I would like to suggest this be a companion thread to the recent Pasta sauce from scratch thread, which holds many fine recipes and tips for sauce which can be used on pizza as well as pasta.
Now, pizza is one of my favorite foods. That and steak are the two foods that pop up in my head whenever anyone asks the question “If you could eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?”. Being the fan that I am, I’ve been taking steps towards making it from scratch. Or I was untill I discovered how big a pain in the ass pizza dough is to make, but then I discovered the Publix Bakery makes the dough and sells it for $1.50 a bag. And it’s damn good too. So now I just make my own sauce, add the cheese, and try to figure out what the best combonations of spices and fixings are.
So Dopers, what are your tips, tricks, and methods towards making a truely rightgeous pie? For the first time in my pizza making life, last night I made some pretty good sauce using some tips from the thread previously mentioned. Still, it wasn’t the best. The best pizza sauces I have tasted have been very sweet. How do the cooks in resteraunts do this? Are they using a particular kind of tomatoes? Can I find them in stores? Or are they just adding a few spoonfulls of sugar whereas I only added one last night?
What about the crust? Anything I can do to make that taste better?
How bout the cheese? Anything I should be sprinkling/drizzling on that before I pop 'er in the oven? I’m using a dry mozzerella right now. What else would be cool? Anyone ever try a few small slices of Gruyere?
And one thing the pasta sauce thread didn’t cover was white sauces. Alfredo is easy enough to make, but me and my roomie want a white pizza, and neither of us are exactly sure what the white sauce on a pizza is. Alfredo and gorgonzola? Something else? We haven’t a clue.
I doubt I’ll try making dough again, but I want this discussion to remain open so feel free to talk about it or anything else that contributes towards making a dynamite pizza
Pizza is one of those foods where just about anything goes, and it’s all up to personal taste. I, for example, like to use 4 or 5 kinds of cheese on my pie, with pepperoni, sausage, peppers, pepprocini, mushrooms and tomatoes piled on top. I also love Papa John’s BBQ Chicken pizza, which my wife considers to be an abomination.
Don’t over-sauce the pie, and prebake the crust half-way if you like them crisp.
Pizza dough isn’t that hard to make if you’ve got a bread machine. I use the recipe in Fleishman’s book, that you can order (free plus shipping) off the back of a yeast packet or browse on their site. It needs more salt than they say. If you’re making a single standard-sized round pizza it will be too much dough. I use a rectangular cookie sheet.
More cheese is not neccesarily better, contrary to my long-cherished beliefs. And I know some here will be tempted to hurt me for saying this, but a combination of jack and cheddar does make a nice homemade pizza.
Mostly because of the kids (paidhi boy is a remarkably picky eater, despite our efforts to expose him to a variety of foods), our homemade pizza is pretty pedestrian. One section cheese only, one section pepperoni only, and the rest pepperoni and mushroom. If we’ve got red bell pepper, we put that on. That’s about it. Very tasty, and pretty easy as long as I remember to throw things in the bread machine far enough ahead of time. But I can’t really help you with the white pizza. I’ll be watching to see if anyone has any suggestions, though.
On preview, I have to agree about not oversaucing. I’ve never tried pre-baking the crust. I’ll have to try that.
My white pizza sauce usually consists of (ingredients only, I never measure and it’s different every time)
Unsalted Butter
Olive Oil
Crushed Garlic
Whole Garlic Cloves, sliced in half (small) or quartered (large)
Fresh Basil
Fresh Oregano
Red Pepper Flakes
Fresh Ground Black Pepper
Lemon or Lime Juice
Salt
I start with the above, which is my generic Italian-esque non-red sauce and to it I add any combination of the following:
Spinach
Sliced or whole pitted olives
Tomatoes (Sun Dried or Fresh)
Artichoke hearts
Roasted Red Peppers
Sauteed Fennel Bulb
Sliced White Button or Baby Portobella Mushrooms
Prosciutto
Thinly Sliced Fingerling Potatoes
I usually use the fresh ball mozzarella, but part-skim packaged stuff is not too bad.
I think my ultimate white pizza was one with cream added to the sauce, fresh sage and rosemary, sliced chicken breast, Italian sausage, prosciutto, fennel, fresh mozzarella and roasted red peppers. Wish I had a slice or two in the fridge right now.
Pizza is a great way to be creative with different flavors, but the time it takes to cook in the oven can present a problem for the more delicate flavors such as fresh herbs or textures such as shrimp.
It’s tough to do much with the pre-risen store bought dough, apart from brushing with oil and pre-cooking as suggested by Silenus. I like to make my own herb crust or whole wheat crust.
Yes there is. At least to me. That’s one thing I hate about most American-style pizza: too much friggin sauce and cheese (and I adore cheese–to the point I even make my own on occassion.)
My perfect pizza is a delicate balance of a cracker-style crust, restrained amount of tomato sauce (or fresh tomatoes), fresh toppings, and a sprinkling of fresh mozzarella (the kind that comes in brine). The Pizza Marghareta is perfect: fresh tomatoes, cheese, torn basil, and a sprinkling of good extra virgin olive oil. I cook mine at 500F on a heated pizza stone. As for crust? I make it myself with flour, yeast, salt, water, and olive oil. I can’t tell you what the secret is, but it’s not difficult to make. I just combine the ingredients until they feel right, knead the dough, let it rest for an hour, punch it down, and flatten in out.
Like pasta sauce, you don’t need any special secret herbs or spices to make a kick-ass pizza. Just the best ingredients you can find. I don’t believe in complicated pizza sauces. If I get a little fancy, I might use something like an arrabiata as a base. Drained plum tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, hot pepper flakes, salt, and perhaps–this is my addition–some fennel seed. When I ladle the sauce onto the dough, I add only enough to wet the bottom–you can still see the dough through the sauce in most places.
To help keep the crust crispy, it’s sometimes a good idea to cook the crust a little bit before laying on the ingredients. What I do, though, is put the pizza dough on the preheated pizza stone, and this allows it to cook a bit as I start laying on the sauce (or tomatoes) and other ingredients. I also roll out my dough very thinly (like 1/8 inch). Prosciutto is another topping I adore, as well as artichokes, and a sprinkling of some other cheese (like a nice, aged Parmesan or Asiago).
First of all, making the dough is the heart and soul of making your own pizza.
We’re talking about BREAD. Your mom should have made it. It’s BREAD. Making bread is good for your soul.
It’s not a “pain in the ass”. You don’t need a bread machine – the ancient Egyptians were making bread. You need nothing more than the desire to actually make food from scratch, to say, “no, I’m not a willing member of the microwave generation. I don’t want Boboli. I don’t want pre-made crusts. I don’t want daddy to cut my meat for me. I want to blend together flour, yeast and water and pass the time while my dough ball rises, then roll it out.”
That said. . .
To sweeten your sauce. . .first of all, I use “crushed tomatoes in puree” or just “crushed tomatoes”. I’ve actually put “corn syrup” (Karo) in it. You could use honey, or sugar. If you add sugar or honey to your crust, you might not want it in your sauce.
Cheese-wise: mozzarella makes a good base. It has nice texture and volume but it doesn’t have a lot of flavor. For flavor, grate romano, fontina, parmesan (not the powder in the dry can). You can find these hard cheeses at the grocery store. Experiment with combinations and amounts. I don’t think that the nice, fresh mozzarella packed in water is very good on pizza. For pizza it’s the one time I like the vaccuum packed mozzarella. Usually we get the big chunk and grate it ourselves.
After that, toppings are up to you. . .keep in mind that raw veggies and raw meat usually can’t cook through in the time it takes for the dough to cook so you want to brown your meat first or saute your veggies a little. If you like raw onions and raw peppers, you don’t need to do that.
You’ll need a pizza stone.
And not a wafer-thin little Pampered Chef stone, get a good, thick stone.
Using a good stone and letting it get up to 450 degrees F before making the pie will make the difference between a ‘homemade pizza’ and making great pizza at home.
Pizza dough is easy, but a buck fifty is cheap, so you make the call. I use the ‘flying ferment’ method and find the dough to be the easiest part of the process:
teaspoon of dry yeast (I buy in bulk and keep it in a container in the freezer)
teaspoon of sugar
1.5 cup lukewarm water[
Let these stand for a few minutes in a bowl (I use a stand mixer with the dough hook.)
Then add:
1 cup flour
and mix it up. Let this stand for 15 minutes or so, come back, turn on the mixer or start stirring and add:
1 teaspoon salt
3 glugs olive oil (glug, glug, glug)
enough flour to make the dough soft, but not sticky (about 3.5 more cups)
Knead it for 10 minutes or let the mixer do the work for 4 or 5. When it’s done it will feel not unlike a ripe, young breast.
Now stop playing with it and put in in a warm place while you heat up the stone.
It depends on how you like your cheese. If you want your cheeze as one homogenous blob covering your pie, then the plasticky, stringy grocery store mozzarella is your choice (can you tell I don’t like it?) If you like Italian-style pizza that looks like this, fresh mozzarella is your choice.
I don’t know about your mom, but mine worked full time and didn’t spend the free time she had making bread. Personally, I think she did everything she should have done, and it didn’t include homemade bread, sorry.
No, you don’t, but it makes it much, much easier to have pizza on a night when everyone’s tired and you want to have something nice for supper. Less mess, less trouble. And I’m speaking as someone who does make bread by hand just because it’s nice to do.
The ancient Egyptians also built their own houses out of mud bricks and grew a lot of the food they ate themselves. They had meat when they butchered an animal they’d been raising that year–if they were lucky. Except for the aristocracy, they had precious little time for anything else in their lives beyond the business of providing themselves with a few neccesities.
They didn’t make bread by hand because it was good for the soul, they did it because they had no other way to eat. If any ancient culture had had bread machines and microwaves, or grocery stores that sold Boboli, they’d have used them.
Making bread by hand is like sex - invigorating; it’s quite possible to feel less tired when it’s done.
Sure, a store-bought base or premade dough topped with your own choice and combination of toppings is nice, but if you’re serious about making a unique, hand-crafted pizza, it’s essential to make your own dough, otherwise you’re just assembling it.
Actually when I make my own pizza I like to toss on chunks of mozz and drop on gobs of sauce instead of spreading everything out. It looks good and you have variation within the pizza.
Still, I’ll contend that the pizza – while looking great – doesn’t have the flavor that that the grocery store mozz gives it. If I had to guess, I’d say that the grocery store mozz has added sugars and salts and that’s part of the problem.
Now, I’m a fan of both, but it’s takes a more “nuanced” understanding of your own pizza to get off on that fresh stuff.
[quote=Bren_Cameron]
This is abomination.
Well, it’s not.
And, he asked.
Still I don’t sweeten mine, usually. We make pizza at home a lot. One mixes it up.
I used to make my own dough in my bread machine. Followed the maker’s instructions for “pizza dough”, but added some garlic powder and parsley just before the first rise.
The two best things you can do for pizza, in my opinion, are the right cheese, and the right seasoning. I don’t like much sauce on my pizza, so I didn’t bother with finding “the ultimate sauce”. For cheese, I found a great pre-shredded blend from Kraft that tasted great and didn’t get overly stringy or soupy the way pure mozzarella can. The blend contained mozzarella, parmesan, smoked provolone (great flavor), and romano. Sadly, I can’t find it locally anymore, but I believe they still make it, and you can find it in some areas.
And then there’s the seasoning. You gotta put some herbs down between your sauce and your cheese. Again, the easy thing to do is look for a blend. Crazily enough, the best pizza seasoning I ever had came with a spice rack I bought; it was just called “pizza seasoning”, and it was fantastic. Generic Italian seasoning will get you by, but I find them too peppery and not herby enough. Shop around, find a good one. The herbs make or break the pizza.
I’m reading this thread with interest. Although my mom did in fact make her own bread, with two jobs I’ve never gotten into it. Farmwoman’s recipe looks like a good way to start.
But I have a question about stones. I’m not willing to shell out the kind of money for a special round pizza stone like you linked to, and I wonder if there’s an alternative. Can I use an unglazed terra cotta tile? Maybe a few of them? Is there something else at the home improvement store that would work, like stone pavers? Any suggestions?
Look for an unglazed quarry tile or terra cotta for a buck or so. Leave it in the oven 24/7 for additional thermal mass and bump up your preheat times to make sure it is at the temp you are shooting for.
I worked roomservice at an upscale hotel and one of the things I sometimes ended up doing was preparing pizza sauce (and pizzas) for our in-house “Papa Mario’s Pizza”… which had nothing to do with anything, other than it being a marketing gimmick to make the pizza seem somehow better. In fact, it was just Boboli style premade dough with our otherwise “homemade” toppings.
The sauce that I made was fairly generic but not too bad. We would open an industrial sized can of tomato sauce and mix in a smaller can of tomato paste (this gave it a little added sweetness without adding sugar) followed by a handful or so each of dried oregano, dried basil, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper and finally salt. Although it wasn’t standard, I would sometimes spoon in a quarter cup or so of our chiabatta bread, pre-bake olive oil brush making sure to get some of the fresh garlic in there. This was basically an olive oil brush-on for our decidely awesome fresh baked chiabatta bread. It consisted of olive oil, fresh garlic, dried oregano and dried rosemary.
The pizza wasn’t anything special but I always tried to make a decent sauce as that was where I had some control. I believe the greatest secret was realizing that the sauce could take a lot of seasoning. I like spicy and flavorful pizza sauce so I would add quite a bit of herbs and black pepper. Tomato sauce can take quite a bit of seasoning to reach the right taste.
I’ve been trying to make a good homemade pizza for the last few weeks, but so far am running into problems with the toppings.
The crust I’ve been making from scratch and it’s been my favorite part, I love the process of the two seperate rising times (once in a bowl, once on my pizza stone.)
My main problem is that my toppings just don’t ‘taste’ right.
My first two tries I roasted mushrooms, peppers, garlic and onions in olive oil, fresh basil, salt and pepper before putting this mixture on the pizza. (I then added pepperoni or sausage and cheese)
It didn’t taste ‘right’, though the vegetables were delicious, something gave the pizza an odd taste.
I’ve tried adding only fresh mushrooms on the pizza, but this also gave the pizza an odd taste.
Should I be cooking the mushrooms on the stove before hand?
I’ve been using turkey pepperoni, could this account for an odd flavor?
I’ve been cutting up fresh parsley and tossing it over the toppings and cheese, could this be the cause of the odd flavor?
There shouldn’t be anything wrong with that. It’s a pepperoni pizza. Just because the pizzeria charges you more for them, more toppings do not necessarily mean better pizza.
Was that good? Now have mushroom & pep.
Next time try peppers & onions.
I almost never have more than 2 toppings on a pizza.
ham & pineapple
caramelized onions & sausage
ground beef & pepperoni.
ham & peaches (with gorgonzola cheese)
red onion & olives (with a little feta cheese)
Don’t make a confusing pizza. Don’t make a confusing sauce. You don’t need garlic and oregano and basil and thyme and rosemary. They’re all good from time to time, but don’t throw the kitchen sink on the pizza every time you make it.
Your toppings sound fine to me. What kind of odd taste are your experiencing? I normally don’t cook my mushrooms before putting them on my pizza and I use Portobellos usually. Fresh basil would be better than parsley on pizza, but there is no rule saying you can’t use parsley. That could be the perceived odd taste.
It’s hard to anlayze. What was the “off taste”?
Many people are accustomed to the standard pizza flavor from local and commercial pizza joints. Maybe you’re fresh ingredients didn’t match up with the tastes you are accustomed to? Usually vegetables are always added fresh and uncooked as toppings to be baked on the pizza.
Maybe it was too much basil? Do you like basil?..it can be overpowering sometimes and it might have been “overcooked” and developed a funky flavor from the twice cooked sauteeing and baking.
What kind of mushrooms did you use?
Of course, It could be the turkey pepperoni…
If the sausage was standard out of the wrapper sausage that could account for it…too much pork fat maybe? Most pizza places use a special “sausage topping”.
Maybe the olive oil became acrid and burnt from the high temperatures of baking?