Trying to Make a Pizza

Last night I was rummaging through my fridge/cabinets and realized I had the perfect ingredients for a pizza. The only problem was that my pizza dough was over a week old. It looked fine, but it was very liquidy. Kinda weird. Anyway, I googled “week old pizza dough” and the general internet consensus was that it would be fine. My toppings included baby spinach, mushrooms, and hot peppers. Keepin’ it simple.

 

Oh, and some herbed goat cheese, of course!

 

At this point, I put my pizza stone in a cold oven and turned the oven to 425. After the dough sat out at room temperature for a while, I spread it out on a floured surface. This was a mistake. I didn’t really think about how I was going to transfer it to the pizza stone after the toppings were added. Or why didn’t I just plop the dough on the stone at this point? We’ll never know. I’ll blame it on sleeping way too many hours a day.

 

I added a thin layer of pizza sauce. I was worried about it getting too soggy if I added more, but the end result definitely could have used more sauce. (Let’s keep in mind here that I’m not a pizza-making professional…)

 

I added all of the toppings, and it looked great! I’ve seen other people/places add the spinach/lettuce after the pizza is done cooking, but I wasn’t really worried about crispy spinach. Then I was faced with the task of adding this floppy (but pretty) mess to the pizza stone. Let’s just say it was ugly.

 

My terribly disfigured pizza came out of the oven 7 minutes later looking pretty sad, but it tasted great! No really, it was actually good. The week-old dough was surprisingly fine, and I think I liked that it didn’t rise as much in the oven. The crust was dense and chewy. The pizza stone also made it perfectly crispy.

 

This was a great-tasting pizza! And it provided me with a meal at work for three days for about $4!