Mrs. Stier's Homemade Italian Bread Dough

This was shared to me by my sister Allison Yanda, Mrs. Stier was like a second mom to my BIL, Ray.  It was shared as a YouTube video on Mama's Cookbook channel under the title Mama's Homemade Italian Bread.  I made this very large recipe and used it for two pizza crusts, to pie pans of rolls and a small French Bread loaf.  If you don't need that much dough you can cut the recipe in half.  I like being able to make the dough for several meals worth of crust/bread all in one recipe.

Ingredients

5 1/2 cups warm water

7 teaspoons yeast

2 T. Sugar

5 pounds of flour (roughly 17 cups of flour)

2 T. Salt

2 eggs

1/2 cup olive oil

Directions

In a bowl pour 5 1/2 cups warm water and add the yeast ans sugar

In a 7-8 qt. mixing bowl mix together 5# of flour, salt, eggs, olive oil.

Make a hole in the center and add the yeast mixture.

Mix together with a spoon and then finish the mixing with your hands.

Cover it with plastic wrap and a towel and let it rest 20-30 minutes.

At the end of that time, pour it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it, return it to the bowl and cover again with plastic wrap and towel for 20 minutes.  Do this two more times for a total of 1 hour.  

Now your dough is ready to do any of the following:

1/2 the dough will make two 9X13 baking sheet pizzas

You can roll them into 2 oz. balls for rolls

You can make breadsticks

You can form them into french bread loaves
form them and let them rise until double in size

You can use a bread pan and bake a traditional style bread.

Bake at 425 for about 20 minutes  for rolls/bread

For the pizza, 450 for about 15 minutes.

An interesting note about her pizza...she pressed pieces of uncooked Italian sausage squeezed out of the casing into the pizza dough, then added a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese and some onion before adding the sauce on top.  She said you could bake it right  like that, but she went on to add more parmesean and mozzarella.  I am going to add some spinach and basil and grilled chicken on top of the sauce as I do with my grilled pizza and see how it turns out.

*Note:  I tried the uncooked sausage and was not satisfied with the results  I will precook my sausage in the future.