Last weekend, after some inspiration from friends of ours that this can indeed be done without a lot of fancy cooking equipment, we decided to make homemade pizza. This was partly inspired by the fact that my herbs are finally grown up enough to eat, so I used them to both make the sauce and to season the dough.
This was the first use of my lovely garden herbs!!
I made the sauce with onions, green peppers, garlic, oregano and basil.
I began by making the sauce, which was from a can of tomato sauce and half a can of tomato paste, to which I added onions, garlic, green peppers, oregano and basil. I let it simmer; the longer, the better.
Test the yeast in some warm sugary water.
I then mixed flour, salt, water, olive oil and yeast with some fresh herbs and garlic.
This was the scariest part for me and it turned out to be the simplest. If the yeast doesn’t get foamy in the water within 10 minutes, it’s dead, so try again. The recipe I used called for 2 cups of wheat flour and 1 cup of all-purpose flour, a tablespoon of olive oil, a pinch of salt, along with the water and yeast. I added some fresh herbs and garlic to the dough for extra yumsies.
Then cover it with a towel for 1 1/2 hours.
Roll the dough out on a clean, floured surface.
After about an hour and a half, the dough should double in size, indicating that it’s ready to be rolled out. You can make the crust as thin or as thick as you like. Me I like it thin, so we rolled it out tenderly and topped it up.
We did half Margherita and half Mediterranean.
We popped this baby into a 425 degree oven for 15 minutes and pizza came out the other side!
Homemade tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and fresh basil from my garden.
Pesto, red onions, white onions, green hot peppers, red bell peppers, olive-marinated chicken and feta cheese.
I’m not one to toot my own horn, but for a couple of first timers making homemade pizza, this was a big victory… TOOT TOOT.
Eat. Read. Ask. Do. Be. 