Wednesday, March 23, 2011

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.

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Oh, and some herbed goat cheese, of course!

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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.

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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…)

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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.

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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.

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

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3 comments:

  1. I have a recipe to make pizza dough but it makes two servings. My suggestion is to put one in the freezer right away with some olive oil in a airtight container. You can thaw it out the day you're going to use it.

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  2. that is the gross-est pizza I have ever seen - I'm glad you liked it : )

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  3. You can get a pizza peel for around 10 bucks at Penn Fixture in the Strip; it's an even more vital tool in pizza making than a pizza stone. A good homemade pizza beats any pizza from any pizza place any day of the week.

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