There’s no real trick to homemade pizza. Turn the oven up all the way and hope for the best. But I can offer a few tips.
1. If you’re making homemade dough, the recipe makes less difference than how long you let it ferment. Stick it in the fridge overnight and you’ll have better dough. But there’s no shame in buying dough at a pizzeria or Trader Joe’s.
2. Use low-moisture whole milk mozzarella, and mix it with a little grated Parmigiano-Reggiano for flavor.
3. Iris loves putting pepperoni on the pizza, but she has trouble biting a whole slice. So I cut the pepperoni slices into four wedges, and she has just as much fun putting them on but more fun eating the pizza.
4. Most vegetable ingredients (mushrooms, peppers, onions) benefit from precooking. Otherwise not only will they end up undercooked, but they’ll leak water onto your pizza.
5. Hunts Traditional canned tomato sauce makes great pizza sauce, and it’s really cheap.
6. When you go out for pizza with kids, bring scissors.
7. One of the best reasons to make pizza at home is to mess around with toppings that you can’t get elsewhere. We love bacon with pickled jalapeños. Ask your kids what they’d like to try on pizza.
8. Yes, you do need a pizza stone, but you can leave it on the bottom oven rack and forget about it. It will improve the performance of your oven even when you’re not making pizza.
9. Roll the dough thin enough that the pizza is done in six to seven minutes. More than this and the crust will start to try out, and Iris will get impatient.
9. Insufficient pizza consumption is associated with irritability and slack-jawedness. Don’t let this happen to you.
Most vegetable ingredients (mushrooms, peppers, onions) benefit from precooking.
This is my new pet peeve … most crudite-type veggies do too. I’ve lately gotten very cranky about supermarket veggie-dip trays with raw broccoli, green beans, cauliflower, etc. Parboil the things for a few minutes and the whole tray gets so much better.
Maybe the supermarkets are just lazy…or maybe they’ve been infiltrated by raw food zealots! Sound the alarm!
my mom has recently been excited by the realization that, leaving their pizza stone in the oven all the time, her self-cleaning oven is also a self-AND-pizza-stone-cleaning-oven.
You know, we have a self-cleaning oven and I’ve never used the self-cleaning feature. I should try do that sometime, huh?
it’s fairly awesome…it locks you out, because it heats up to the temperature of the sun, and it won’t let you in again until it’s safe. i like to imagine that if only i COULD get in there, i would find a wormhole that would take me someplace cool, like jodie foster in “contact.” and no chemically ockyness!
Per Alton Brown, I mix my mozzarella with provolone and monterey jack, with excellent results. Usually I’ll grate a bit of Parmigiano-Reggiano on after the pizza comes out of the oven, while I’m letting it cool; that works well.
I don’t have a pizza stone, though; my pizzas turn out okay, though I’m sure they could be better. I don’t want to spend huge amounts of money on a pizza stone, though I haven’t had any luck finding Alton Brown’s recommended substituion, a quarry tile. Any suggestions? Or should I just suck up the pizza stone so I can suck down much better pizza?
Get the stone. I was also too lazy to seek out quarry tiles, so I paid $35 for a stone, and it’s totally worth it. It’ll last forever as long as you don’t try to move it.
I hope you haven’t been scrubbing your oven, that’s just a ridiculous way to spend an afternoon. Or are you just letting the crusty bits accummulate?
My oven would be a pit without the self cleaning cycle. I just refuse to use those chemicals, or spend my Saturday scrubbing out baked on cheese.
Mamster, try the self cleaning. You’ll love it.
We got our “pizza stone” from Home Depot. It’s a 12″ sq Mexican Quarry stone and cost 95 cents. Hoorah for the Lord God Alton Brown!! (as he is known in our house)