I’ve always had such bad luck finding a decent delivery pizza that years ago I started to make my own from scratch. The great thing about making your own pizza is not only do you get to use any topping you like, you can choose to do as much or as little work as you want. The simplest way is to buy a crust – either a Boboli or the Pilsbury refridgerated dough, and a jar of pizza sauce or a can of tomato sauce. From there you can let everyone in the family pick their toppings. And the kids can all help chop onions, grate the mozarella, and for a real adventure you can make your own pizza dough. So if you like, you can make your own pizza faster than most places could deliver one, and it’ll probably taste a lot better! But for the most fun with your kids, go the whole nine yards and make everything from scratch.
Yes, we’re going to be working with yeast. There’s really only two things you need to know about yeast. First, it has to be fresh. The word “active” on the yeast package tells you that it has a shelf life, so if you’ve had a packet of yeast from your first year of marriage, it’s time to buy a new one. My folks didn’t care much for spicy food, so my Mom always joked that they’d been married so long that they were on their second bottle of Tabasco sauce. The second thing you need to know when you’re working with yeast is that you can’t let it get too hot. Yeast is a live bacteria and it dies at around 125F, so you can easily kill it if you aren’t careful. Sometimes there’s a “starter” step where you mix yeast and sugar with water and wait for it to foam up, but you always mix the entire recipe with flour and wait for it to rise. So when you’re making a yeast-based dough, if the liquid doesn’t really foam up or the dough doesn’t rise to twice its original volume in the time specified, it means you’ve got to try again. Either the yeast was dead in the first place, or you’ve managed to kill it. No amount of patient waiting, lighting of candles, or ritual incantations will revive it. Don’t worry, just tell everyone that it must have been a bad batch from the grocery store and start over. So until you get a few successes under your belt, remember to have enough of the ingredients on hand to make two batches. Here we go…
Homemade Pizza
1 pkg. active dry yeast
1 tsp. sugar
1-1/2 cup warm, not hot, water
3-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup corn meal
1 tsp. salt
3 T. olive oil
1 jar pizza sauce
other toppings to taste
Fill a measuring cup with 1/2 cup warm water. Use a thermometer to make sure the water is no more than 115-120 degrees. Stir in the yeast and sugar. Let rest until foamy, about 5 minutes. If it doesn’t have a nice head of foam after 5 minutes, start over.
Combine flour, corn meal, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the olive oil. Stir in the yeast mixture, and then slowly add the remaining water until stiff and sticky. Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth, moist, and elastic – about 10 minutes. Transfer to oiled bowl. Turn the dough a couple of times to get a thin coat of oil, cover with a damp cloth or towel, and allow the dough to rise in a warm place until volume doubles, about 1-2 hours. Again, if it doesn’t rise to double, you need to start over.
Punch down dough once and turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Gently knead for 3-5 minutes. Spread onto pan to prepare for baking. Cover dough with desired toppings. Bake at 450 degrees for 20 minutes or until edges are golden brown.
I found the basic recipe for this dough in a pizza book. It had several recipes for sauces, too, but I rarely liked them as much as the prepared pizza sauces from the grocery. The packets of sauce in the Boboli crusts aren’t bad, either, but they don’t cover well. This dough comes out a bit bready, but with a nice crusty surface. The kids can have a lot of fun kneading the dough. Be sure to sprinkle enough flour on the breadboard to prevent sticking, and don’t let them over-knead the dough or it will get tough and chewy. It’s important to use the damp cloth to cover the dough while it rises to prevent it from forming a dry crust.
Another alternative is to buy a pizza kit. For most of my childhood, there was only one choice – the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee kit. It was okay, but the dough was thin and the only topping was grated parmasan. Then in the mid-60’s we got a second choice – Jeno’s! It was much better tasting with spices and other toppings. You can still find both of these if you look hard enough. The main advantages of the kits are that they include the basic ingredients to get you started and you can keep them on your shelf for months. But overall, it’s a pizza! How bad can it be? So don’t worry whatever you choose. Just have fun!