Mmm, crusty thin crust. Bubbly, toasty cheese. Classic Margherita flavors on a thin, chewy crust.
Supreme pizza toppings on the freshest, tastiest piece of pizza imaginable.
I wanted to make this. I found what I thought was a good recipe. (More about this later in the process.) The website sat and sat in an open browser on my phone for at least a month. It's hard to make pizza when you've got a four-year-old and four-month-old running your life. It was hard to plan ahead enough to make dough so the dough would be ready when it came time to start cooking at night. Anyway, here's the story. Bad things happened along the way and I thought it would be a disaster, or mediocre at best, but it turned out AMAZING! The best pizza I've ever made. There are some tricks you should know and I'd like to share them with you.
I started making the dough today from this recipe. It looked good. The recipe is from Serendipity Mommy and it's called
The Only Pizza Dough Recipe You'll Ever Need.
I only held off on eating it to take photos because I knew the sauce was still so hot, it would burn my mouth off. But get in my BELLY!
I like that the dough included garlic powder, olive oil, and Italian herbs. I don't even know where I found the link. It wasn't through the usual internet search engine like Google. My only beef with the recipe is that I needed to add a lot more flour than what it called for. And that started freaking me out. I also used old bread flour that was past expiration, so maybe that was why the gluten wasn't activating? I don't know. I read up on it and since the flour smelled okay, not like rancid oils, it should have been fine.
I also have a beef with the serving size. Twelve? More like two-and-a-half. The pizzas are no more, and there are only three of us, and one is pint-sized. (To be fair, Adeline really liked it and had a pretty big serving size.)
Things you'll want to do in order to go the extra mile to get that really great, fresh pizza:
-Thin crust, baby. (Choose thin over thick, especially for the Margherita.)
-Use the freshest ingredients you can find. Fresh tomatoes over canned tomatoes for sure! Fresh basil if you've got it. Fresh onion, fresh green pepper, canned olives okay, though.
-Use a pizza stone and preheat it for awhile to fully warm it.
-Let gravity pull the crust, don't roll it with a rolling pin. Use your fingers, and be patient and give it time and more flour to keep it a big circle. Ya know how it's annoying when it snaps back to being small and then you're just eating a tiny, thick pizza? Overcome this. And when it's almost the size you want, use corn meal on the bottom.
-Don't let the pizza dough tear. (If it does, use a little water to get it to stick back together, and then be more careful.) When the dough is getting really thin, put it on the pizza peel (paddle thingy) (or cookie sheet with no edges) for easy transfer to the pizza stone. Use the palms of your hands and finger tips to stretch it a little more on the peel. Make sure flour and/or corn meal is on the bottom so the pizza dough won't stick and it will be easy to transfer to the pizza stone.
-There's a trick to getting the pizza off the peel and onto the stone. This is one of the hardest parts of the pizza process if you don't have a good system. My system is to keep the bottom from sticking to the peel by having enough corn meal and flour under there. Position the peel just above the heated pizza stone in the oven. Gently pick up an edge of the rolled out pizza dough. Slightly tilt the peel and put the edge on the stone. Let the rest of the pizza slide off the peel and it does the job. The worst is when your pizza does an accordion and smashes together on the stone. I hope this doesn't happen to you. Be careful and patient, but not too timid, and you should have some good results.
-Cook the dough all by itself on the stone first for about ten minutes (or until just getting a little golden) and then pull it out, add the toppings, and finish cooking the pizza on the stone. The dough won't get soggy from the sauce and toppings and it will be chewy and wonderful.
-When making Margherita, add a tiny bit of pizza sauce (I cheated and used Whole Foods bottled spaghetti sauce with garlic) and smear it around, then add thinly sliced tomatoes all over (as if they were the sauce), then mozzarella in thin rectangular/almost squarish slices, not too much. let a lot of tomato peek through, then a little basil, also not too much. I don't like the tomatoes on top of the mozzarella. Who does that? There is something sick and wrong about that. Maybe I'm getting more "Italian" and I realize that you shouldn't mess with perfection. (Aka the way it's classically done in the recipe. Don't be creative here, stick with tradition.)
She can't take her eyes off of that good-looking Margherita pizza we made together.
-When making Supreme, add a bit of pizza sauce, but DO NOT OVERDO the sauce. A little goes a long way. This used to be my problem. I would add too much of everything on pizza, especially sauce, and then it was too weighed down and soggy and just mediocre. Shoot for AMAZING! And do not be heavy-handed with toppings.
-Layer the Supreme this way, you'll be glad you did: Sauce on bottom, then any combo of diced onion, sliced green pepper, red pepper, mushrooms (I did large portabella caps diced up, yum!), sliced black olives. Do NOT overload. Then finish with mozzarella cheese on top. And if you're doing pepperoni, the pepperoni goes on the very top, resting on the cheese. This way both the cheese and the pepperoni can get a nice golden toasty look and taste. So so good! Sorry we are getting so nitty-gritty, but believe me, it's important.
-If you're doing a deep dish Chicago style, then you can add tons of sauce and toppings. But you will need to find another recipe for the proper crust. Share it with me if you do, I want to successfully make a good deep dish pizza, like the kind you can get at Pi Pizzeria in St Louis. So so good.
Just some things you'll want handy as you make the dough and pizza. Cornmeal, sauce, pizza slicer. Someday I'll get one of those fancy rocking pizza knives to cut it without pulling the toppings off.
You might want to accessorize your pizza with sparkling grape juice or a salad. I failed and bought flat water that I thought was fizzy, but it came from Tuscany and it tastes like amazing glacier water, so I guess it's all good. (And I had a bottle of Perrier handy to go in the grape juice, and it was delicious.) I thought the labels were especially pretty.
Take me to Tuscany!
Adeline wanted to play with my camera and be a photographer, too! Here's a great photo she took of her pizza.
I'm going to re-post the recipe in case the website goes down. It contains my notes and what I did differently.
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Perfect Pizza Dough
By Candy, the Culinary Grad at Serendipity Mommy
(Parentheses mark where Danelle deviated.)
Ingredients:
1 C. HOT water (110 degrees F or 45 degrees C)
1 pkg. active dry yeast
–
2 C. Bread Flour (more like 3 C., 2 C. Bread Flour, 1 C. all-purpose (I had run out of bread flour))
2. tsp. white sugar
2 tbs. olive oil
1 tsp. garlic powder (or fresh minced if you wish)
1 tsp. Italian seasoning
1. tsp. salt
Instructions:
Dissolve the yeast in the water and let it set for ten minutes, it will thicken slightly
Pour the yeast mixture in the mixer bowl
Add the flour and other ingredients leaving the salt for last, the salt will kill the yeast with direct contact so make sure its last to go in.
Beat the dough into a stiff ball.
(It NEVER made a stiff ball, I beat it FOREVER with the dough hook in my stand mixer. Gave up. Added more flour. Didn't really knead it in since my kids started having melt-downs. Figured it was going to turn out mediocre at best.)
If it sticks use a little olive oil on your hands and it will come off. (Olive oil? Let me know if that works for you. I used flour on my hands. It was still sticky, but magic things can happen during the rising phase.)
Cover and let rise to double size, which takes about 25-30 minutes. (Kind of forgot about it during the rising phase while I was nursing a baby and putting her down for a nap. It rose for maybe an hour. It looked pretty good. I touched it and it immediately deflated. Oops. I threw it in the refrigerator to deal with later when it was time to make pizza.)
This recipe made 3 personal 8 inch pizza’s but would make 2-12″ pizzas as well. (Yes, we turned it into 2-12'' pizzas.)
For Pizza: (This is where I deviated to Better Homes and Gardens Instructions for Thin Crust Pizza.)
Heat oven to 375 degrees. (Nope, 425 degrees. (Authentic pizza ovens operate well over 500 degrees, so don't panic. Experiment!) Also, get your pizza stone in there nice and early. Give it a good half hour to heat up to 425 degrees.)
Roll your dough into a round shape with a rolling pin on floured surface if desired OR shape the dough in your hands just working in a circle letting the dough gently stretch. (Just use your fingers and palms and gravity to stretch the dough. You know you've done a good job when it doesn't pull back to being small. Use flour as needed to keep it stretched out and nice and thin. Put it on a peel with flour and corn meal underneath to keep it from sticking, and get ready to cook it without toppings on the pizza stone.)
Place on your pan, make sure you leave some extra at the edges if you want a thick crust there, then add your toppings, Bake for 15-20 minutes. (Just look to the Better Homes and Gardens Pizza and Thin Crust tips for baking instructions. Cook it until the cheese is bubbling and turning a lovely golden color and the crust looks nice and crisp.)
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My wonderful sous chef.
In the photo above, she's pictured with the Margherita. Below is the Supreme.
Adeline helped a lot. She was so excited to mix the yeast into the hot water. Adam lets her help him make his famous Sourdough Pancakes (I should include a link for the recipe for that here! - will do soon!) and she loves helping get the yeast going the night before with Daddy. She's getting a lot of hands-on experience with yeast already!
Here she is with the finished Margherita and our make-shift peel with dough ready for cooking. (Don't forget that you add the toppings in the middle of cooking. I know it's a lot of steps, but if you try it a few times, it gets easier and you can do it more quickly.)
Here are the Better Homes and Gardens tips on pizza and thin crust, if needed. You can also just Google it and find it that way.
My stand mixer really needs the grease replaced. I'm pretty sure the grease split and ran out the back. Sometimes some of us forget to put the gear head back down from being tilted and the grease leaked out the back. I didn't realize that's what the nasty oily gunk coming out the back was until a few years later. There are great YouTube videos that will help me with this fix. This seems like a tangent, but since I would need the stand mixer to help make the dough, I didn't want the gears to grind and die while I'm trying to make this, so it's one reason I have been putting off making this recipe. I wanted to service the stand mixer first. I need to find some time to address adding more grease to the gear box. I have never done this before and it's freaking me out. I just ordered the stand mixer grease today from Amazon, along with some Italian 00 flour for making super pizza dough! And a pizza peel, our other one went kaput. We are not operating on full cylinders here. None of these things will arrive in time for me to make the pizza tonight. I am looking forward to making a lot more pizza. It's been awhile. And I actually thought that the cookie sheet worked very well as a peel. Maybe I shouldn't have ordered one. Darn.
I'm in pizza heaven. Best and freshest supreme I've ever had. We all love pepperoni around here.
