Ciao ya’ll!
I made homemade pizza the other night and it was really good. I’m not really a pizza person but Hillbilly really likes it so I thought I would give it a try. I made 2 homemade sauces, a red sauce and a spinach alfredo which is my pizza topping of choice (red sauce recipe below). Even though it took 3 hours to make dinner (because of the two sauces), making the dough was fun and here’s how I did it.
Pizza Dough
- 3 cups Flour
- 1 envelope Quick Rise Yeast (or 2 Tsp Active Yeast)
- ½ teaspoons Sugar
- ½ teaspoons Salt
- 1-½ Tablespoon Olive Oil
- 1-½ cup Warm Water
- ¼ cups Grated Parmesan (pay the extra for Parmigiano-Reggiano because it’s good and if you’re going to all this trouble you might as well get the best ingredients)
Preparation Instructions
To a big bowl add the yeast to the water and let sit for 5 minutes. Next, add the sugar, salt, olive oil and flour and mix together. When dough begins to come together, add in the Parmesan cheese.Knead dough, adding more flour as needed to keep the dough slightly tacky. The directions said to knead until slightly shiny but I didn’t. I just kneaded until I thought I didn’t need to knead anymore. LOL. It turned out great.
Oil a large mixing bowl and drop the dough in, spinning it to coat the ball. Cover with a towel and let rise until doubled in a warm spot. This could be 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how warm your house is.
Punch down the dough in the mixing bowl, cover and let rise until doubled again.
To make the pizza:
Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.
Divide dough into 2 equal parts. This recipe should make 2 pizza's.
Spray your pan with non stick spray and dust with cornmeal. Lightly flour your hands, flatten the dough ball into a disc, and work the pizza dough from the center or just roll it out. This part gave me fits and my pizza’s were anything but round. I guess you could throw it in the air and spin it at this point but I chose not to. I ended up stretching, pinching, pounding, rolling and anything else I could think of to flatten it. I left the edges slightly thicker than the middle simply because I was tired of messing with it. It worked out okay.
Top with your favorite toppings. For the cheese I used fresh mozzarella and highly recommend that you do to because it was yummy. Brush edges with melted butter or olive oil. Bake 12-15 minutes until the crust is golden and cheese is bubbly.
This recipe should also be good for breadsticks. I might try that next time I make spaghetti.
A couple of recipes that I used to adapt this said that you can also “cold rise” the dough in a fridge for 8 hours. Be sure to cover with plastic wrap instead of a towel. This is supposed to give the dough extra flavor but I cannot confirm that so let me know if works.
For the sauce:
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 small yellow onion, chopped
- 1 1/2 teaspoons minced garlic
- 1/4 cup red wine or beef broth if you don’t have wine handy
- 1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
- 1 tablespoon chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
- 1 teaspoons salt
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon oregano
- 1 teaspoon basil
Mama Mia your kitchen will smell like a pizzeria and your family will say Grazie.
Arrivederci for now.
