If you’re using homemade pie crusts, make the dough now and freeze it in freezer bags. Defrost the dough and bake your pies the day before Thanksgiving.

Start making your Thanksgiving desserts with the help of these video tutorials.

Browse more of Food Network’s Thanksgiving recipes and tips.

When you think about it, dough is just a mixture of flour and water. Yes, we usually use fancy flours and extra ingredients, such as eggs or yeast, to transform dough from its original simplicity into pasta noodle or bread varieties, for example. Still though, making dough need not be an intimidating process. In fact, here are four fool-proof recipes for classic doughs – bread, pizza, pasta and doughnut – that you might typically purchase instead of making from scratch. So bake a loaf of bread, roll out your own pizza dough and fry your own doughnuts because with recipes like these, there’s no need to make a trip to the store.

Move over, counter space-hogging bread maker. Ellie Krieger’s Whole-Wheat Cinnamon-Raisin Bread from foodnetwork.com uses no special equipment and is still so simple to make and consistently produces swirly good results. Best of all, it is far healthier than its sugar-laden counterparts from the grocery.

Read on for more recipes