Pizza, Pizza, and More Pizza

Hi Folks! I am here with another recipe that I have been testing for a while and now I am ready to share it. You guessed it: It is pizza!

Like bread, pizza dough can be made with just 4 ingredients:

• Flour (500 grams)
  
• Water (325 grams)
  
• Salt (1 teaspoon)
  
• Yeast (2 teaspoons)
  

No need for artificial anything, sugar, honey, milk, oil, you name it. Here I would like to share my recipe that uses 500 grams of flour. You can linearly scale it up and down depending on how many people you want to feed (or how hungry you are).

As easy as it sounds, all you have to do is just mix these 4 ingredients in a bowl. As for flour, I mix regular white flour with  whole wheat flour. I've found that using 4 parts of white flour to 1 part of whole wheat flour creates a nice consistency and taste. But you can mix in other proportions -- it is not that critical!

You can mix the mixture by hand or by using a mixer. I sometimes use our bread machine in its pizza program and sometimes do it by hand. If you do it by hand, you need to knead it for about 5-6 minutes. You just need to make sure that the flour absorbs all of the water and no dry bits remain. After the mixing stage, you need to cover your bowl and rest it for at least an hour. It is better if it rests for 2 - 3 hours but you can be flexible based on your schedule. Depending on how much you wait, and the room temperature of course, you can get a dough that is roughly doubled in size. Here is an example that I got after waiting for too long, I guess:

Just to cut the long story short, just rest your dough between 1 - 3 hours in a closed or covered container in your kitchen. That should do it. Now do something else and then come back after this time has passed.

With the above proportions, your dough may be a bit wetter than ideal for the next stage. So before flattening it on the tray or on a board I usually add some more flour. This way it doesn't stick to my hands. In general, here is a rule of thumb that I found useful for making pizza:

• If you use a wetter though your pizza will end up more spongier. If you use a drier dough, it will end up more crunchier.

So with the above proportions of 500 grams of flour to 325 grams of water, the dough is on the wetter side. I just add a few handfuls of flour to make it manageable. I then take the half of the dough (just eyeball it or measure it) and stretch it on an oven tray:

As you can see in the pictures above, it is a good idea to do the stretching slowly as you don't want to tear the dough. Just gradually apply downward and sideways pressure with the palms of your hands and fingers. Actually, fermentation helps here. The more you waited for your dough to develop, the easier it will be to stretch it without tearing.

At this point it is a good idea, if you have not already done, to turn up your oven to 230 degrees Celsius (450 Fahrenheit). When you put the pizza in the oven, you want it to be very hot.

Now, let's talk about the toppings. I think that in a pizza the following two items are required, everything else is optional:

• Tomato sauce
• Cheese

To make the tomato sauce, put a few tablespoons of olive oil in a pan. After it heats up I add 4-5 cloves of diced garlic. Then without waiting for too long (to avoid burning of the garlic), I add tomato sauce. If you don't have tomato sauce, you can use tomato paste. But if you go this route, make sure to have some boiling water ready to dilute the tomato paste in the pan. You don't want a sauce that is too thick. Basically add the tomato sauce or the paste and some hot water to create a mixture that you can easily mix with a spoon. At this stage I also add some oregano as I really like its taste in pizza. Ideally, you want to prepare this mixture beforehand so that it is cool when you spread it on the pizza dough:

As you can see in the picture above, I take several spoonfuls and distribute it on the dough. Then I spread it with the back of the spoon:

 

 

Next comes the cheese. Simply sprinkle and distribute it over the surface:

The other ingredients are completely up to you. In the following I add onion, mushrooms, pepperoni, and broccoli:

Once you are happy with your decorations, simply put the tray in a middle rack in your preheated oven (remember 230C=450F) and bake for 15 minutes with the bottom and top heaters on. The recipe I shared above makes two trays of pizza -- but do not bake them together. Prepare the other one while the first one is baking and feed it to the oven as soon as the first one is out. The result is this great, healthy, and irresistible dish that you can proudly serve to your family, friends, or just yourself:

Of course there are many other ways of making great pizza: wood-fired oven, baking stone, you name it. But in this post, I just wanted to share a to-go recipe that I mainly use for making a practical and healthy dish in a short amount of time. If you don't count the rising time, all of this can be prepared in 15 minutes and be ready after baking for another 15 minutes. I hope you try this one and let me know how it turned out for you.

Thanks for reading!