Make my own pizza

This has been one that husband has hinted at for a while – and the other day, I was hunting for something to cook for dinner and I figured I’d look up the recipe for Chicago-style dough. The main advantage is that you don’t have to wait on this dough overnight. You actually aren’t building a lot of gluten in this dough, so there isn’t a need to wait for this dough to ferment. Plus the addition of cornmeal and olive oil gives this an added flavor and texture that ensures you won’t feel like you’re eating a flour and water-tasting dough. I found my recipe on recipepizza.com of all places.

The Ingredients:

Cornmeal, All-Purpose Flour, Sea Salt, Olive Oil and Sugar. Oh – there’s water as well, it was shy for this photo.

Even though I use instant yeast, I still proofed it with the sugar and water:

I know, exciting stuff. But, hey, that gets me to the mixing part. Basically, all the other ingredients in a bowl, make well and dump in the yeast mixture. Mix until incorporated and then knead into a supple dough (cornmeal will only allow for so much suppleness). Then set aside to rise:

Once the rise is done, it’s time to roll out the dough. I don’t have a dedicated Chicago-style pizza pan and I had two routes to take for a pan. Springform vs. cast iron pan. In the end, I decided that the cast iron pan would be more likely to crisp up the dough and conduct heat better than a thin springform pan. I’m very happy that I went with the cast-iron:

Now for the fun part – the toppings. Chicago-style is sauce-cheese-toppings-sauce-cheese. My toppings were simply sausage and yellow peppers (I had half a yellow bell pepper to get rid of). I was worried about amount of toppings the recipe suggested – after having the dough rise around the ingredients, I realized I could have added more quite easily:

Baking was 25 minutes in a hot oven. I was worried the crust would be soggy on the bottom, but it came out! (Yay, cast iron!) The oven spring on the crust was CRAZY. This is where I realize that I could have added more toppings, but truth be told one piece was pretty filling as it was. Husband loved this pizza and was really happy to hear that it was easy to make:

I used the last of my frozen dough tonight – Shrimp pizza! It was tasty.

This means I’ll be putting the KitchenAid up to dough again. From everything I’ve read, my mistake was making the second batch so close to the first. Basically, the worm gear can do the 4 minutes and then it needs to REST, not do another tough batch of dough.

So here’s to future batches!

I bumped into a couple we know at the library the other day and found out that their kitchen is being redone due to a burst pipe. So we’re having them over for homemade pizza and games tomorrow – good times!

On the downside, my mixer started making a horrible noise and I’m worried that means bad things…husband is taking it apart to assess the damage. I need to stay off KitchenAid complaint sites before I start believing the worst.

Cook’s County

The cousins make pizza using sheet pans all the time, but tonight is our first attempt at making it. I need to order a new pizza stone before I make most of the pizza recipes I want to try.

Although the crust was crisp and good, it’s not really the type of pizza that I like. I prefer pizza with thinner crust and no sauce. My husband enjoyed this pizza more much more than I did.

I’d talked about my first foray into pizza dough as part of my bread goal, but it looks like we’re starting to take this a few steps further. Husband has become equally obsessed as well.

We picked up a book at the library called American Pie to try out this NY-Style Crust.

This is the first dough we made without the standard All-Purpose flour. We bought bread flour. Bread flour is basically a high-gluten flour that makes for chewier and higher rising breads. Great for breads, horrible for cake. For pizza dough, this promised a chewy crust. Yeast, sugar, salt, water and olive oil rounded out the rest:

The great thing about pizza dough is that this can all be done in the mixer – basically all the kneading and everything. You just let the machine do all the work and watch it evolve from mess to dough:

From here, we broke the dough into three balls and rubbed them in olive oil so they wouldn’t stick to Ziploc baggies. This was so the dough could sit overnight in the refrigerator. The more we’ve read, the more we find that “quick” and home-made pizza dough are recipes for disappointment. Letting the pizza dough sit overnight basically allows the yest to ferment in the dough – this is the flavor in the dough and it allows for greater caramelization of the sugars in the dough. Basically if it looks better and is set up to taste better, you KNOW it’s going to be better. The great thing about pizza dough is that it freezes for later.

So, to make the pizza, I basically pull out the dough about 2 hours before I want the pizza. An hour before I want to eat pizza, I heat the oven and a pizza stone in the oven to 550 degrees. Before then, it’s putting together the pizza – which basically consists of forming my pizza, saucing and topping it and then tossing it into the oven for 12 minutes. In 12 minutes, I got a thick, chewy, airy crust:

This was a great crust, but one of many in the book – and I have a few more books on the shelves to try. The good news is that these doughs are turning out to be crazy easy to make and the cook times all seem to be next to nothing. I can’t believe I ordered pizza before!

We tried the barbecued chicken skillet pizza recipe from Cooks Country and really liked it. I used homemade barbecue sauce. We also made the basic skillet pizza recipe again.

No more of the Trader Joe’s frozen cheese pizzas for a quick weeknight dinner – homemade is so much better!

We just made the Skillet Pizza recipe from this months Cook’s Country and loved it. The pizza only took about 30 minutes to make and the crust had baking powder in it instead of yeast. This pizza was light and crisp and topped with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, Parmesan cheese and fresh basil.

I prefer pizza without a sauce and will definitely make this recipe again very soon.

...at making pizza. We wanted a crust that didn’t need rolling and decided to make Pizza Bianca with tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. The crust was very light and crisp. We will be making this pizza again!

Still sussing out the base – I’ve tried a couple different versions, both okay but room for improvement of course – practice makes perfect. Made a spicy prawn pizza for dinner last night. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

...to a cousins house for pizza and haven’t spent a lot of time making it ourselves. We do make two types of pizza – grilled pizza without sauce and deep dish pizza with cornmeal in the crust that is baked in cast iron skillets. We love both of those types, but don’t have much experience making regular pizza.

I would like to try more recipes and find more pizza that we really enjoy.

Yesterday we made a deep dish pizza in a 9” cake pan. We liked the toppings and the crust, but felt the sauce was a little too heavy. Next time we make this recipe, we will cook the crust for a few minutes before adding the toppings. I liked that the pepperoni was microwaved between double layers of paper towels for 30 seconds to remove some of the oil before adding it to the pizza.

Our next attempt will be a thin crust and lighter pizza sauce.