Well it’s Sunday and I’m cooking some pizza for some friends and well I thought maybe all of you would like to try it yourself.
There always seems to be some kind of “mystique” about making anything involving dough, as though it were super difficult. That might be true for some breads and God knows I’ve screwed up enough loaves LOL but making pizza is super easy, cheap AND fun.
I know a lot of people are on tight budgets so pizza is really one way to get a lot of bang for your buck too. It’s super delicious, has both a carbohydrate element, a dairy/fat element and perhaps a meat/protein element all in one.
Obviously there are 501 ways to make a pizza so my recipe here is for people using ordinary equipment who have no special skills or pans or “pizza stones” or the whatnot. I’m using about a 50 year old gas-fired oven (Communist-era LOL) with no temperature control whatsoever so basically If I can do it, you can do it.
Ready?
Ok equipment you will need:
- 1 large bowl, any kind but one that fits in your oven
- Some kind of baking tray(s) that fits in your oven
Thats it! Now for the ingredients:
500g or less (1lb) flour, any kind
1 tablespoon of salt
tiny amount of sugar or honey
a little bit of yeast, either dry or the refrigerated kind
Water
Sauce
Toppings (whatever you want)
Cheese (mozzarella is standard but anything works)
A squirt of vegetable oil (any kind)
The “difficult” part that people always moan and groan over is the making of the dough. That’s actually the EASIEST part, so don’t let anyone fool ya. It’s so super simple.
First run the water in your tap until it’s as hot as it goes, hot enough to where you can put your finger in it and not be burned but it’s still darn hot. Add about a cup or two of this hot water to your bowl.
Add your sugar/honey, just a tiny amount really will do it. Then add either one packet of dry yeast or else about 2g of the “alive” stuff. I think mostly in USA they use the dry stuff, so one whole packet.
Stir it a bit with your finger or with a knife or something and just LET IT BE. Wait a good 10 minutes. If you start to see bubbles and it smells SUPER yeasty, you’re set. This is the ONLY difficult part!
Assuming you’ve got a bowl full of muddy, “swamp gas” looking crud LOL dump in about a cup of flower into the bowl. Measure out in your palm a GOOD little pinch of salt and add it to the bowl on top of the (unmixed) flour. It’s a little more salt than you might think!
FUN TIP: if you’ve got some good dry spices like oregano, parsley, basil, rosemary, garlic or even dried onions, add them NOW to the dough. You can add a LOT of these spices without overpowering the flavor.
What you do next is the fun part. You keep adding flour until you’ve got a big mound of dough that’s moist but not sticky. It’s a bit of a messy process but it’s a lot of fun and I really like it. My rule of thumb is pound on the dough until your hand aches and that should be good.
NOTE: the MORE you pound on the dough, the better the dough will taste since you’re “stretching” the glutens in the flour. Let out your aggressions as you CANNOT knead the flour “too much”.
There is no “exact” measurement of dough to water because each kind of flour absorbs water differently. Essentially you add flour until it becomes a solid mass and then keep working in more flour until it’s still moist but not sticky.
Now put the dough ball into the same bowl and add the oil and make sure the whole ball is covered in oil. Then stick the bowl into your oven (which is OFF and unheated) and clean off your hands and the table. Part one is done!
Yeast grows best in warm environments so if it’s fairly warm in your oven, about 90 minutes later the dough should be ready (if you’ve got a oven light, leave it turned on). If it’s a little cooler, might be 2-3 hours. If you want to do it even MORE easily, stick the bowl in your refrigerator and the dough will have risen by the next morning.
You’ll know when the dough is ready because it will be about 2-3 times bigger and kind of “foamed out” inside the bowl.
Once you take your bowl of ready dough out of the oven, fire up the oven to about its hottest setting. Seriously if you can get 500F on there, go for it, just full steam ahead.
While the oven is firing up, get a little extra flour and pinch out your dough based on how many pizzas you want to make. I always roll out my dough using a glass bottle on my shelf, anything hard and cylindrical will work. Roll out your dough to be pretty darn thin and then shape it to fit whatever your baking pan/tray is.
IMPORTANT: if your baking pan is metal and sticky, “grease” the pan with some kind of lubricant, whether vegetable oil or crisco or margarine or whatever you have. If it’s not a very “sticky” metal pan, you can use just a tiny sprinkling of corn flour instead.
After getting your dough in the pan, add your sauce. VERY IMPORTANT: Just a LITTLE sauce will go a long way. You barely want the bottom to be red, not “thick” with sauce at all!
Next add your toppings any way you want.
On top and always last goes the CHEESE. The pre-shredded cheese is an abomination and never use it. But you DO want to either shred or dice your cheese yourself. The smaller the bits of cheese, the more evenly they will melt. Trust me it’s worth the effort.
Now basically you’re ready. The last trick is slam all those pizzas in there as quickly as you can so you minimize the time the oven door is open. Remember, the hotter the temperature the better!
Depending on how powerful your oven is, etc, is how long it takes for the pizza to cook but it won’t be long, anywhere from 15-40 minutes. If you see the cheese and crust browning up nicely, it’s done!
Let it cool off 5-10 minutes (or leave it in the oven with the heat turned off) and bam, dinner is served!
Some fun ingredient ideas:
Onions (esp red) go extremely well with pineapple.
Hot (spicy) ingredients will lose some “power” when they’re cooked so sometimes it’s best to add these AFTER the pizza is cooked. Otherwise add more to compensate.
Sundried tomatoes and broccoli are very good pals.
If your into more intense veggie pizzas, I highly recommend corn and peas as a topping as well.
I have no idea what a bag of flour costs where you live but I can make a “small” pizza for about $1.50 apiece factoring in all the ingredients and me buying this at a normal store not in bulk, etc. Certainly for $20 (or whatever a delivery pizza costs) you can probably make 5 times that amount AND it tastes better.
Happy eating!
