If It’s The Weekend, We Must Be Making Pizza

Jump to Comments

In this house, we’re big on pizza in all its forms.  In the prepared/convenience/probably toxic category, the basement freezer is rife with frozen pizza, pizza rolls, pizza bagel bites (yeah – so sue me), and probably a few other frozen food items sporting the word “pizza” on the label.  We make flatbread pizzas, bagel pizzas, and baguette pizzas for quick meals. 

When the weekend rolls around, we frequently make the real deal, complete with a risen, yeast crust.  Friday nights are popular pizza nights, if I can get home from work early enough to start the dough.  (I have taught D1 to make dough, but a few technical details make it preferable for me to be home when she’s doing it.)  We have tried buying raw dough – that didn’t work out so well.   The flavor left something to be desired.

Just for kicks and grins, I thought I’d share some of our pizza tips and tricks here.

First, let’s rap about crust.  Readers, do not fear yeast!  It’s a single-cell organism – I promise, you ARE smarter.  We buy yeast in bulk from places like Sam’s club – you can get about a two-year supply of Fleischmann’s for dirt cheap.  I open the package and dump the whole thing into a ziplock, which I store in the fridge.  All you need for pizza crust, really, is yeast, salt, water, a touch of sugar, and flour.  I also use olive oil, but you wouldn’t strictly have to.  Once you have a crust, you can slap pretty much anything on it and call it pizza.

So, how do I make my crust?  Here’s what you need:

1 3/4 cups warm water (nuke it a bit in the microwave – you want it at about what Julia Child would call “blood heat” – all that means is it feels comfortably warm when splashed on your wrist)

2 tsp. yeast

1tsp. sugar

1 tsp. salt

3 T. olive oil plus a tad more for the bowl

3 1/2 – 4 cups flour (depends on several factors – relative humidity, your mood, the dough’s mood – you never know)

In a large-ish mixing bowl, combine the warm water, yeast, and sugar.  Let that bubble around for a few minutes.  You should see something that looks like flesh-colored pond scum sort of expanding on the surface of the water.  If the yeast just sits there, it may be dead (of old age, or killed by boiling hot water) or just not activated (water’s too cold, or you forgot the sugar – that’s what the yeast “eats”).  Add the salt, olive oil, and about three cups of the flour, and stir with a wooden spoon until you get a sort of shaggy ball of dough.  Flour a clean surface (like your kitchen counter or table) and tip the dough onto it.  Start kneading (just push with the heels of your hands and reform the dough into a ball, repeatedly).  This dough tends to be a bit sticky, so flour your hands, and sprinkle more flour over your dough ball as needed.  After a few minutes (not too long – if you overwork the dough it will be hard to work with and tough to eat), you’ll get a rather smooth ball that springs a bit when you poke it.  You’re done.

Clean out your bowl, dry it, and drizzle a bit of oil in it.  Place the dough into the bowl, rubbing it around to oil both the dough and the bowl.  Cover the bowl with plastic wrap.  Place the bowl in a warmish spot for about an hour.  (One winter trick:  turn on your oven to about 200 while making the dough.  SHUT IT OFF, and put the dough into the warm oven to rise).  After an hour or so, the dough should have doubled in size.  You’re in business!

Push out the air and pinch the dough in two (you’ve got enough for two medium pizzas here).  Spray your pizza pans with cooking spray, and sprinkle them with corn meal.  Then take a dough ball, pull it out into a rough oval, and slap it down on the pan.  Flour your hands, then push, pull, and pat the dough into the desired shape – you want to wind up with no more than 1/2 inch of dough thickness, probably much closer to 1/4 inch.   Repeat with the other dough ball.

At this point, you can either par-bake the crusts in a 450 degree oven for about 5 minutes before topping (I do this) OR just top them and bake them.  You can also refrigerate the prepared crust til later if you want.  We use the usuals for toppings – we like Pastorelli brand canned pizza sauce, and the jarred sauce from Trader Joe’s is good, too.  Mozzarella, onions, garlic, pepperoni, green olives, red bell peppers, mushrooms – whatever’s in the fridge. 

In my oven, two topped pizzas on par-baked crusts stacked top to bottom take about 14 minutes to bake at 450.  You may need more or less time depending on your oven, your pans, or the whims of the gods.

We always make enough for leftovers – we’re big on pizza for breakfast or lunch around here.

Last night, we did not make pizza.  This is because we went out.  For pizza.

6 Comments

Filed under Cookery, Lifebits