Thought I'd resurrect this thread. I just bought a pizza stone on Amazon and am looking forward to making pizza next week when it comes!

You are going to love making your own pizza. Use good ingredients and you cant go wrong. I soon found I needed a breadmaker though...just to make the dough as it does a much better job than I could do!

I have been wanting to buy a bread maker off and on for a while now. We had one when I was in high school, and I loved it. Of course, it was also probably a significant factor in my weighing 20 lbs more than I should...

gfunkdave - hope you enjoy your stone!

If you can't face the palaver in my earlier posts #24 and #26 ... then as you're clearly salivating now I suggest a couple of ideas to give you something to do.

Why not make an authentic Pizza and use a biga starter for the base. It's like the french use to make baguettes - but they call it poolish.

Get some dried yeast now and put just a few grains into a small tumbler of water and just a little flour and leave it with a bit of kitchen paper over the top and leave it out for a few days. Every so often give it a stir and in a couple of or few days when it starts to froth add a tablespoon of flour or two as extra feed. This is my cheats version of sour dough starter.

When this is a really frothy mix then split it in half and use this as your starter for your dough mix but addd this to your quantity of flour a day or two before your pizza cooking day and leave it in the bottom of your fridge. Do the same with the other half but leave this in something like a chinese take-away plastic box in the bottom of the fridge. This can be halved and used as pizza starter and you won't need to wait a day or two for future pizza. The other half is then increased by more flour and water and put back into the fridge. In future you'll always have a sour dough starter for your pizza. I hope you get the drift of this approach .... but if you agree that pizza is all about the base then a proper sourdough pizza base makes all the difference and gives the chewiness and character that eludes so many home pizza makers.

In the best Napolitan places they use yesterdays made dough for todays pizza until they run out and use sourdough procedures. Hence Napolitans believe that pizza at lunch in these places is often better than the evening stuff.

With respect to the stone ..... make sure you heat it with the grill for 30 minutes or so before you revert to the max oven temperature to ensure a crisp base.

Enjoy your pizza.

Generally, it would be getting stoned and ordering pizza.

I once tried making my own pizza simply because of that reason that I wanted my own special toppings that I couldn't get from a restaurant, takeout, or grocery store. But at the end I failed miserably and have never attempted again.

I've got very plebeian tastes in what toppings I like, but I'm a bit of snob when it comes to the basic crust + sauce + cheese, and I have a very hard time finding pizza that works for me. So I've love to come up with a recipe that worked for me at home.

Sadly, my pizza results in the past have been underwhelming to the point of making mass-market chain pizza look good. I've been working on my basic bread-making which has been getting from equally bad to be almost passable so the pizza might be wort trying again soon.

The problem that most people new to making pizza is the dough and is often therefore one of simply planning ahead and patience - and more difficultly - the oven temperature.

The quickest a base can be ready in is 90 minutes to two hours to allow a first decent rise. To make a pizza that's a lot better needs to have you prepare the base dough the day before .... or longer. I suspect most problems come about because people expect to make a dough and cook it straight away. Anthor challenge is that many people try to roll the pizza base out with a rolling pin which destroys the air bubbles in the dough. It needs to be pulled out flat rather than rolled.

The other major problem - that is insurmountable to the majority - is that the temperature required to cook a raw pizza to most peoples taste ie a crisp and unfloppy base requires temperatures between 350 - 600 degrees. Most domestic ovens reach around 220. This issue combined with most people's desire to put too much wet topping means a fairly dissapointing result.

Assuming that you overcome the dough challenge then a way to minimise the temperature challenge is to use a very large oversized frypan. You heat the frypan on a hob then turn it upside down and place it under the grill just before you put your uncooked pizza on it. This sometimes produces a reasonable pizza base.

These issues unluckilly make pre-cooked pizza a better result for the majority.

I would love to make my own pizza at home. Unfortunately, I suffer from some sort of dough syndrome, where I can't work with it at all. Even in college paying my way by cooking at a restaurant that served pizza, I failed and was not allowed to touch the dough.

What is going wrong exactly?

Bingo! That was my problem. In the end it just turned out really tough for mines - as hard as a cracker.

OK, so my inaugural pizza didn't turn out quite right. It tasted good...but I couldn't figure out how to do the nifty turn-and-stretch maneuver to get a nice round pie. So I made a rectangular one. So far so good. But apparently I hadn't floured the cutting board enough, so the dough stuck to it. And I didn't realize this until I had all the ingredients on it and was tipping it into the oven.

Long story short, I used a spatula to get the pizza off the cutting board, and wound up with a misshapen calzone thing.



BUT I did have enough dough for a second pie. I floured the cutting board (probably excessively) and got it all ready. I'll slide it in the oven tomorrow when I have had a chance to clean the pizza stone.

Normally you just scrape off anything loose with a metal spatula after you take the pie off the stone and it's done. Any remaining residue is incinerated the next time you heat up the stone.

Well done for persevering - and let me assure you that the WHOLE point of home made pizza is for it to be irregular shape. This is to prove to the world that you made it. That pizza is nothing to be ashamed of! The bread mix looks good to me .....

I suggest that you prepare your final pizza base (prior to cooking) on a cutting board so your only moving the cutting board to the oven rather than a wobbly pizza on a spatula! Use lots of flour or if you have it semolina is better. Semolina, or very fine ground polenta or any flour made from corn or maize but not thickening cornflour. If you look closely semolina is what many pizzaria use for the final stretching as it adds crunch to the base. If you see what looks like a yellow tinged flour then they're using semolina.

Having kneaded and had a first rise of the pizza ball in a covered bowl then spread and pull your mix on the heavily floured board. Another trick which genuinely works. Pull the pizza out and stretch it as much as you can. Let it rest for a few minutes ... then stretch it further again. Repeat the process of pulling and covering and resting a few times. Each time you do this the stretchability will seem to be rejuvenated ie the allowing to recover and rest adds more to the ability to pull and stretch. It's something to do with gluten. Keep pulling and stretching and when it keeps springing back give it a rest for a few minutes then try pulling and stretching again. You want the base as thin as possible but preferably not as a result of using a rolling pin which kills the elongated air bubbles which is a requirement of good pizza.

When big and thin enough cover with oiled cling film for 30 to 40 minutes. It's important that the pizza should still be able to move around on your chopping board so it must be well floured. Ensure your tomato mix has been cooked down to a intensive flavour and apply the leanest of smear so the base doesn't get too wet. A simple canned tomato mix with sugar, salt a touch of tomato paste, garlic or garlic salt, and if you have a bottle - a small drop of ouzo adds an intense aniseed undertone which is as good as basil. The tomato mix must be a cold mix when you add it to the pizza base. Then whatever else goes on top .... but please ..... less is more ... but from the picture I think you understand that! The whole pizza can now be taken to your pre-heated base and slipped and coaxed onto it.

You may also want to keep a small basil plant by your window to help with your pizzas!

Finally ...... if you can bring yourself to ....... try and save some of your current dough to use as a sourdough starter for your next set of pizzas. Add some more liquid and perhaps a few grains of sugar and try and make it forment again ie leave it in a warm place. The aging of the dough is what adds the real flavour to pizza dough and is prized in pizza making. It's called a biga in Italy when used for Pizza or bread making and poolish in France when used for baguette making. It's the main secret for giving character and flavour to dough/bread.

edited to add: Salt kills yeast and an error made by many pizza makers is to add too much salt to the dough mixture.

I'd suggest stretching the dough on to the pizza stone directly (once it is hot - watch your fingers tho!) and then topping it, quickly, before putting back in the oven. No trying to transfer the dough laden with toppings. Use semolina under the dough on the stone to make it slide off again once cooked too.