Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Homemade Pizza

This pizza was surprisingly tasty. I made a batch of basic foccacia dough (recipe here), let it rise, punched it down, divided and shaped it into two disks, and froze one of them. With the other, I mostly rolled it out on a 12" x 11" cookie sheet, and formed the edges by hand.

The tomato sauce was something I made yesterday from fresh tomatoes from our garden (blanched, peeled, deseeded and crushed between my fingers), diced onion, minced garlic, salt, pepper, oregano and basil. That simmered on low for 3+ hours before I took a boat motor to it, and filled a 1 qt. mason jar. No need to go through the whole canning process to vacuum seal it, since I knew we were going to use it over the next few days.

Here's where it gets weird. I didn't have any Italian sausage, and I didn't have any mozzarella. So, I sliced up a pre-cooked bratwurst, and used that with some monterrey jack I shredded on top of it. Somewhere, someone is probably thinking that's sacriligous. Actually it worked out fine.

I prefer my crust thinner, but I didn't have anything wider than my cookie sheet on which to bake it. I suppose I could divide the dough into three portions next time. Nonetheless, the crust came out very much like regular NY-style pizza crust, as opposed to that nasty thick Sicilian style stuff. It didn't droop at the point, when I held a slice up in the air, so I managed to get it crispy enough

Although I didn't time it, I popped it in a 425F oven until I could smell it in the next room. When I checked on it, the cheese was bubbly, and had browned nicely. It probably took around 15 minutes, if I had to guess. Pizza crusts don't normally brown very well in my oven, but I didn't brush the edge with any olive oil, either, so . . .

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