Pizza

If you know me, you know that I love pizza.  I could eat it everyday.  Seriously. It’s a bit of a problem.  My favorite pizza (much to the chagrin of my Papa Murphy’s owning brother-in-law) is Dominos because you always know what you are getting.  It is consistently good.  And it helps that the local Dominos has a carry-out one topping for $4.99.  Recently, I decided that I needed the chance to get out of the house and do something for me.  Sure, I get out of the house by myself to run errands occasionally, but that just doesn’t do the trick.  I looked into some classes through the local community college but I missed all the community-ed classes.  I was telling my brother that I was interested in taking a class and he told me that he was looking into some classes too.  He forwarded me the info on the classes that he was thinking about and we decided to take a Pizza Classics class. 

The class was at this little hole in the wall restaurant, and while we didn’t get any recipes we were able to make dough by hand and learn how to tell when it had been kneaded long enough.  I think that a lot of people are afraid of over-kneading so they don’t knead enough.  To know if it has been kneaded enough you take a walnut sized ball of dough and stretch it as you turn it in your hands, and if you can see the gluten threads for about three inches before it tears then it has been kneaded enough.  Something else I didn’t know, is that dough is supposed to be sticky.  Resist that urge to add more and more flour!  It starts out sticky, but once it has been kneaded enough it is smooth like a baby’s bottom. 

The guy teaching the class recommends doing a “slow rise” for the yeast, which means making the dough and then refrigerating it for at least 12 hours, up to 36 hours, and then using it straight out of the fridge. 

{Pizza we made at class}

For baking a really good pizza at home, he recommended getting a stone and putting it in the oven cold.  Preheat the stone and oven to as high as possible (500+) and preheat your stone for an hour before putting the pizza on it.  This way the stone has time to warm all the way through and will cook the dough with out burning the cheese and toppings. 

We got to bring home the dough that we made at the class, so I tried this method with a stone from Target ($10!) and this is what our pizza looked like:

It was so good.  I’m excited that I now know how to make a good pizza, although the local Dominos probably isn’t.  We didn’t get a dough recipe, which I was disappointed about but I think dough recipes are pretty basic…flour, sugar, salt, yeast and olive oil.  Not a lot of sugar or salt either.