We make pizza at least once a week. There are two versions that we make. The easy one, a deep dish square pizza from Serious Eats, and the hard one. The easy one you can make the same day you plan to eat, so if you forget to make dough the day before this recipe saves pizza night. The hard one requires a bit of planning and some gear, but it’s totally worth it.
Real Pizza at Home
It starts with pizza skins. You can cheat and buy these from Trader Joes all ready to go, or you can make your own.
Our three favorite pizza dough recipes in no particular order are:
- Four Water Salt Yeast - This book is a game changer, if you want to make bread at home you should read this book. He’s got how to videos over on YouTube too!
- No Knead Pizza Dough - We have a stand mixer, so not sure what not kneading buys us, but if you don’t have a mixer this might be your go-to dough.
Each has it’s advantages and disadvantages, all of them need to be made ahead of time, and Yes! you can freeze pizza dough with few adverse effects. Make extra and toss the skins you don’t need in the freezer for another night. Also, you can swap out ⅓ of the white flour for whole wheat. It gives you a richer flavor in the crust and a bit more tooth.
Next you need some gear:
Baking Steel - You could spend $80 plus shipping on a 15lb hunk of metal for your oven, or you could measure your bottom rack and go to your local welding place and ask them to cut you a ¼” thick piece of sheet steel. This is what we did. It cost us about $20, and they ground down the sharp corners for free.
We had been keeping the steel in our oven all the time. It helps with heat retention and makes the heat more consistent. However, we’ve been cooking our bread in dutch ovens, and when you put the pots in the oven with the steel, it takes the damn stove 45 minutes to come up to temperature. Also, you can’t put anything directly on the steel, other than pizza or things you want to cook like pizza (e.g. naan or pita bread), without the bottom scorching. So, I’ve been taking it out when I need to cook big, or I don’t want to wait for the oven to come up to temp.
The benefits of a steel are documented here: The Pizza Lab (Serious Eats), The Steel Slab Makes Awesome Pizzas, But… (Chow)
A Peel - that funny thing that helps you get the pizza in and out of the oven. Resist the urge to cut directly on your peel. Once the pizza is out of the oven, transfer it to a cutting board to cut it. We got ours from amazon, but you can have one made, or buy it from Etsy.
That’s it. Stretch the skins (there’s a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4aw5Mn99uk) top with sauce (we make ours and use cheaped canned stuff, or fancy tomatoes that have been blended with the stick blender) and cheese and whatever else suits your fancy. Be careful not to over top, cheese spreads as it melts so use less than you think you should. The better quality your toppings the better your pizza, but even crappy pizza is better than no pizza.
This is totally all linked up, but none of these sites, people, or companies have any idea who we are. We just like homemade pizza.