Home Made Pizza Goodness

We will just start right off with the recipe for this one! 

Thin Pizza Crust

Preheat Oven (and pizza stone if you have one) to 475˚

¼ Dry Yeast Packet
¾ c. Warm water (110˚ warm enough to bring the yeast to life, but not so hot that it kills it)
¼ tsp sugar
1 ¾ cup flour
½ tsp salt

Dissolve yeast and sugar in warm water and allow to rest for eight minutes (or while you do the next step). In a separate bowl combine flour and salt. Pour yeast mixture over flour and mix well with a wooden spoon. Turn onto a heavily floured surface and knead for two minutes.

Side note here: Having an art/ceramics background I have found it really hard to teach myself the difference between kneading; as in bread, where you are trying to work air INTO the dough and wedging: as in clay, where you are trying to get all possible air OUT of the clay. Luckily for me this recipe is for thin and crispy crust and it’s not really meant to rise that much, so not really an issue here... the real problem came when I was making the cinnamon rolls... but that’s a later post.

Using a floured rolling pin roll out dough, if you are really good, you can stretch one batch out enough to make two really thin pizzas.

Sadly this was my last time getting to use my wonderful and very well loved pizza stone. It was awesome; however, I am accident prone and managed to shatter it with this very pizza. If you are luckier than me and still have one, use it! Put it in the oven and allow it to preheat with your oven, it helps bake the dough on both sides and make it that much more crispy. If you don’t have a stone any pizza pan and or cookie sheet works too. I like to sprinkle coarse salt and corn meal on the pizza stone before putting the dough down, it gives it a little more flavor. Plus, for those of us beyond the delivery area of any Cassano’s Pizza Places, it’s a nice substitute for their salty salty crusts.

For this particular pizza I knew we were going with feta and chicken so I came up with a white sauce out of what we had in the kitchen at the time. Sauté a few cloves of minced garlic in some butter (which at the end of Kurio Cookies I had roughly 9 lbs of real sweet cream butter, so from here on out, I say butter you assume I mean REAL butter). Add about a half cup of milk and melt about a half block of cream cheese into it. Salt and pepper to taste. It will thicken up, if you want it thinner add more milk.

Oh and before topping I usually bake the crust for about 5 minutes or until it just starts to get a little color on it.

For toppings this time I grilled two chicken breasts and cubed em. Spread the sauce, add the chicken, sliced mushrooms, crumbled feta, diced green peppers and red onions... on half if you are sharing it with a picky eater like I do, or whatever else you want (obviously).

Before Baking

I rarely time things like this... so bake until the cheese starts to get nice and golden brown on the top.

Most important lesson from this baking experience: turn off your burners when you are done using them. Yet another reason why I hate having an electric stove, if you leave the burner on there is no visible flame to remind you. And then when you have forgotten to turn your burner off and you pull your beautiful yummy looking pizza out of the oven on your awesomely loved pizza stone and sit it on the still ON burner... your awesomely loved pizza stone (with a very loud and scary POP) breaks into three shards. It was a sad day. And I am getting a little better at remembering to turn the burners off. But the pizza did make it a little better.

yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm