Pizza Making: At Home!

A couple weekends ago, Jo and I had a housewarming party.  I’ve been meaning to try making homemade pizzas for a while, so we decided almost last minute to do dinner before the party by making pizzas…. enough for 15 people!  Conclusion? Delicious and fun!

Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures that night because I was so engrossed with making and consuming the pizzas… but if I make one again (which I will) I’ll be sure to take pics.

Here we go!

We used this dough recipe from smitten kitchen. All you need is some all purpose flour, yeast, lukewarm water, salt and olive oil.  Kneading the dough is actually easier than one might think – getting it to an even consistency only takes a few minutes.  I don’t think I need to add any more details to the recipe linked above… it is pretty thorough.

Best thing ever: after the dough has risen, patted down, and re-risen (about 1.5 hours), it has the most AMAZING texture.  Poke  it! Hold it in your hand!  As someone put it at the party it is like “touching the boobs of the cosmos”.

Anyway, after the dough is ready, get all your toppings chopped!  This is the fun part, where you can get as creative as you want. Here are some toppings that we made  use of:

• white mushrooms
• red, yellow, green peppers
• red and yellow onion
• italian sausage (we pre-cooked it)
• bacon
• mini pepperonis (Costco had the most adorable centimeter-wide mini pepperonis, WE COULD NOT RESIST)
• basil
• zucchini
• chicken strips (we used the frozen strips that you can just heat up in the microwave then cut into cubes)
• mozzarella (cut into smallish pieces, not shredded)

We made a critical mistake with the tomato sauce we used for the pizzas: we only had tomato sauce from a can, which turned out to be waaay too runny.  In the future, we will at least use 50% tomato paste, 50% sauce.

Another tasty addition was roasted garlic – mmmmmmm.

So once your toppings are ready, flatten out your dough (I used a combination of my hands and a rolling pin), spread toppings evenly across the pizza, then roll the edges around to form a crust.  Stick it in your oven at the highest temp for around 20ish minutes, then you are done!

Some more ideas on pizzas can be found here:

10 Paths to Painless Pizza Making