Homemade pizza

The neighbors have been very happy with me lately. I’ve been cooking up a storm and shared most of my creations with them. It got to a point that John’s (my neighbor) first question when he sees me is “what are you cooking today?” Every time he sees me I'm whisking up something. Today it was homemade pizza.

To be honest I didn’t wrote down the exact measurements because I wasn’t planning on blogging about it, but since it turned out so great I decided to share some teaser pictures.

Tracing back my steps this is what I did:

I heated one cup of milk with one table spoon of sugar for about 30 seconds. I wanted it to be warm and not hot. To hot will kill the yeast. Then I added a package of dried yeast (7 gr) and let it sit for a while. In one big bowl I put about 500 gram of flour and one teaspoon of salt. I had half self rising and half all purpose flour, just because I ran out of the all purpose flour. I mixed everything together, added a tablespoon of olive oil and covered it with a wet kitchen towel. What you are looking for is an elastic dough that doesn't stick on your hand or on the bowl, so add some more flour or milk if needed. Then the bowl went in the oven on 35 degrees so it could rise for 30 minutes.

In the 30 minutes I had enough time to slice some button mushrooms, some slices of ham and diced 2 mozzarella cheese balls.

I sautéed about one small onion and 3 gloves of chopped garlic. After they browned I added one can of chopped tomatoes. Then I added some of the herbs I had in my pantry. I had poultry, steak and chicken seasoning at hand so I used that. After tasting it I added some salt and some sugar since it was a bit too sour for me.

By this time 30 minutes past and I took the dough out of the oven. I beat all the air out of the dough and put it back in the oven for another 10 minutes.

Then I took the dough out and preheated the oven on 250 degrees. While the oven was heating up I used the dough to make some round shapes. Or at least I tried to. I put them on some wax paper and started by covering the bottom with the tomato sauce and then added the slices of mushrooms. Then the ham went on and the cubes of mozzarella. I also added some more shredded cheese.

Once the oven was ready I lowered the heat to 200 degrees and baked the pizzas for 10-15 minutes in the middle of the oven. Every couple of minute I would have a peak through the glass to see how they were doing.

I took the pizzas off the wax paper and put them straight on the rack back in the oven for a coupe of more minutes so the bottom could crisp up some more.

 

 

They came out so good and tasted even better. Before digging in I used a scissor to cut some basil leaves in little ribbons. It was the cherry on the pie. No more frozen pizza for me!! Needless to say that I shared one with my lovely neighbors =)