Made From Scratch Pizza

Hi everyone! I hope you're staying warm! It is snowing pretty hard here in Laramie and we are expected to get between 6-13 inches by tomorrow night...wow! Well good thing we had a hot and cheesy dinner tonight to keep us warm. This evening I put together a little something called pizza...I'm sure you've heard of it. Well this pizza was made from scratch! I made the dough this afternoon and let it rise, and by tonight at dinner time it was ready to go.

The fun thing about tonight's dinner that I have never done with my pizza recipe, was that I made personal sized ones. Usually when I make pizza, I make roughly an 18-inch pie. But tonight I thought it would be fun to make mini, personal pizzas. And everything turned out according to plan because they tasted just as good as a big one. The nice thing about doing the individual ones was that each girl was able to customize her pizza just the way she likes it. And we thought a crunchy salad was the perfect side to the pizza, so Kara and Juli put one together with a few odds and ends we had in the fridge.

The dough recipe that I use is one that I got from my friend Berto, who is also my manager at the pizza restaurant that I work at in Denver. This recipe makes enough for about an 18-inch pizza.

Ingredients
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1 cup warm water
1/2 cup milk
3 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions (making dough)
Put warm water in a small bowl and stir in yeast. To proof and make sure yeast is active, stir in 1/2 tablespoon sugar. Let sit 10 minutes, and it should puff up. While that is sitting for 10 minutes, in a separate larger bowl add flour, milk, and olive oil. Once yeast mixture is ready, add it to the bowl with flour, milk, and oil. Stir a couple times until it starts to get sticky and dough forms. Then use your hands to knead it about 20 times. Then place the dough ball into a new bowl and cover with saran wrap. Let that sit on the counter in room temperature for about 2 hours, or until it rises and doubles in size. Then place in refrigerator for at least an hour. Remove from refrigerator and flour a section of your counter. Take dough ball out of bowl and place on floured counter. Flatten with your hand, and make sure you get all the air bubbles out. It should be a fairly large circle. Then form the crust by placing your left hand (thumb up, pinky down) on the outer edge of the dough and using your right pointer finger to make an indent into the dough, raising the edge up on your left hand. Do this all the way around the dough.

Directions (cooking pizza)
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Place uncooked pizza on a pizza tray with a little flour underneath the dough. Place in oven about 12-15 minutes or until cheese is cooked and a golden brown, and crust is done.

I know that seems like a lot, but it's really not that bad. It just takes a bit of explaining to do. Now that you have made your yummy homemade dough, you can put any kind of sauce and toppings on it that you desire!

For our 4 mini pizzas tonight we had a few different ones that we made. One was a BBQ chicken pizza that had BBQ sauce, chicken, red onion, and mozzarella cheese. Another one was a white pizza with an olive oil oregano, basil, garlic powder sauce. With chicken, tomato, spinach, garlic, and mozzarella cheese. Another one was the exact same as the one just mentioned, but there was also ricotta cheese on it too. And the final one was made with a pesto sauce, and for toppings there was chicken, tomato, spinach, garlic, and mozzarella cheese. 

It was so fun to be able to decorate and create each pizza to individual tastes. In the end, we all just ended up trying a little of everything. But that is the nice part because you can have a little variety. And a little tip that you might enjoy: brush the crust with olive oil before you bake it. That way it will get a pretty golden brown color and crisp up nicely.

 <----- BBQ Chicken

Pesto ----->









Also, today was the chili cook-off in Prexy's Pasture at the center of UW! The competition was between the pharmacy students and the engineering students. If you ask me, the pharmacy students are going to win hands down because they are so precise and articulate at measuring things...how can they go wrong?! Well Kara, being the little pharmacist in training that she is, made a bangin' green chili with two other pharmy classmates. So at lunchtime, Juli and I made our way over to the tasting extravaganza. We sampled 5 different chili's, one being Kara's of course. They all paled in comparison to her green chili. One tasted like hay...which Juli and I are not sure how that happened. Another one was way too smoky, and another one had a weird flavor that was kind of odd. And then there was a white chili that was decent, but when it came down to the voting, we had to vote for the best: green chili. 

With the votes tallied, Kara's green chili won! I am not surprised because it was so incredibly good. For winning this chili cook-off her group and fellow pharmy students got a cash prize and bragging rights. So a congratulations to Kara for kicking butt and bringin' home the bacon!

Well everybody, I'm off to curl up with a blanket and do some studying. I hope you try this pizza recipe, and please leave a comment or tell me about something you would like my roommates and I to try!