Last month my fiancee and I had our pizza cook off, and today I have finally gotten around to posting about it. Epic fail, I know, but work and graduate school have eaten into my free time of late. Instead of walking through our strategies, I thought I would give some helpful tips to making pizza at home.
In case you were keeping score, the groom got his revenge and won with a prosciutto, peppers, and garlic pie.
The (Un)Official Rules to Homemade Pizza
1. Buy a pizza stone. It is worth the cost. Cooking the pizza becomes much simpler and moving the pizza in and out of the oven is no longer a challenge.
2. Heat the pizza stone in a 450 degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes before you put your pizzas in.
3. Use small batches of dough. Each individual pie should only be 1/4 pound of dough. Any more and you'll get a chewy pizza not a crispy one. Roll the dough out thin and evenly to ensure you get the best crust possible.
4. Don't add too much sauce. You want the sauce to just about cover the the dough, not drown it. Just like with too much dough, too much sauce will give you a soggy instead of crispy pizza.
5. Mozzarella is not a requirement. Not every pizza needs to have a small village's annual cheese intake on every slice. My favorite pizza in NYC, at L&B Spumoni Garden, isn't even topped with mozzarella.
6. Let the pizza cook. You can tell by the crust when it is done. The crust should be a golden brown.
7. Enjoy it. If you are making more than one, enjoy the first one out before starting on the next otherwise you'll be more concerned about the one in the oven than the one in your plate. My fiancee's veggie pie was great ... just not as good as mine. :)
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