The best pizza in Hong Kong
We make our own pizza dough. To find out why, I’ve included a little explanation of our Pizza Quest below. If you’re just looking for the recipe, here it is.
Whole Wheat Pizza Dough
Ingredients
- 1 pkg (2 ¼ tsp) active dry yeast
- 2 tsp sugar
- 1 cup warm water
- ¼ cup vegetable oil
- 1 ½ – 2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 ½ – 2 cups whole wheat flour
- 2 tsp salt
Directions
Whisk the yeast, sugar, water, and oil together and make a paste. Add the flour and salt and mix until the dough comes away from the sides of the bowl. Remove the dough, put olive oil in bowl and place the dough back in the bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise until doubled in size, or 1 hour. Turn onto floured surface, divide in half, roll into balls, cover, rest for 15-20 minutes. Preheat oven to 350 F (175 C). Using your hands, stretch and guide each ball into a flattened shell that reaches the edges of your pizza sheet, leaving a little extra thickness around the edges to make a crust. You can now top the pizza shells with your favourite toppings and pop them in the oven for 15 – 20 minutes, rotating once if needed. Let stand a few minutes before slicing and serving.
Tips
- The dough recipe can be made with 100% all purpose (white) flour, 100% whole wheat flour, or half and half, depending on how grainy and hearty you like your crust. I usually use half and half, as indicated above.
- Alter your pizza tray size depending on how thick or thin you like your crust (stretch it out thin on a large tray, make it a deep dish pie on a small dish or tray).
- Experiment with different sauces to mix things up. Try pesto sauce with grilled vegetables or peanut sauce with grilled tofu/chicken, peppers and mangoes.
- The pizza dough can be frozen for up to 3 months. If frozen, defrost the dough in the fridge during the day and you’ll have a quick and easy weekday meal.
Now for the Pizza Quest story.
We arrived in Hong Kong a year and a half ago and we’ve been trying to find good pizza ever since. “Good pizza” is totally subjective, but for us that means whole wheat, light (or no) cheese, and no weird stuff like corn or tuna flakes. The supermarket frozen pizza is out of our price range. We can’t find pre-made pizza shells. So it really comes down to four options for pizza here:
1. Pizza Hut (which has walk-up store fronts here with delivery guys who arrive on scooters. We usually end up ordering this at parties, and it tastes like greasy cardboard.)
2. Paisano’s, a place with fabulous 24″ pizzas but the service is so terrible it is almost impossible to walk out with a slice.
3. Pizza Express, a UK based chain which, despite it’s name, is a place for sit-down dining and what we think is pricey pizza. Good pizza, but expensive.
4. Voisin Pizzeria, where we’ve been experimenting with making our own pizza dough from scratch. Finding pizza pans was a little complicated (few people have ovens in Hong Kong so few retailers sell baking supplies), and cheese is unpopular and VERY expensive (so we skip it). And that brings us to the best thing since sliced bread; homemade, fresh, healthy, personalized pizza. Mmmm.
Danielle makes the dough. This batch was made with 100% white flour.
Frank grills veggies in our favourite pan - the cast iron skillet.
It’s been pretty fun experimenting with different sauces and toppings. And it reminds me of my Dad, whose specialty is homemade pizza for Christmas dinner, singing and dough tossing included.
We both enjoy the finished product. This pizza dough batch was half white flour and half whole wheat.
