meansoybean

So we’ve covered the important tools needed to make awesome pizza in part 1, now we can move onto the fun part!

Unless you’ve lived under a rock, you’ve heard of Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread recipe. I was, admittedly, a year late in joining the craze but after a year of doing it his way, I got tired of making bread one loaf at a time. There had to be a better way. Enter Zoë François and Jeff Hertzberg’s book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The authors are big proponents of pizza stones and peels, prompting me to come up with alternative solutions. Now, thanks to them, I’ve always got a big batch of dough in the fridge, waiting for a piece to be torn off to be made into something delicious.

Delicious like pizza! So why go for a frozen pizza, store-bought pizza crusts or settling on ordering in a lame-ass vegetarian pizza with no cheese? Nothing beats fresh, out-of-the-oven, made-to-measure pizza pies. So what you’ll need is their basic recipe, as follows:

3 cups lukewarm water
1 1/2 tablespoons granulated yeast
1 1/2 tablespoons kosher or other coarse salt
6 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
Cornmeal for the pizza peel

Combine the water, salt and yeast. No need to dissolve all the way. Mix in the flour well, ensuring no dry spots. Let rise at room temperature for 2 to 5 hours, then into the fridge for two weeks. Tear off as needed.

Now you’re ready to start cooking. Put your stone/griddle in the cold oven and preheat for about 20 minutes at 450°F. Then go ahead and cut off a piece of dough. The size depends on how big a pizza you want to end up with, and how thick you like your crust. To give you an idea, for a thin-crust 9 inch pizza, I use a lump that’s almost the size of a tennis ball, maybe a tiny bit less.

Flour the dough in your hands just a little and start to shape the dough into a small disc. You can then put it down on your lightly floured and cornmealed surface and use the rolling pin to flatten it out. (I like to slowly stretch out the disc in my hands first, rotating around the edge so as not to overstretch and create holes/rips). If you want to stretch your dough a bit more but aren’t easily able to with the rolling pin, over turn a bowl with a smooth bottom and rest it on top. Let gravity do the work while you prep the next pizza crust.

As you can see, I’ve got some stainless steel bowls that are perfect for the job.

For the toppings, it’s really to your liking, or what you have in the fridge. This is what I use, in this order:
• a thin layer of tomato paste, unless I have leftover pasta sauce
• Yves pepperoni slices
• Earth Island’s Vegan Gourmet cheese, sliced thin
• a mixture of chopped onions, chopped mushrooms & peppers lightly coated in olive oil
• black olives, sliced

Once you’ve layed out all of the toppings, load up your peel and slide the pizza onto the stone/griddle. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Here is a picture just after being placed in the oven. When ready the pizza should be nicely browned in spots and the cheese will be melty. Just remove from the oven, slice and serve. Enjoy!

It sounds like a lot of work, but with prepared dough, it only really takes 15 minutes of prep plus baking time. Trust me, it’s totally worth it!