Homemade Pizza - A Trifecta of Recipes

This week I took on one of the longer series of recipes I've attempted thus far. The first step was to mix up a pizza dough (page 178 Bittman), kneed it into a dough ball - which proved much more difficult than I had anticipated - and let it rise for about an hour.

Pre-kneed

Not too bad of a result.

While the dough was rising, I made the pizza sauce using the fast tomato sauce recipe (page 502 Bittman). Using one of the suggested alternatives I was able to make this spaghetti-like sauce a bit more like a marinara-pizza hybrid. On top of the tomato paste base, I added a good amount of garlic, basil, parsley, bay leaves, and a fresh chopped tomato.

Simmering the garlic and tomatoes in some butter.

Fresh herbs

Final product - very tasty.

With this, all that was left was to form the dough onto a baking pan - another very difficult step - add the sauce, and top it.

Perfect circle no doubt.

A little uneven, but not too shabby.

For the cooking instructions and portioning, we followed the pizza with tomato sauce and mozzarella recipe (page 181 Bittman). My grandmother and I have pretty different taste in pizza topping but we were able to agree on a few things. We put some chopped tomato and orange bell pepper across the whole thing. She smothered her side in sausage and black olives, as you will see below, and I kept my side simple with some pepperoni. The cheese we used was a mixture of mozzarella with a little parmesan on top to give you that appetizing golden brown color - I used to deliver pizzas if you couldn't already tell.

So many olives.

Pre-bake.

It smelled simply amazing.

Maybe a little overdone, but the hearty toppings called for a well cooked crust.

Hands down, best pizza I have every had in my life.

After preparing this recipe, I think I can entirely cut frozen pizzas and delivery out of my diet. Despite the added cost of ingredients and time investment, the final product is like no pizza I've ever ordered, be it delivery or "gourmet". The timing for letting the dough rise allows for the perfect intermission to prepare the sauce, and oven time was just over 10 minutes making this recipe about a 2 hour investment very well spent.