Monday, July 02, 2012

Market Mondays: Homemade Pizza

This weekend has been full of planting and working on refinishing an antique cabinet for our kitchen. The refinishing project is taking a lot longer than I anticipated it would! But I will do an entire post on it, including my tips and best tools to remove old paint. so be on the look out for that in the next couple weeks once I get it all finished.

The market was fabulous as always this week. (I set the food on top of the "new" cabinet, it was an awesome find)


This week's take: a 4 pound chicken, pork chops, ground beef, tomatoes- two varieties, white baby potatoes, corn on the cob, romaine, green beans, fresh butter (this stuff is SO good, we seem to go through it pretty fast so this week we got a larger tub of it), cinnamon bread, and cherries!!!

The past few weeks we have been getting back to making our own pizza. We used to make them all the time, then I guess we just got lazy and started ordering it from different shops. K makes it, and it is SO good. It is a gazillion times better than any local place here.

Homemade Pizza:

Gather together:
2 Cups Flour
1 TBS salt
Mixing bowl
Olive oil
1 package yeast (1/4 ounce)
1 TBS sugar
1 Cup warm water
Sauce of your choice
Shredded mozzarella cheese
Your choice of toppings


Dilute sugar in a cup of warm water, then stir in yeast and set aside.

Take flour and salt in a mixing bowl - (once yeast has bloomed) add 1/2 cup of the yeast concoction slowly as you are mixing. Add 2 TBS olive oil. Then slowly mix in remaining 1/2 cup of yeast. (You made need to add more flour if its too wet - as K says, "You need to 'eye-ball it") 

Prepare a large bowl and coat with 1-2 TBS of olive oil. Transfer dough into prepared bowl with spatula. You need to flip the ball of dough in the bowl so that it gets completely covered in the olive oil. Cover with plastic wrap or a clean towel and let sit for roughly an hour to an hour and a half. It should look something like this - this one didn't rise really well. But it was still good enough!


Then prepare a clean surface with roughly 1/2 Cup of flour to knead your dough.








Lightly coat the pizza pan with a paper towel. We have been using a heavy cookie sheet, but we also have normal round pizza pans too. It's whatever you have and want to use.


Add your sauce..


Your cheese...


Your toppings, I'm a "cheese only" pizza girl. K loves different toppings and is always picking something different. This one was bacon and onions. But he's been on a ham, pineapple and onion kick the last couple times.


Cook at 475 for 15 minutes...and you will then have this:


It is soooo stinking good and is my favorite pizza by far! 

Good luck if you venture to make your own, leave a link if you try it yourself. K always makes it, I tried once with not real great results. It can definitely be a little tricky if you aren't used to working with yeast - plus getting the consistency of the dough just right. But if you master it, or have your other half master it, you will be so happy you did!