Homemade pizza {with pictures}

Tonight around 6:30 I started thinking about dinner. Nothing really sounded good in any way, but in the end I decided to try a new recipe for homemade pizza. You can find it here if you want to give it a shot. For your convenience I will also include it here, edited and plus commentary.

Ingredients

Pizza Dough: Makes enough dough for two 10-12 inch pizzas

• 1 1/2 cups warm water (105°F-115°F)
• 1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry yeast (check the expiration date on the package)
• 3 1/2 cups bread flour (can use all-purpose but bread flour will give you a crisper crust)
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar

I would like to take this opportunity to apolagise to my mother for throwing away the old yeast. I'm sorry, I had always thought that things which expired 5 years ago were safe to throw away. I hope we can move past this.


Pizza Ingredients

• Olive oil
• Cornmeal (to slide the pizza onto the pizza stone)

• Tomato sauce (purée)
• Mozzarella or Parmesan cheese, shredded
• Feta cheese
• Mushrooms, thinly sliced
• Bell peppers, stems and seeds removed, thinly sliced
• Italian sausage, cooked ahead
• Chopped fresh basil
• Pesto
• Pepperoni, thinly sliced
• Onions, thinly sliced
• Sliced ham

I have no idea why this is even a section. It makes no sense to me. Why not say "Get whatever toppings you want on your pizza"? I sincerely hope that people would be able to figure this out by themselves. It worries me to think that all of these things were on one pizza but maybe I am close-minded.


Special equipment needed

• A pizza stone, highly recommended if you want your pizza dough to be crusty
• A pizza peel or a flat baking sheet
• A pizza wheel for cutting the pizza, not required, but easier to deal with than a knife

I had never heard of a pizza peel in my life. Does this make me uncultured?

Method

Making the Pizza Dough

1 In the large bowl of a heavy duty electric mixer (such as a Kitchen Aid), add the warm water. Sprinkle on the yeast and let sit for 5 minutes until the yeast is dissolved. Stir to dissolve completely if needed at the end of 5 minutes.


You will see later in the recipe that you don't truly need a heavy duty mixer. Which is fortunate because I do not have one.

2 Attach a mixing paddle to the mixer. Mix in the olive oil, flour, salt and sugar on low speed for about a minute. Remove the mixing paddle and replace with a dough hook. Knead using the mixer and dough hook, on low to medium speed, until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. If you don't have a mixer, you can mix and knead by hand. If the dough seems a little too wet, sprinkle on a bit more flour.


What is a mixing paddle?? All I know is beaters. Is that a stupid term for beaters? Am I just completely unversed in the terms of heavy duty electric mixers? I tried to mix this with some egg beater type thing at first. I'm not proud, but I did. No, it did not work. I wouldn't recommend it.

3 Place ball of dough in a bowl that has been coated lightly with olive oil. Turn the dough around in the bowl so that it gets coated with the oil. Cover with plastic wrap. Let sit in a warm place (75-85°F) until it doubles in size, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours (or several hours longer, a longer rise will improve the flavor). If you don't have a warm spot in the house you can heat the oven to 150 degrees, and then turn off the oven. Let the oven cool till it is just a little warm, then place the bowl of dough in this warmed oven to rise.
At this point, if you want to make ahead, you can freeze the dough in an airtight container for up to two weeks.


Personally I turned on the space heater in my room and let it chill in there for an hour and a half. Meanwhile I was starting to feel extremely hungry so I ate a piece of matzo. I proceeded to whiten my teeth and play The Sims 2 until the time was up.

Preparing the Pizzas

1 Place a pizza stone on a rack in the lower third of your oven. Preheat the oven to 450°F for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour.


I combined this with the previous step and so my oven was warming while the dough was rising. That isn't very interesting but something interesting did happen. As it turns out I really need to clean my oven. I went upstairs after an hour, to a house full of smoke. I nearly freaked out. I opened windows and turned on fans. Standing barefoot in my suddenly cold kitchen I pondered my life.

2 Remove the plastic cover from the dough and punch the dough down so it deflates a bit. Divide the dough in half. Form two round balls of dough. Place each in its own bowl, cover with plastic and let sit for 10 minutes.


At this point I froze one of the things of dough, we'll see how that works out. And oh my word, I walked into my bedroom to find a bowl with dough lurching out the side. It was simultaneously frightening and beautiful.

3 Prepare your desired toppings. Note that you are not going to want to load up each pizza with a lot of toppings as the crust will end up not crisp that way. About a third a cup each of tomato sauce and cheese would be sufficient for one pizza. One to two mushrooms thinly sliced will cover a pizza.


If you're a complete tool you can look at the list of suggested toppings that were for some reason included with the recipe. Personally I used ragu (screw tomato puree!) and parmesan cheese.

4 Working one ball of dough at a time, take one ball of dough and flatten it with your hands on a slightly floured work surface. Starting at the center and working outwards, use your fingertips to press the dough to 1/2-inch thick. Turn and stretch the dough until it will not stretch further. Let the dough relax 5 minutes and then continue to stretch it until it reaches the desired diameter - 10 to 12 inches. Use your palm to flatten the edge of the dough where it is thicker. You can pinch the very edges if you want to form a lip.


5 Brush the top of the dough with olive oil (to prevent it from getting soggy from the toppings). Use your finger tips to press down and make dents along the surface of the dough to prevent bubbling. Let rest another 5 minutes.
Repeat with the second ball of dough.




As smoke was re-filling my kitchen and burning my eyes I found these two steps incredibly difficult. I think it also has to do with my general ineptitude. I had to wait 5 minutes and re-form or whatever my dough but it kind of worked out.

6 Lightly sprinkle your pizza peel (or flat baking sheet) with corn meal. Transfer one prepared flattened dough to the pizza peel. If the dough has lost its shape in the transfer, lightly shape it to the desired dimensions.


Instead of whatever a pizza peel is, I turned over a...round cookie sheet that my family often uses for pizza. It worked fine.



7 Spoon on the tomato sauce, sprinkle with cheese, and place your desired toppings on the pizza.

8 Sprinkle some cornmeal on the baking stone in the oven (watch your hands, the oven is hot!). Gently shake the peel to see if the dough will easily slide, if not, gently lift up the edges of the pizza and add a bit more cornmeal. Slide the pizza off of the peel and on to the baking stone in the oven. Bake pizza one at a time until the crust is browned and the cheese is golden, about 10-15 minutes. If you want, toward the end of the cooking time you can sprinkle on a little more cheese.


The cornmeal on the pizza stone was totally unnecessary though it did help on the cookie sheet thing. I would try something else next time because I think the cornmeal made it taste weird.

Yield: Makes 2 10-12-inch pizzas.



Final thoughts:
Capa and I both think this tastes better than the previous recipe I used.
My mother for some deranged reason prefers my old recipe, which I might post. I don't remember where I obtained it but it was a fail.
In any case it was better than frozen pizza, but not as good as Pizza Nazi pizza, which is to be expected.

Here is a handy list of things you may want to do while waiting forever for the pizza dough to rise

• Pluck your eyebrows.
• Play a video game
• Read a Dilbert comic book
• Try not to think about how hungry you are getting
• Listen to the radio
• Text a friend about things that bother you and spend an hour or so thinking about how much it sucks
• Think about how much you dislike someone
• Stretch your legs
• Try to clean the kitchen but fail because you have a bad back and it huuuuuuuurts.

I think this is one of my least interesting posts to date, but at least it was long. Also, I have a picture. It deeply bothers me that the picture is tilted the wrong way, but I am too lazy to fix it because I can't fix it within this post. The knife is supposed to be on the bottom right. Tilt your head.

Don't mind the knife. Capa was just being Amish.