Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Cheap and Easy Homemade Pizza

We have become big fans of making our own pizza. The idea that we can make so much pizza with so many different combinations which we would never be able to find out, especially for so cheap, convinces us to make our own pizza again and again. We do still get tempted to go out, especially to our favorite Italian restaurant, and order a pizza, but if we plan ahead of time that we want pizza, we and our stomachs are more than content staying in to eat our own creation.

To make four medium/large sized pizzas:
500 g  Flour (we switched to pizza flour which is not much more expensive and noticed a big difference!)
4 g  Yeast
2 EL  Olive Oil
300 ml  Water, lukewarm
10 g  Salt
Cheese, tomato sauce, or any other toppings you want


To make these pizzas you need about three hours. Don't preheat the oven until you are ready to roll out the dough and top your pizzas.




Mix the yeast,  flour, salt, and olive oil. Add the warm water.






Knead for five minutes and place on a cookie sheet or in a bowl.




Cover with a slightly damp cloth and place in a warm place. Let sit for 30-45 minutes (longer is better). Knead dough again and place back in the bowl in a warm place. Let sit for another 30-45 minutes.



Now it is time to preheat the oven to 230 C (445). While the oven is heating up, leave in a cookie sheet so it also gets nice and warm. This will help make your pizza nice and crispy. When it is time to cook your pizza put it on this hot cookie sheet (with parchment paper in between).


Roll out the pizza dough into 1 cm thick round pizza pies. We think it is easiest to do this on parchment paper so that you can just lift up your pizza and put it directly onto the hot cookie sheet.

Top with anything you want! We have found that we actually like our pizza with no or very little tomato sauce. This time we did not use any. Instead we used lots of vegetables such as tomatoes, bell pepper, onion, and zucchini. We also like to add lots of seasoning and garlic and hot peppers along with pepper flakes or a bottom layer. A little bit of cheese on top and ta da, great tasting non-soggy crispy pizza.

Each pizza will take about 10 minutes, depending on how large it is, what you put on top, and how hot your oven has stayed. To get the perfect crispy crust, remove the parchment paper from under the pizza about two to three minutes into cooking.

And now, because sometimes pictures do speak louder than words...our creations!

This time I could not resist and made a recreation of my favorite pizza from a little restaurant in another part of Germany. This pizza consisted of wurst, potato and an egg on top. Crack the egg onto your pizza right before it goes in the oven and it will be ready by the time your pizza is.









We made various mixes of tomatoes, zucchini, bell peppers, onions, garlic, hot peppers and lots of spices. Dipped into hot sauce makes perfection.






1 comment: