cooking ideas: pizza

I've been baking a lot of pizza lately and it's led me to swear off delivery pizza forever. I doubt this decision will stick (delivery pizza, after all, is pretty much unbeatable on some occasions). But that's how good homemade pizza is. It's so much better and less oily than pizza that someone would bring to your door, and there's the benefit of getting to customize exactly what you want on it and in what amount. So, if at all possible, pizza I consume from here on out will be made by my hands.

My plan is to keep some pizza dough frozen at all times and stewed tomatoes stocked in the cupboard. If those two items are on hand, then it's just silly not to make a pizza.

Here's the basic idea:

Pizza dough (from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything)

3 cups flour
2 teaspoons yeast
2 teaspoons salt
1 to 1 1/4 cups water
2 tablespoons olive oil

1. Combine the yeast, flour, and salt, then add 1 cup of water and oil.
2. Mix, adding more water until the mixture forms a ball and is slightly sticky.
3. Form into a smooth round ball. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it rise until it doubles in size (1-2 hours). At this point, I divide the dough into two pieces (one piece is enough for a medium pizza) and freeze them or bake one and freeze one as needed. If you freeze it, wrap it up tightly in plastic wrap.
4. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Oil a circular pan and spread the dough out. Spread more oil thinly on top of the dough.
5. Add tomato sauce (see below), toppings and cheese.
6. Bake for 8 to 12 minutes (or until the bottom of the crust is nice and brown).


Casual tomato sauce

1 can of stewed tomatoes
1 small onion
3 or 4 cloves of garlic
oregano, salt, pepper to taste
a spoonful of sugar
a bit of red wine (if available)
Tabasco sauce to taste (if available and enjoyable to you)
fresh basil (if available)
ground beef, browned in a separate skillet (if desired)

1. Sautee diced onion and garlic for a few minutes, then add other ingredients.
2. Simmer on stove -- the longer the better!

The pizza pictured above has meat sauce and four (that's right, four!) types of cheese that just happened to be on hand: ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan and queso fresco. It was fantastic. And since all I had to do was defrost the dough, chop some veggies, boil the sauce and then throw the whole thing together, it took next to no time.