Pizza stones and parchment paper
If you’ve been following the blog for any length of time, you know how much we love pizza. When we owned our deli we would eat home made pizza every Friday. We’ve taught many how to make a great pizza at home and people still ask us for instructions which is why we decided to write a post about making your own delicious pizza at home.
Green olives, mushrooms and cheese
With the right tools you will quickly learn that you don’t need a 200 year old, Italian wood burning oven (although it does help) to enjoy pizza at home.
First, treat yourself to a pizza stone, they can be found at grocery or kitchen supply stores for around $10-$20 put it on the middle rack and leave it in the oven, you don’t need to take it out every time. While you’re at the grocery store, grab a roll of parchment paper. You’ll also need cake and all purpose flours, yeast, Kosher salt and milk.
- 1 packet yeast
- 3/4 cup warm water
- 1/2 cup milk (the milk makes the dough soft)
- 1 1/2 cups cake flour
- 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 Tbsp kosher salt
- Dissolve yeast in the warm water and milk
- Add flours and salt (cake flour has less gluten and makes the dough easier to work with.)
- Let it rise, punch it down, let it rise, punch it down and then roll it out.
- Rolling and baking the pizza on parchment paper makes it super easy to get it to and from the oven.
- Cut a piece of parchment paper large enough to cover the pizza stone.
- Dust it with flour and roll out your dough (you can use a rolling pin, if you don't have one, a clean (labels off) wine bottle works well) as thin as you like it.
- Dress it with your favourite ingredients.
- 1. Less is best. Piling on ingredients will give you a soggy end product
- 2. Quality ingredients make a quality pizza, fresh mozzarella (not a brick), fresh toppings and homemade sauce (garlic, olive oil, oregano, tomato puree, S&P).
- 3. A hot oven, 420F (at least) for a home oven works well.
Heirloom tomatoes and basil
Now, how to get the pizza from the counter to the pizza stone. If you don’t have a pizza peel, you can use an upside down cookie sheet, hold it at counter level, grab the end of the parchment paper and pull it onto the cookie sheet. Open the oven door, put the cookie sheet level with the pizza stone and pull it away from yourself and onto the pizza stone. When the pizza is ready (bubbly, golden cheese) grab your cookie sheet, hold it at pizza stone level, grab the edge of the parchment paper and pull it onto the cookie sheet.
Goat cheese, pesto, scampi and tomato
How do you enjoy your pizza?
Easy, with as much cheese as possible! These pizzas look AMAZING!
I find everybody has their favourite ingredient.
Love us some pizza! We are full time in an RV but still manage to cook a decent pie. Don’t have a stone but parchment paper really helps.
Pizza is the perfect food.
I always bake my pie at 500 F. on a stone. Put the stone at the top of the oven, it bakes really fast & gets all crispy…yum…yes, less is more, the Italians would be shocked to see how much stuff goes onto North American pizzas! Next pizza for me…eggplant & green olive (no tomato sauce). Can hardly wait. I make my dough the night before & let rise in the fridge until a couple of hours before stretching out, the crust develops a nice taste!
Eggplant and green olive sound good, will have to try that one some time.
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