I love good food, and I like to cook, but sometimes I get really busy and suddenly it’s dinnertime and the kid is hungry and I got nothin’ - so we do what everyone does and order pizza. We like the good stuff, no Pizza Hut for us, and we tip the delivery guy pretty well (they use their own cars! they pay for their own gas!), so it ends up being $20 or more, and it drives me crazy to spend that much on a pizza. With a little planning and cooking ahead, we had lovely homemade pizza for dinner, plus an extra 3 pizzas in the freezer ready to throw into the oven, and they cost less than $8 each. It took a little while to do, but most of the time is waiting for the dough to rise.
First I collected our toppings. Of course kidlet and I like different stuff on our pizzas, so I wanted to make each of them with half my stuff and half the kidlet’s stuff. I took a trip to Costco (is there Costco in Canada?) and got sliced provolone (better than mozzarella!), goat cheese, and a big jar of sun-dried tomatoes. At PCC, our local organic food store, I got Muir Glen pizza sauce (one can is enough for 2 pizzas) (making your own is better), pepperoni for the kidlet, mushrooms, and whole olives - if you slice them yourself, it’s half the price of pre-sliced. I also bought flour from the bulk bins, much cheaper than pre-packaged, and I have a bulk package of yeast that I keep in the fridge, it’s way less expensive than buying those individual packets.
You need something to build your pizzas on that will be ok in the freezer. I cut some circles of cardboard from some boxes I had hanging around, and covered them with foil. Then I made the dough. I have a bread machine; it bakes bread horribly, but it’s wonderful for mixing and rising, you can just throw in your ingredients and walk away for a while. I see them on Craigslist and at yard sales and Goodwill all the time, definitely worth the investment if you bake bread and don’t have tons of time. Here’s my dough recipe:
1 1/2 cups warm water
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons sugar
3 teaspoons yeast
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 1/2 cups flour
In the bread machine, put the water, salt, sugar and olive oil in first, then the flour, then the yeast on top of the flour. I set mine to knead for 20 minutes and rise for 1 hour. This recipe makes enough dough for 2 15-inch pizzas.
Frozen pizza, awaiting its destiny
After the dough rises, I rolled it out into circles, sprinkled the cardboard rounds with a little cornmeal and put the dough on them, then put them in the freezer. I wanted to make 4 pizzas, so I started another batch of dough after I put the first ones in the freezer.
After all 4 rounds were ready, I did an assembly line thing and put on the toppings. I wrapped 3 of them up with a layer of plastic wrap, then foil, and froze them. The better you can get them sealed up, the longer they’ll last in the freezer.
To bake the one I left out, I preheated the oven to 500° with a baking stone on the rack - I use the middle rack. (You really need some kind of baking stone to get great pizza and bread. Regular pizza stones can be expensive, and there are cheaper alternatives - here’s a discussion on The Fresh Loaf about using quarry tiles, slate tiles, and cast iron.) We baked our fresh pizza about 10 minutes, the frozen pizzas take longer - baking time depends on how many toppings you have, how cold the pizza is, how hot your oven actually gets, you gotta mess around a bit. They aren’t as awesome after they’ve been frozen, but they’re still pretty awesome.
Cooked pizza, again awaiting its destiny
There are about a million pizza recipes on the internet; here are links to a few of them:
6 Comments
Bulk food prep is the way to go. I did this in college when me and my roomies would cook on the weekends and eat our results for the following week. I know my kids would have fun helping with this one.
Wot? You still buy yeast? Pfaff!
Sourdough
Well now, Patti’s got a lot on her hands taking care of the kidlet and that ginormous cat she has. If she adds a humming bird to the mix in the winter, it’s another layer of worry–I’ve seen it, and it’s not pretty (the worry, not the bird. The bird is awesome. Watching your best friend stand on a wet porch rail to change a hummingbird feeder is not so awesome.).
Great Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid she should add another entity to babysitting pile in the form of billions of yeast. Sheesh! Who do you think she is? Wonder Woman?
Cripes. Did any of that even make sense?
Alternate instructions for those without a bread machine, but with a stand mixer:
Mix yeast, water, and sugar in bowl of mixer and let sit for 5-10 minutes until yeast is activated (it produces a nice layer of bubbles on top). Add olive oil, half of the flour, and all of the salt (in that order-yeast doesn’t like salt, so add it with the flour last) and mix on lowest setting with dough hook until combined. Add remaining flour 1/2 cup at a time until your dough is doughy. Turn it out onto a floured board and knead it into a nice ball. Place in oiled bowl to rise covered with a damp tea towel for an hour or two at warm room temp or overnight in the fridge. Then follow rolling out directions above.
If you don’t have a stand mixer (or electricity, or room on your counter for appliances, or you just want to show Kaden how hardcore you are) you can do it all by hand: mix the first set of stuff with a spoon, then knead in the rest of the flour. Builds good arm muscles.
I’m trying your crust recipe this weekend in ye ol’ bread machine. The finished product looks GREAT, Patti!
I hate taking the time to make the crusts. Instead, I keep corn tortilla shells on hand. I deep fry one, then put on toppings like it’s a normal pizza, then I put a raw one on top of that, and put toppings on that. It has the same general feel as a bread crust, if it was really thin, and holds up to being handled like a pizza is supposed to. It takes a fraction of the time to make pizza this way, and I always have corn tortillas on hand for other things.