How to Make Homemade Pizza
Want to learn how to make homemade pizza? Read this guide to find out.
We eat pizza about once a week. It’s one of my favorite foods and the variations are really endless. Don’t tell me that you don’t like pizza, because you can put anything on there that you like, the rest is just bread.
When I make pizza, I make pizza. No store bought dough or pizza sauce. I make everything from scratch, the whole 8.2296 meters (we don’t do yards here!)
Let’s start with the dough. Pizza dough is really simple to make and only requires a few ingredients. The amounts stated here are for 3 medium sized pizzas, enough to feed our family of four and have a little left over for a midnight snack!
Ingredients
- 500 gr. flower
- 250 ml. water
- 1 packet of dry yeast
- Olive oil
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 tsp. sugar
Dump the flower onto your kitchen counter top and press a little depression into the middle. Add water, yeast, salt, sugar and a splash of olive oil and start mixing from the middle with a fork. When the water and flower start to bond, use your hands to knead until you have a smooth dough. The dough should not be sticky, add some flower if it is.
Kneading the dough is a pretty good workout and stress reliever! If you have a bread maker, it will probably have a dough setting, I like to use my bread maker to make the pizza dough. In fact it’s the only thing I use it for. I have tried using it to bake some bread, but the thing I hate about it is the hole that the kneading paddle leaves in the bottom. Anyways, back to the pizza.
Put the dough in a bowl and cover with a towel, so it can rise (or just let it sit in your bread maker) If you have the sauce already, you can skip this step, the dough doesn’t really need rising.
On to the secret sauce! The sauce you put on your pizza can really make the difference, so put some extra love into it!
Ingredients
- 1 can of peeled tomatoes
- 1 clove of garlic
- 1 handful of fresh basil leaves
- Pepper
- Salt
- Sugar
- Ketchup
- Olive oil
Start with the tomatoes. The whole tomatoes are way too watery, we’re making pizza sauce here, not tomato soup! Take the tomatoes out of the can with a big spoon and make a cut along one side using your finger. Now gently squeeze the water out of it and put what’s left into a big glass.
Once all the tomatoes have had this treatment, use your stick blender to turn it into a smooth paste. Chop the basil leaves and garlic and add salt, sugar, pepper and a splash of olive oil. Don’t go easy on the salt and pepper, there will only be a fairly small amount of sauce on your pizza, so it should have quite a strong taste.
Mix everything and add about 1/4th the amount of ketchup, give it a final stir and you’ll have the best pizza sauce you’ve ever tasted! Using one can of tomatoes to make the pizza sauce, I usually have about half of the sauce left over. The sauce can be kept in the freezer until the next time you make pizza.
Back to the dough. Cut the dough into 3 equally sized pieces and roll each one out into the desired shape. The dough will still rise in the oven so don’t make them too thick. Add about 2 tablespoons of sauce onto each pizza and spread it out evenly. You are now ready for the toppings.
When it comes to assembling your pizza, there is only one way to do it, and it goes like this: Dough, sauce, cheese, toppings, cheese. Don’t let me catch you doing it differently!
There are many different toppings you can use for your pizza. The general rule for the toppings is that they should be fairly dry and cooked. Mushrooms, for instance, contain quite a bit of moisture, so they should be cooked before adding or sliced very thin. Chicken breast is a nice pizza topping too, but it should be fried in a pan before adding it to your pizza.
Here are some of my favorite toppings:
- Ham and pineapple, the world famous pizza Hawaii
- Tuna and unions
- Döner-kebab or Gyros, serve with lots of garlic sauce.
- Salami
Cheese is added to all of the above. There are many different cheeses you can use on a pizza or a mix of several. I normally use grated Gouda cheese and Mozzarella.
The kids love to make their own pizza, so I usually put all the toppings into small bowls and let the kids have fun with it. Keep an eye on things though, because too much toppings will make a mushy pizza.
image: https://web.archive.org/web/20120422030539/http://whatscookingdad.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/pizza.jpg
The pizza should be baked in a very hot oven, crank it up as high as it goes and bake the pizza until the crust is colored medium brown. Enjoy!
