It's Rarely Too Late to Fix the Dough

Pizza is a big deal in our house.

As long as I make the kids pizza and snuggle them, they're happy campers. And once a month I eat a WHOLE pizza by myself. Every bite.

So this weekend I made dough again. Lauren's Latest chewy pizza crust, doubled so we'd have four pizzas. I've made it before, so I figured this would be easy.

It wasn't lol.

I put in about 3 cups of bread flour, then another cup and a half-ish. I could have kept going. But the dough was already pulling away from the sides of the bowl, and I didn't want to keep dumping flour in and end up with a rock.

So I stopped and poked it. Tacky, but not sticking to my finger. Ok cool... but it still felt stiffer and drier than last time.

My first thought was honestly "did I already ruin this?"

Nope. Add a little water, a tablespoon at a time, let it mix in, and check it again. That's it. You don't dump a cup of water in to fix it.

Then I had about five more questions. How do I know when it's done kneading? Do I just take it off the hook and throw it in a bowl? How long until I know the yeast is actually working??

At some point you just have to put it in the bowl and wait.

Spoiler, the dough worked and the pizza was off the charts!

I think about this stuff a lot with building a business (I know, I know, it's pizza). When I was a cop building on the side, I followed a lot of other people's recipes exactly how they wrote them. Some of it worked. A lot of it didn't, because my situation wasn't theirs.

The stuff that actually moved for me came from paying attention to what was in front of me and making small fixes. Not blowing it all up and starting over.

So if you're halfway through something and it feels off, it's probably not too late. Add a tablespoon of water and check it again.

Stay in the fight, Kevin