Homemade pizza (again)

by Ryan

I made homemade pizza again this week.  The dough turned out so much better than last time.  The dough this time was just about perfect.  The only thing I could have improved upon was giving the second rise of the dough more time… assuming I wanted thick pizza crust, which I didn’t.

Ingredients:
2 cups all purpose unbleached flour
1 1/2 tsp instant dried yeast
3/4 cups tap water

Notice that I didn’t use salt or any dried herbs?  Yeah, it would have made for a richer dough flavor, but since I knew I was going to let the dough rise for around 10 hours in the refrigerator, I knew that the dried herbs would impart too much flavor.  I also skipped the salt since the pasta sauce has plenty — no pizza sauce for us, it never seems to go on sale.

So before I went to work I made the dough, covered it in foil, and put it in the fridge.  After I got home from work around 10 hours later I took it out of the fridge, punched it down, created two small balls of dough, added a little more flour (maybe 1/4 cup), let it rest for 10 minutes, and then rolled it out into random non-circular pizza shapes (yes, really, with a rolling pin, I’m not a pizza tosser).  I punctured the dough to let the air escape during cooking, and then put it into a 450 degree oven.  I like thin crispy crust pizza, so I overcooked it a bit, then pulled it out to cool.  After it was cool it was sauced, topped, and cheesed (in that order) and put back in the oven for another 5 to 7 minutes.  Then pulled out, cooled for a minute, cut, and eaten.

This time I also cleaned some mushrooms, put them on a silicon baking mat, and then put them in the oven at around 350 degrees, so they would dry out some.  Later I used them as pizza topping and since some of the moister was gone it helped keep the pizza from being too watery.  I’ll use this method in the future as it turned out great.

Keep making, and eating, great food everyone!