Friday night is usually family pizza night. With a houseful of children, getting pizza that everyone likes usually means multiple pizzas and compromises all around (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing!). And when you’re buying a lot of pizza, it can get pretty expensive, so we usually go the route of Little Caesars, Hungry Howie’s or Domino’s when they’re on special. Pretty standard fare.
No disrespect to the chains, considering that I love pizza in just about any of it’s forms, but sometimes I get a craving for something special. So if we’ve got a little extra time and we’re not totally spent from a week of work and school headaches, sometimes we just make our own.
For this pizza, I picked up Publix’ pizza dough from the bakery. Not the pre-packaged stuff, mind you, but their own pizza dough. If they don’t have it in a refrigerated bin in the bakery, just ask for it.
Also, Bon Appétit has a recipe in the March 2012 issue which I’m sure is totally awesome, but picking up a couple bags of dough at Publix is just so convenient!
The real key to making a great homemade pizza is the technique for preparing your dough which is also in the same Bon Appétit issue and which I’d recommend committing to memory. Gradually stretch out the dough in a circular motion until it’s large enough to lay over your knuckles and use a combination of gentle stretching and gravity to get it to the size you want.
Then it’s time to get creative with the toppings. While the kids made theirs with pizza sauce and packaged mozzarella, I went with a can of peeled San Marzano tomatoes which I crushed with my hands and spread over the dough lightly rubbed with olive oil.
On top of that went caramelized yellow onions, sauteed with a clove or two of minced garlic, a mix of packaged gourmet mushrooms, some basil from the herb garden and some fresh mozzarella cheese that I ripped up into chunks and put on the top.
Liz prefers a base of pesto, sun dried tomatoes, lots of fresh basil (with some olive oil to keep it from burning in the oven) and a generous sprinkling of feta cheese.
Just as key as the dough prep is the actual cooking of the pizza, and when I changed to this technique, my homemade pizza when from good to great.
A pizza stone is pretty much a must have if you really want to get that extra crispy texture in the crust. You can, of course, still make a great pizza without one, but if you’re into homemade pizzas, this is an investment that you’ll want to make. The other is a wooden baker’s peel. Again, not necessary to make a pizza, but it certainly makes life easier!
Preheat the stone in the oven on a really high heat, like 500° while you’re preparing your ingredients. Once your dough is ready, lay it out on your generously floured peel and add your toppings. Then, when you’re about to bake it, crank up the heat to broil and work the pizza from peel to stone by jiggling it back and forth until it slides into place (this is, of course, why you flour the peel).
Some folks sprinkle a little semolina flour on the stone before sliding the pizza on it, but as long as you get the stone good and hot, you’ll get an immediate crisp when the pizza goes on and it’ll come right off when time to take it out of the oven.
Broil the pizza for 5-7 minutes (a few more minutes if using a baking pan), rotating it once while cooking. The whole broiling thing and the high heat is the difference maker. Whereas before, my pizzas were ok, the heat and fast cooking gives them that stone fire oven look and that pizza parlor crispy crust and real dough taste and texture. Superb!
Once you get the technique down, then you can experiment with toppings and get really creative!