Growing up, pizza from the pizza place was a treat and more often than not, before it was just too damn convenient, my parents would make their own pizza - my Dad was particularly patient and could stretch the dough to result in a crisp crust.
In my own time I have made a few home-made pizzas, with very limited success and a few disasters that my brothers love to use as an (unfair) illustration of my cooking abilities. Admittedly, when I was 14 years old I used a box of Jiffy pie crust mix that had alternate directions if you wanted to use it for a pizza crust. Today, I realize that the recipe probably doomed a good number to fail and I wonder if they yet endure the harassment from siblings who took a look at the dismal mess of pie-crust pizza coming out of the oven and were disappointed and, at the same time, amused.
When first dating, Matt and I both lived at our parents' homes and our respective incomes were plentiful enough to allow us to eat out quite a bit. One of favorite places to stop was Willington Pizza for the Shrimp Scampi Pizza and the Red Potato Pizza. When we first got our apartment and our parents first met, it was home-made Red Potato Pizza on the menu. I would like to point out that this success was despite Matt practically cutting his finger off and having to spend the night in the emergency room!
With so many pizza places around it is convenient to grab a mid-week meal, but often times the consistency is lacking and after awhile, pizza is the last thing you feel like eating. Since I've been baking so much lately, I decided that I should give the Italian-American pizza pie another chance. So, I skipped the American Test Kitchen Cookbook, didn't even open the Joy of Cooking, and just googled pizza sauce - after searching around some baking blogs and checking out simplyrecipes.com, I had some recipes and felt I had the confidence to make something worthy of Matt's Italian ancestry.
The result, I made AWESOME pizza dough and made the best homemade pizza I've ever made! Like I said, based on past experience, I'm not usually too keen on home-made pizza, but the crust was light, crispy and puffed just a little bit on the edges, tasted good - not too yeasty/fermenty and it was super good considering I only put mozzarella cheese and pepperoni strips on half of it... We don't even have a pizza stone (up until this point of my life, why would I?!?)but I preheated the oven with an upside down baking sheet in it and and I put my stretched dough on a piece of parchment with some cornmeal, and using another baking sheet transferred the paper onto the preheated sheet - almost unbelievably, success!!
So, finally, I have a recipe that may redeem the pie dough-pizza debacle from my youth; although, I don't believe my brothers will ever give up the opportunity to reminisce over their sister's utter failure - one of only two that they know of, apparently: )
No comments:
Post a Comment