Pizza night

Pizza! I just ate at some fancy pizza places and was amazed that they were charging about 15-20 dollars a pizza! I felt rather neutral on the subject, but figured that I give it a go and made some pies I've been craving for quite some time. We ate, a total of five pizzas that night; Smoked salmon, bbq chicken, arugala, fennel and dessert. Three simple things to remember when throwing a pizza party is...


Make your own dough

• I like to make a simple dough. The recipe is as follows. 
• 3/4 tablespoon dry yeast
• 3/4 cup warm water
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 table spoon olive oil
• 2.5 cups flour
• 5 tbsp of warm water

• Add yeast, and 110 degrees water together and let sit for about 5 minutes
• Combine salt, sugar, and flour in a food processor and pulse
• Add olive oil, and yeast mixture together, then add into food processor
• Process until everthing looks like parm cheese/dip and dot ice cream
• Stop food processor and add1-2 tblspoons of warm water. Pulse. Stop. Repeat until dough is soft sticky but still comes off fingers.
• Put in big metal bowl and let proof for about 1 hour or until double in size. 
• Punch down and cut with dough cutter in to baseball sized dough pieces. Place in tray with 1 inch spacing in between.
• Homemade dough is a key to pizza success vs pizza failure!

Make your own sauces

•  To make pizza sauce just cut up 3-4 cloves of garlic, add to about 3 tbsp of olive oil, add 1 can of tomato sauce, simmer 10 minutes, add dry basil.
• Making sauce will give that homemade taste and will absolutely impact the taste of your pie

Use a pizza stone

• Stones are a must and should be pre-heated in your oven. Put stone in the oven while the oven is preheating to 500 degrees
• Once stone is preheated, slide your pizza onto the stone in the oven. This is the hard part, but if you heavily flour your pizza slider thing, ( I use a bamboo cutting board heavily dusted with flour) it shouldn't be that bad). If you don't feel comfortable doing this. You could make your pizza on the stone and then place in the oven, but the results won't be the same. 

Remember Dough, sauce and pizza stone! Athough there are other things that make a great homemade pizza, without these you might as well buy pizza from the frozen section or your local takeout. So the next time you make pizza try these techniques out, and be sure to tell a friend about it, you won't be disappointed.

BBQ chicken pizza, with shaved fennel.

Smoked Salmon, cream cheese, ewa sweet onions, capers, Local Italian parsley, olive oil

                                               &

Arugula chicken sausage pizza