Homemade Pizza
 

Well, actually calzones too. BamaVol Jr made pizzas for a living for years. When he lived at home or close by, I could count on him for pizza dough. I tried making calzones tonight and the dough was a mess, too sticky. I guess I could have tamed it with additional flour.

Does anyone else make pizza at home? I love a chunky tomato sauce, red onion, red bell pepper, feta cheese. What a great alternative to calling a chain for delivery!

Tonight's calzones (came out ugly but tasty) were sweet Italian sausage, onion & bell pepper, ricotta & mozzarella, tomatoes & basil. Salad on the side with homemade garlic dijon vinaigrette. Mmmmm.

Wirelessly posted (Palm TX: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-D050; Blazer/4.3) 16;320x448)

Not calzone but pizza yes !!

Homemade pizza is the best because you get to freestyle with toppings no one ever puts on the pizzas they sell.

My SO bought a Lonely Planet magazine a couple of months
ago which had an article with the title " In search of the perfect
Pizza". Anyway below the article was a recipe for a homemade
pizza. I tried it and it was in fact delicious. We haven't had any
pizza delivered since.

Problem with making pizza at home is the oven... difficult to get it hot enough.

I've tried multple dough recipes and I like the one from the A16 cookbook the best. ^

I've found 550 Fahrenheit on convection (as hot as my oven will go) works well in combination with a pizza stone. The key is to let the oven hold at 550 for a good 15-20 minutes before putting the pizza in, so that the stone also gets up to temperature.

this is for thin crust, using this dough recipe:

3 1/4 cups flour
1 cup hot water, with 2 1/4 teaspoons yeast and 1 tablespoon honey stirred in
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
knead in cuisinart for 1 minute with dough blade, then let rise for 75 minutes covered in dark location.

Bob

We don't usually make it quite so hot, but I would definitely agree on the pizza stone. Don't think it is possible to get the crust quite right without one.

I use to use a pizza stone on a grill when I was making it at home. Plenty hot enough for a thin crust pizza to cook crispy in a few minutes.

The dough came from a pizza place that had really good dough, they sold it in pizza sized hunks for people that were baking bread, making pizza, or frying the dough.

my wife cooks pizza on the grill. easily goes to 7-800F. she makes the dough in her Zoshoi(?) machine. she buys the flour from king arthur.

i'm totally craving pizza now!!

King Arthur makes an excellent high gluten flour for home pizza making. We have used the Tom Lehmann process for "NY Style" pizza with great success. Works indoors or on the grill. Pizza stone a must. ^

i have a gas oven that can hit 550 to 600 (verified with thermometer) ... and ive read that ideally for home pizza the higher the temp you can hit the better

i can really brown the pie but the sauce wont finish for me.... tried fresh marzanos, etc, etc... just cant do it

This is pretty much what I do except I do not have a bread machine. I also make my own pizza sauce as it is much better than any of the jar/can stuff. You are right about keeping the stone in the oven as long as possible before putting the dough on as it does make a big difference.

I used to make my own sauce as well, but the advent of two young kids has pretty much eliminated that. It's better, but my wife and I just don't have the time to make the sauce from scratch very often.

bob

We make the odd pizza at home and we love putting whatever and how much toppings we want but we still like take-out/delivery because we can replicate various crusts and even the sauce.

I'm not sure if this makes a difference but we use a bread maker to make our dough. I want to try buying dough from a baker to see if that makes any difference. Plus, the way we handle it, it only ends up being a crispy thin crust.

We never use the oven but instead lather the crust up with olive oil and then toss it onto the Weber to brown one side, take it out, top it, and then do a final bake.

We do the standard toppings of course be we had some great luck with a balsamic, caramelized onion, and goat cheese topped pizza once. We have some nice basil and tomatoes growing in the garden this year so we might have to do a Margherita.

I’ve got a great recipe for pizza on the BBQ grill, starting with homemade dough. Instead of sauce, you char-grill sliced tomatoes sprinkled with olive oil and a little sea salt.

Then stretch out the dough on a rectangular enamel grilling tray coated with olive oil. Flip it just when it starts to char on the bottom. Then add the tomatoes, shredded fontina cheese, romano cheese and fresh basil leaves.

Sounds excellent. I have had an issue using oiled pans on my grill. No matter what I do, the oil always ends up catching fire. I've tried low heat, indirect heat, covering the oil completely with the food. Nothing works. Maybe a spray bottle of water?

I've had the same Breadman machine for more than a decade now and have been using it to make my pizza dough since the beginning. I've settled on the following recipe, although I'm always open to modifications:

(This will usually make one 16+" pizza or two 13" pizzas)

1 1/4 cups warm water
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
3 cups bread flour
1/3 cup semolina flour
1 1/2 tsp yeast

I usually cook my pizza at 450 in a regular oven. After spreading the dough, cook it for 5 minutes with cheese only so that the cheese adheres to the crust - fewer mouth blisters that way. Then add the sauce (usually Trader Joe's Fat Free Pizza Sauce) and toppings of the day plus a light sprinkling of cheese for looks, then cook for an additional 8 minutes. I finish up cooking the pizza an additional 3-4 minutes OFF the pan and directly on the oven rack. Sometimes a pizza stone is used, sometimes not.

I've been using traditional pizza parlor pans, but have been thinking about picking up some pizza screens. Does anyone have any experience using screens over pans?

I tried screens ONCE. They worked OK, but were incredibly annoying to clean. That's another reason I like pizza stones. Just get a wood pizza peel to slide the pizza on/off the stone, and cook it directly on the stone. When you're done and the stone cools down it's easy to clean.
A pizza pan (not screen) is useful for putting the pizza on after it's out of the oven for slicing, but it's not necessary for cooking on if you're using a stone.
At the other pizza extreme, I also make a fairly good imitation of Geno's Chicago style pizza, cornmeal crust and all. That's a whole different thing, doesn't need a stone, but does need a cast iron pan to cook in.

Bob

The heat must be too high. Seems like the main thing I have issues with food sticking on the grill is chicken. For that I take a piece of skin and rub it on the grill. PAM also makes a spray designed for the high temperatures of grilling.


After it’s cooled, I throw it in the utility sink in the garage and spray it with oven cleaner. The next day I brush it lightly with soap and water and a Scotch-Brite pad. Works great!

that still sounds annoying to me.

Will the dough recipes mentioned work without any machines? In other words can I knead the dough myself?

Anyone have a good sauce recipe they could list?

Thanks.

This is the one I like to use if I have time and all the ingredients.

http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/Ult...a-Sauce-114392

If I am in a hurry or dont have all the items in that list I just use some garlic, tomato sauce, tomato paste, basil, oregano, sugar, salt and fennel seeds.

Mrs DHG and I use a stone and will pick up dough from Whole foods or a local pizza joint.

Lately, we've been using whole-wheat pita. It is thin, gets incredibly crispy quickly, and the perfect size for personal mini-pizzas.

I don't know whether there's any current interest in this topic but for what it's worth I was fairly obsessed about cooking pizza at home and would say that there are three main secrets for what to me is the perfect pizza. The best thing is that the basic ingredients can be batched and kept in the fridge and freezer for when the pizza moment grabs you. And from then on a pizza is just turning the oven on and assembling the pizza and cooking it ..... and eating it .....

1. The dough base

2. The topping

3. The cooking temperature

---------------

1. The dough base.

If posssible hunt around for genuine Caputo flour which is milled in Naples and sent around the world to the best pizzeria. Make what is described in Italy as a bigga and in France as a poulish. This is a sour dough starter. This is often fed daily and has been kept going in traditional pizzeria for decades ... but a good approximation I have worked out can be cheated. In France this mix is used to make traditional bagguettes .... in a steam induced oven. Simply get some caputo flour or if you cxannot find caputo the finest hardest flour you can .... possibly Canadian extra hard. Add some water, and a few grains of dried yeast. Leave that wet mix ie a mix with a cling film cover that looks like double cream in a warm room for a few day until the mix has doubled in foam and bubbles. The longer it takes the closer to a real sourdough mix it is. In real life the sourdough starter has come from natural airborne yeasts and my approach is simply a pragmatic cheat that I worked on myself.

When your ready to make your first pizza use more flour and water and some salt and a small amount of olive oil - and if you like a few grains of sugar to encourage the fragrance and crispness - and make a wetish dough with half of the bigga. The other half of the bigga can be stored in a plastic ontainer (chinese takaway container does it) and keep that mix in the fridge for your next pizza and all pizzas in trhe furture. Simply take half of the mix to use for the pizza and feed the mix with more flour and water for future pizzas. In the best pizzeria the dough mix is at it's very best as a one day old dough ie ie make it a dough ball today for tommorows pizza. The dough ball should be a little weter and more pliable than a normal bread mix. Let it rise to double bulk and when you knead use a pulling motion to stretch the potential air bubbles to be long bubbles rather than round bubbles. Let it rise knock back and then shape to a round and let it rise again. To me a proper pizza is a very thin base with very little topping. It's a bread with a bit of topping not a thick stodgy goo as enjoyed in the US more than in Italy.

2. The topping. The key is less is more. Leave a wide pizza base edge so it chars and make a tomato mix out of whatever is your taste. I bulk make a tomato mix from tinned tomato, tomato pure, slowly fried onion and some oregano salt and sugar. I then mouli this down after it's been cooked a long while into a thick paste. This has intense flavour and a few sppons is enough for a pizza. EDITED TO ADD. If you have a bottle of ouzo around a few spoons of ouzo to the tomato mix adds an anise taste that approximates basil and adds a lovely under-taste. The tomato mix on the pizza shouldn't be thick. Put on that mix your choice. Mine is a few prefried mushrooms (raw mushroom makes the pizza wet) and some ham and some mozzarela. The tomato mix can be kept in an ice cub tray in the freezer and a couple melted in the microwave when you want a pizza. I keep a basil plant on my window shelf and pull a few leaves off for garnish. I also paint the dough edge with a little olive oil.

3. Cooking. The hotter the oven the better the results. You want the base to be as thin as possble with charred areas but soft dough - this takes speed and temperature. The only inexpensive kitchen appliance I have found is the
Ferrari Divina Pizza oven .... very dangerous ... ignore what it says - it reaches around 600 degrees and other look-alikes do not - they only go to around 250 degrees and Raytemp 3 a temperature guage that goes to 500 degrees or more ..... for above! I also use a beehive oven in summer.


The pizza takes around a minute to cook.

I've probably gone to too much trouble here ... but if any FT'er is obsessed with a truly wonderful pizza at home and is obsessive about perfection then these suggestions might be a starting point for them as it summarises several years of my obsession and experimentation.

Here's the recipe from Steven Raichlin. No machine needed. :D

Handmade dough will always be better than machine dough ... so long as you knead for just long enough. Over kneaded machine dough will give a more characterless dough with very consistant air pockets. If you hand knead try and use a pulling motion to stretch bubbles.

Good luck with the pizza making - once you make your first - you'll always enjoy home made and enjoy the time you take making them. When you finally shape it into a round (or whatever shape you choose) a further tip is to use semolina flour to stretch the base on - if you have some around - as this adds to the crispness. Good pizzeria often use semolina flour when they finally shape the base.

I made some great pizza recently after watching Bobby Flay's "Grill It!" where he made pizza with hummus, grilled veggies, goat cheese and olives.

Not traditional, but very tasty. The dough was very good and fairly simple to make - but then again, I frequently make my own bread.

Not to beat a dead horse here but grilling is so good for home made pie and San Marzano tomatos sweeten up on their own when you cook your sauce and reduce it without needing a ton of paste. So tasty. Grilling recipe below I use.

http://vindulge.typepad.com/vindulge/2009/08/test.html

so, has anyone compared caputo OO or is it 00 flour to other 00 flours? this year, i am growing san marzano and two san marzano hyberds, plus a polish paste(found inferior last year) tomato. get a lotta sauce from one plant. maybe 1.5 quarts(2 liters). there really is no comparison. too bad pizza has so many calories. no wonder the Nepalese pizza is so famous.

I have tried a load of flours and read quite a lot about Caputo. Evidently it's made from a blend of softer grain and milled in an old mill especially for pizza. The caputo family still seem to be in control and I read of a visitor from the US visitng the mill and the boss was constantly picking up the phone to restuaranters saying "more water .... more water"!

I'm an obsessive cook who likes to try and perfect things before I become obsessed with the next thing and the caputo flour certainly did make a difference. The other thing I read and tried that made a big differnce to the crustiness of the base was stretching out (the pizza base .... not me!) on semolina flour.

To be honest - I go over the top - and whether caputo is important to you depends on how obsessive you are!:D

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?