Freezing Pizza Dough

When I was pregnant with Kate, our favorite Friday night meal was homemade pizza. I'd start the dough in late afternoon and we'd spend the evening designing our own pizzas. Because dough takes a few hours to rise, coordinating kneading time with rising time and baby fussing time became a challenge once Kate was born, so we stopped making pizza every Friday.

But - now that the kids are older, we'd like to reinstate the tradition, but don't always have time to start from scratch on Friday afternoons. So today I've been researching how to freeze pizza dough. The idea is to make multiple batches on the days we have time and freeze the extra dough. That way, we can still have fresh pizza on days we are time crunched.

It appears the trick to success is to freeze the balls after the first rise, because the defrosting time acts as the second rise. I found this that explains more. Do you know of any other tricks or techniques to make this successful?