PIZZA! Make it at home.

Hello!  Midway through this post, the font/font size changes.  I've tried to remedy that, to no avail.  Apologies for the tiny type!

Back in March of 2020, when the pandemic was first ramping up in the US, my workplace and our child's school shut down for a time.  That meant that everyone was home, all day, every day.  We were advised to stay home, only go out as needed, wear a mask when we went out - all the things so many of us have heard throughout the past year.  It's been a rough time in some ways, but we have kept our health throughout, and mostly, kept our sense of humor.

We always cooked quite a few things at home, but one food we have gotten much better at through the course of the past year is pizza.  Here is the recipe we use for dough, along with some tips for getting tasty pizza with a light, crispy crust!

This stuff, and some warm water.  That's all you need for the dough!

Our Pizza Dough Recipe

Shared by my friend, Ellen Paugh

3 1/2 c. bread flour (if you use all purpose, the crust will not have the 'chew' of a pizza crust)

1 tsp. kosher salt

2 1/4 tsp. (or one packet) yeast

1 tsp. sugar

1 1/4 cups very warm water, about 110 degrees

2 tbsp. olive oil

In a large mixing bowl, combine water with yeast and sugar, let stand 5 minutes, until foamy.  Add olive oil, flour, and salt.  Stir until mixture forms a soft dough.  Turn out onto a floured surface and knewad until smooth - about 5 minutes - adding more flour if dough is too sticky.  (Note:  Ellen's original recipe called for 3 cups of flour, and I had to add a little over half a cup more.  I adjusted and add far less extra flour now.  If you can keep your dough slightly on the sticky side, you'll have a better result.)  

Oil the mixing bowl (it's okay if there's a little dough here and there from the mixing), put the dough back into the bowl, flip it to oil the top.  Cover with a cloth or a plate, and let rise about one hour.

Preheat oven for 450 degrees.  Dump the dough out of the bowl and cut it in half.  Do not knead the dough at this time.   Simply take half and shape it into a round and put it into a lightly oiled perforated pan, or onto parchment paper if you're using pizza stones.  Once the first round is shaped, shape the other round.

Add sauce and toppings.  Bake pizzas about 8 minutes, switch pizzas between upper and lower shelves, and bake another 8-10 minutes.  

Tips!

The surface pizza is baked on seems to make the most difference in the end result.  We have a pizza stone, a perforated pan, and a thicker, solid surface steel pan.  The pizza stone works best.  I don't have a peel, so I make the pizza on parchment, and slide it off the solid surface steel pan and onto the stone (with the paper).  The perforated pan we have is thinner metal, with holes in the bottom.  It does a really good job too, and gives us more of a 'pan' type pizza, because it has deep sides where we can build up the crust.  The solid surface steel pan results in pale, soggy pizza crust every. single. time.  If there were a way to pre-heat this pan and put a pizza on it when it was already hot, that might work, but I fear this pan would warp, and I already have two that work well for me, so I'm sticking with the stone and the perforated pan.

Place one oven rack high, and the other low.  This gets the best browning on both the top and the bottom of your pizzas.  Switching the pizzas midway through baking has also resulted in a much better overall result.  We start with the stone on the bottom and the steel on top, but I haven't tried reversing that, so I don't know if it would make a difference.  

You may be surprised by how little sauce it takes, and how little of each topping you need to cover a pizza.  We use just under 8 oz. of mozzarella to cover two large pizzas.  One thick slice of onion, cut into bite size bits, can cover both.  A handful of this or that...it doesn't take as much as you might think, and too many toppings will make it difficult for the crust to cook properly. 

That's what we've learned through trial and error in the past year.  If we aren't finding some sort of sale, we generally get the 5lb. of mozzarella from Sam's, along with the large Member's Mark pepperoni, and repackage them both in amounts to make two pizzas.  We use spaghetti sauce or make a garlicky white sauce for the sauce, and we have tried all sorts of toppings.  Experiment!  One of our favorites is leftover grilled chicken, green onion, bacon, mushroom, and cubed potatoes with a white sauce.  Yum!

Happy cooking!  What are your favorite pizza toppings?