Making Pizza at Home

I've been making pizza professionally in the workplace for just about a year now, but I've never really made it at home. English muffin pizzas don't count, nor does the use of ready-made dough and bottled pizza sauce. I figured it was time to try to make my own pizza at home, from scratch, with the type of ingredients you would find in a typical grocery store. You could always break the bank and go to artisan food shops and get higher quality product, which is what I'll be doing in the future. But since I'm experimenting, it's a good idea to get cheaper product. So I picked up a 2.5 kg bag of Robin Hood's All-Purpose flour. It's nothing special, but it'll do. As far as the rest of the ingredients go, I picked up some dry active yeast, some blocks of full-fat mozzarella cheese, and cans of Thomas Utopia organic crushed tomatoes. For the sauce, I simply added some salt, pepper, garlic, oregano and basil to the crushed tomatoes.

Now, time to make some pizza dough by hand! I started by dissolving my yeast in a few tablespoons of warm water, then adding 2 cups of cool water to it. In a mixing bowl I added 5 cups of flour, a little over 3 teaspoons of kosher salt, and the water/yeast. I then kneaded it for about 4-5 minutes until strengthened, allowed it to rest for 5 minutes then resumed mixing for another 2-3 minutes. I then formed it into a massive ball and covered it with plastic in a greased bowl for 30 minutes. After that, I divided the ball into 4 equal pieces, and rounded each piece into a ball. I brushed them with vegetable oil, covered them, and put them in the fridge overnight. Here's how they looked the next day!

My Neapolitan-style dough

Now that the time consuming part is over, it's time to make some pizza! I put a baking stone on the bottom shelf of my oven and preheated the oven at 550 degrees for an hour. Now it was time to stretch them by hand. I usually don't toss dough in the air, although at times I've showed off to customers by doing tossing tricks. Tossing isn't a bad idea if you're working with high-gluten flour or even bread flour, but for all-purpose flour it's not recommended. I simply stretch it flat down on the counter. For a video demo, check out Anthony Mangieri's technique (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Ahj1GFw18) which is very similar to mine (pictured below).

I always use a wooden peel to prevent sticking

I topped it with the mozz, then slid it in the oven!

10 minutes later!

Not bad for a first effort I suppose. The crust was crispy with a bit of chew and the sauce and cheese were both good despite them being of only decent quality. Time to zing the pizzas up though, tomorrow I'll be making a pulled pork pizza so stay tuned for that! Oh yeah, I'm also making pulled pork.