PIZZA

OK, so if you find things to cook at home that are easier than going out, and taste at least as good (if not better), then you'll cook at home more often.  A few years ago, we found how to cook pizza so that it's better than what we can get from a restaurant, takeout-or home delivery.  I'm not kidding, we've had foster kids who declared it to be the best they'd ever had.

Of course, for the foster kids, helping make their own meal added to the flavor.  It's always so much more satisfying when you do something on your own that turns out to be GREAT, right?

So we start with pizza stones.  We went to Home Depot and got a couple of stone tiles to use.  You don't want a glazed stone for this, the glazing will ruin this.  If you can get an unglazed clay tile, like saltillo, then great, but any unglazed stone will do.  Get it BIG, you want your whole pizza to fit on it.  We got two 12 inch tiles, and they aren't exactly large enough for one 12 inch pizza.  We cut the second tile to fit across our oven. 

The trick with pizza stones, which I forgot last night, is to get them VERY hot before you put the pizza in to cook.  If they are hot, the bottom of your pizza will cook fast, making it crispier.  Not having a hot stone in the oven means the bottom of your pizza cooks last.  Your toppings may be great, but your crust will be limp or soggy, cooked last (if at all).  Having the stone hot is the most important trick to a tasty, firm crust at the center bottom of the pizza! 

We use Mamma Mary's thin & crispy 12 inch pizza crusts.  One is about the right size for a pizza for 2 adults.  Teens, you probably need more than half a thin crust pizza... children, there will be leftovers (cooking leftover pizza in a minute).  You start by putting a very thin layer of oil on top of the cold crust, seal it JUST a little from sauce soaking in and making it soggy.  And now I'll put in a tiny word for  Mamma Mary's crusts.  We discovered them a few years ago.  This company makes crusts that are reasonably priced, comes with the thin & crispy style we like, do not have excess dough or stray flavors cooked in, so that we can make it what we want.  AND they keep on the pantry shelf for MONTHS, till we're ready to use them.  They come two (or more) to a package and the package contains a separate baggie to put your leftover into so you can keep it in the fridge for the next time you use it.   

We made tomato sauce from our garden last summer, but sometimes it's not as thick as we want.  I mix some of the homemade tomato sauce with tomato paste to thicken it up.  The alternative is to use canned tomato sauce (keep a tupperware container available for leftovers).  Add some basil or oregano, and little bits of garlic or garlic powder, to give it a little oomph, if you've used canned tomatoes.  If you make your own tomato sauce with your own spices, whatever you choose to put in your basic sauce is fine for pizzas.  The only problem seems to be the texture.  Thin is fine for pasta, but for pizza, you want a tomato sauce with a little body to it! 

Slices of tomato are fun, too... and can be really cool if you're doing a specialty pizza like one that has feta or ricotta, apples or pears, walnuts... all those cute toppings that you find at a chic and adult pizza place... but today we're looking for reasons not to get take-out, so we're going to work with the usual take-out toppings... not the pears & ricotta...

Cheese is always an issue.  We put the tomato sauce on first, then any veggies... we saute the veggies a little to soften them up and pull out any sweetness we can get from them, and put them on the 'za before we put on the cheese.  We use part skim cheese or full fat.  Anything less fat than "part skim", and it does not melt or bubble up properly. 

The biggest mistake people make with cheese on pizza is that they put on too much.  It really does not require a lot of cheese to make a pizza great.  Too much and the pizza will not crisp up right, it will melt but not get those wonderful little brown bubbles, the toppings will be smothered.  EVERY time I think I've not got enough cheese left to make a pizza, and I put one together anyways and hope for the best, it turns out to have been the PERFECT amount of cheese, creating a bubbly, thin layer that browns up nicely. 

And with meat... if you're using sausage or burger, please, PLEASE brown it first in a pan, sweating out as much of the fat as you can, before you put it on top of all that cheese.  If you're using pepperoni, it seems to not leave as many little puddles of fat on a pizza cooked the way we do (with the stones, and not too much cheese), but sausage can REALLY produce too many puddles of boiling oil on your pizza if you don't take off some of the fat first by giving it a little swirl in the browning pan.  Interestingly, people make a mistake of putting on too much cheese, they make a mistake of putting on too LITTLE toppings.  Remember that if you have a slice of pepperoni that's about an inch & a half around when you put it on, it will shrink during cooking.  If you put the pepperonis on so they look like you want the pizza to look when you're finished, it'll be clearly too few pieces.  Generally, it works best if you put the pepperonis in an overlapping pattern... start from the center and just overlap as they go out.  Same goes for thin slices of ham or any other type of meat that will shrink up as it cooks. 

Let the meat be on top, so it cooks fully and crisps up nicely.  Assuming you've not overloaded the pizza with toppings, and pre-heated the stones till they're super-hot, the cooking time is about 10-15 minutes... depending upon how crisp you want it.  Around here, we like it a little crunchy at the edges. 

For the thin crust pizza, take the toppings ALL the way out to the edge.  For a chewier crust, choose the thicker crust, which has a slightly larger edge.  EVEN if you're used to ordering the chewier crust from your take-out place, TRY the thin crust for the DIY pizza.  I suspect you'll like it better than anything you can buy in a restaurant or take-out.  When you're making a pizza for home, and do it right, and the toppings are on properly and the taste is good, suddenly you're less interested in wasting perfectly good crust by not putting toppings on it!  If you want something to dip, make a bread stick, you know? 

And most importantly, this one is great for the kiddos to get involved.  They love getting their hands oily by putting a tablespoon worth of oil on the crust and spreading it around... they like stealing random pieces of pepperoni.  They learn to appreciate veggies like Onions and bell peppers if they help in sauteing and putting them on the tomato sauce.  And maybe more importantly, they learn that too much cheese is not only high fat and unhealthy, but messes up the pizza by making it harder to get that good, crispy crunch that everyone seems to like so well...

In our house, except during Lent, Friday night is Pizza night... and it's a dinner that EVERYONE looks forward to... a great punctuation for a good workweek, and a great start to the weekend!