But who can afford those ridiculous frozen pizza prices? $5.99? All right, Mr. Rockefeller!
Anyway, making pizza dough is easy enough. The tricky part is starting about 2 hours before you want to eat it.
1. Let the tap water run on hot for a bit to get some warm water. It takes my faucet a little while to get warm. You'r gonna want a cup of warm water. Around 110 degrees or so. You don't want it boiling or anything like that, just warm enough to activate the yeast.
2. I a large bowl, mix one of those little envelopes of yeast with your warm water, a tablespoon of olive oil and a teaspoon of honey.
3. Let is sit for a couple of minutes until it looks foamy and slightly blurry (like you are a mostly incompetent photographer).
4. Add 1 1/2 cups of flour and up to a teaspoon of salt. Mix until smooth.
5. And another 1/2 cup of flour and mix until smooth.
6. Add 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese and mix until smooth.
7. Add another 1/2 cup of flour and mix till smooth.
8. Knead the dough on a floured surface for about 3 minutes to 5 minutes.
9. Oil a large bowl. Use about a tablespoon of olive oil.
10. Put the dough into the bowl, turning it around so that the oil is all around the dough.
11. Wait for it. . .
16. Now you've got some pizza dough. This takes about 75 minutes.
Now, this is enough dough to make one really big pizza or two decent sized pizzas.
Here's what I did last time:
a. I put my pizza stone in the oven (bottom shelf) and then turned the oven on full blast about an hour before cooking time.
b. I spread the dough out into two rounds by hand: one on a floured cutting board to transfer onto the pizza stone, the other on a pizza sheet that has been greased and sprinkled with corn meal.
c. Sauced them. Cheesed them.
(Make sure they are blurry!)
d. I slid the cutting board pizza onto the pizza stone and put the pan pizza into the shelf above.
e. The pizza stone pizza is done and ready in about 7 minutes, whereas the tray pizza will take a little longer.
f. The stone pizza gets some fresh arugula from the dirt worshiping heathens of my community garden and some prosciutto on top of that to hold it down. The other pizza is for my kid, who doesn't want to eat anything.
