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Life
Posted: Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Simple Homemade Pizza Recipe
Sure, you can press a few buttons on your phone and get a box of pizza to your door within a half-hour, but you would be missing out on the unbelievable aroma that your kitchen would acquire from your own pizza creation getting to a state of delicious, bubbly, crispy goodness in your very own oven. And sure, you can get a precision-manufactured frozen pizza for a few bucks at the grocery store that will leave your belly full, but will it leave your soul content? Didn't think so. If I can't get to the Brass Taps on the Danforth, I make my own with this recipe.
Ingredients
Dough1 1/2 cups of lukewarm (90–100 °F) filtered water
1 Pkg (8 g) active dry yeast
4 cups unbleached flour
1/2 cup semolina flour
1 tsp salt
2 Tbl olive oil
Fillings1 small can of pizza sauce (Of course there are lots of sauce possibilities—you can make it from scratch or start with some nice tomato sauce and embellish with your own herbs, etc. I find pizza sauce from a can or a jar pretty tasty.)
Your favourite fillings (I like sauteed onions, mushrooms and sliced green olives.)
CheeseI use about 500 g (a little over a pound) of cheese. I prefer a blend of 3 parts mozzarella to 1 part medium cheddar.
Directions
Proof the yeast in 1/4 cup of lukewarm water with a pinch of sugar according to the instructions on the yeast package. While the yeast is proofing, put the remaining water, olive oil, and remaining sugar into a mixing bowl. Measure out 4 cups of flour. (I use a scale for this because it's easy to compact the flour with the measuring cup and get more flour than you should. I consider 1 cup of flour to be 3.5 oz or about 100 g. So for this recipe, I weigh out 400 g with my kitchen scale.) Mix together the flour, semolina and salt in a second bowl.
Once the yeast is proofed, add it to the mixing bowl with the rest of the wet ingredients and mix. Add the flour mixture to the yeast mixture about one cup at a time, mixing well after each addition.
After all the flour is added, the dough should resemble a shaggy ball. Dump the shaggy ball onto a floured surface:
Knead the dough for about 10 minutes:
After kneading, put the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic film, and leave it to rise until doubled in bulk (60–90 minutes).
Punch down the dough (press down hard and fast to force the trapped gas out) and knead for another couple of minutes.
Return the dough to the bowl, replace the cover, and chill in the refrigerator for 45 minutes. Punch the dough down again and return to the refrigerator for anywhere from several hours to a day or two.
I recommend using a pizza stone. Put the stone in the cold oven and preheat to 450 °F for at least 20 minutes so that the stone gets to the right temperature.
Divide the dough into 4 pieces. Keep one and return the other three to the refrigerator.
Roll out the dough to the desired thickness (I like it somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 inch). At this thickness the diameter is approximately 10–12 inches:
Put some semolina on the bottom of a baker's peel (it is so much easier to make pizza with a baker's peel—well worth the investment.) Transfer the dough to the baker's peel.
Spread the sauce with the bottom of a ladle:
Add the toppings except the cheese:
Gently slide the pizza from the baker's peel to the pizza stone. A gentle jerk at the elbow will give best results.
Bake the cheese-less pizza for 7 minutes. A small kitchen timer is useful for timing this out, since I find myself wanting to get the pizza out before the crust has had a chance to brown a bit:
When the timer goes off, slide the pizza from the stone back onto the baker's peel using a spatula. Sprinkle about 150 g of cheese all over the pizza and return it to the oven using the same jerking motion as before.
Cook for another 7-8 minutes until the crust is brown and the cheese is nicely bubbling.
Remove the pizza to the baker's peel again using the spatula and transfer onto a wire cooling rack for a few minutes. Repeat for the other three pieces of dough.
Enjoy:
