Pizza Night! April 5, 2008

Homemade pizza that is.  I’ve been wanting to make homemade pizza for so long!  We planned a pizza night with some friends of ours in early March.  Stuff came up, such is life, and we couldn’t make it work out until last weekend.  So, we decided on who was going to bring what, meet up and went at it!  We all agreed that the pizza turned out great and we will definitly be going back to the pizza dough and pizza sauce recipes we used again.  Doing this with another couple also worked well so one of us didn’t have to prepare all the ingredients.

Both the recipes came from Melanie at My Kitchen Cafe.  She says this is her tried and true recipe for slow-rise pizza dough.  She also has another one on her site for a quick dough that doesn’t need time to rest overnight.  Thanks for the awesome recipes Melanie!

Slow-Rize Pizza Dough

(Recipe from:  My Kitchen Cafe)

Serves 4

2 1/4 teaspoons yeast
1 1/3 cup water
3 1/2 to 4 cups flour
2 teaspoons salt.

24 hours before making the pizza, throw the above ingredients together to a desired consistency (still soft but not too sticky), place it in a greased bowl, cover with suran wrap and put it in the fridge.  Take the dough out 2-3 hours before making the pizza to let the dough come to room temp and relax.

Homemade Pizza Sauce

 

(Recipe from:  My Kitchen Cafe)

 

Enough to cover two pizza’s made with one batch of the slow-rize pizza dough.

 

1 14.5 oz. can diced tomatoes

1 small can tomato paste

1 tablespoon sugar

Oregano

Garlic powder

Italian seasoning

Crushed red pepper (optional)

 

Combine all ingredients in food processor/blender or use a hand blender, blend all ingredients until smooth unless you like your sauce a bit chunky.  Add seasoning to taste.  

 

Putting it all together!

 

(Some of these tips also came from My Kitchen Cafe)

 

*Preheat oven with pizza stone to 450-500 degrees for 30-40 minutes.

*Get all ingredients together:  sauce, toppings (sausage, peperoni, mushroom, green pepper, etc. unless you just want cheese!).  Grate cheese (can use shredded but results won’t be as good.) and fling dough in the air a few times to make the crust the thickness you want. 

*Take stone out of oven (careful, it’s extremely hot!) and as quickly as you can lay the crust down, spread the sauce, top with cheese and then toppings or toppings then

cheese, it’s your pizza, make it how you like it and slide the stone back in the oven.  (We used a floured pizza paddle for the first pizza, it did not slide easily off the paddle when trying to get the pizza on the stone so this is the way we did it for the second, which seemed to work good!)

*Bake for 7-10 minutes until the cheese is melted, slightly bubbly and a bit browned. 

*If you’d rather not have your crust continue to get crispy, take the pizza off the stone after you take the pizza out of the oven.

 

Sit, eat and enjoy!