Homemade Pizza

WARNING: The following pictures are mouth watering delicious. Pizza! Who doesn't like a pizza especially on a Friday night? The past month my husband has been perfecting the homemade pizza and in my opinion, we have a winner! Here are our family's steps to getting that perfect pizza pie.

First, you need a good crust recipe. We have tried a few different recipes, but really like the pizza crust recipe that came with our Oster bread maker.

Pizza Crust

(All ingredients should be at room temperature.) 

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast

1 cup water

2 Tablespoons olive oil 

We measure all the ingredients into our bread maker and let the machine do the work. If you don't have a bread maker, no worries. You can mix all the ingredients with an electric mixer until a ball forms. Be sure to add your flour a bit at a time. Then, cover your dough for an hour or two in a warm dry place for the dough to rise.

When your dough is ready, divide in half for two pizza crusts. Roll out your dough to the desired thickness. We tend to like our crusts thin and crispy.

Then, top your crust with your favorite toppings. Some of our favorites include: pesto with tomatoes, fresh basil and tomatoes for a pizza margherita, sliced mini colored bell peppers with sausage, or pepperoni with black olives and green bell peppers.

Now, time to cook your oh, so yummy creation. We cook our pizza on a baking steel. We place our steel in the oven about an hour to an hour and a half before our first pizza is ready to cook. We set our oven to as high as it will go - 525 degrees. After being in the oven for over an hour, the baking steel will be blazing HOT so be careful. The hot steel will result in superior pizza. For more information on baking steel, check out this post from Serious Eats. We are very pleased with our steel. It is 1/4 inch thick and weighs about 15 pounds. They are heavy, but make the best crispy pizza crusts!

The below picture shows one of our pies in the cooking process. It is a funny shot, but shows how we cook our pizzas. You can see the steel on top of one of our oven racks along with parchment paper. That's another tip - use parchment paper.

We cover our pizza peel with parchment paper. With the parchment paper on, we then place our pizza on the peel for cooking. This will make transferring the pizza to and from the steel easier. We use a new piece of parchment paper on the peel with every pizza. What is a pizza peel? See below photo.

When your pizza is done, use a pizza peel to get your pie out. Remember it is HOT, but the parchment paper will make sliding the pizza on the peel easier. When out of the oven, we place our pizza on a pizza pan to make the slicing easier.

Then, enjoy all that goodness! Below is my favorite pizza: half pesto with tomato and half colored bell pepper with sausage. I have to have a slice of each kind - or may be two, or three!