How do you like your pizza when it comes to their ingredients and their ratios?
Is there such a thing as a good homemade pizza? If so, how do you make it?
Has anyone ever tried to replace the bread with something low in carbs?
My dad makes pizzas on tortilla shells. I love them.
I like pepperoni pizza.
There is a place down the street from me that makes the best pizza I have ever had. The perfect combo of great crust, the right amount of cheese, and a tasty sauce (and not too much of it). I tend to prefer thin crust, but not cracker crisp Neapolitan style thin crust. Neapolitan is nice, but it’s not my top choice. What I like best is NYC style pizza, but as I don’t actually live in NYC I won’t call it that.
You can make good pizza at home, and it’s not that hard if you are willing to invest in something that will hold heat well enough that you can get your oven hot enough. A largish cast iron skillet will do the trick, or unglazed quarry tile, or, you know, a pizza stone. But high heat is key. You can probably buy some dough from your favorite pizza joint. Just go in and ask them, you would be surprised. Then you can experiment at home.
Making your own pizza dough is surprisingly easy too. I like this recipe (I know it’s called Neo-Neapolitan, it ends up being like the place I go to down the street). Flour is key to any bread making. Again, it’s surprisingly easy to ask the guys at your favorite pizza place what flour they use, and possibly even buy some off them. Also, try to make the dough a couple of days before you need it. I found that the dough to the linked recipe tastes best at about day 3 of sitting in the fridge before turning it into a pizza.
When I make it at home I like to top with a mix of black and green olives, or some good sausage and thin sliced onions. When I go out I like pepperoni or meatballs (depending on where I am going) or just plain cheese, maybe add olives or mushrooms too if I am feeling fancy.
I like a thinner crust, spicy sauce, pepperoni, onion and green olives.
Green, not black. Obviously I am often frustrated.
Appian Way pizza kit, add mozzarella and unseasoned ground beef on top, yum yum yum. Sometimes also add pepperoni.
Thin crust, good cheese and pepperoni, with a bit of black olives and onion if I’m feeling it. I don’t like it overdone with cheese, but I do like some extra sauce on the side for dipping if I feel so inclined.
We have a Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers down the street, and they make some of the best pizza. Something about their crust is just magical to me. It’s like a wheat crust - lots of texture, kind of “chewy.” And their pizzas have great names like “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Holy Shiitake.” My favorite is the Kosmic Karma.
As far as how I like my pizza in general, I used to like THICK crust, and very few toppings, usually meat-based. These days I definitely prefer thinner crusts and a moderate amount of toppings, usually just pepperoni with a couple of other things like onions and mushrooms. Simple is better unless it’s a Kosmic Karma!
I make English Muffin pizzas sometimes, and they’re super easy and tasty. English muffin + pizza sauce + pepperoni, etc + mozzarella = Mmmm.
I think I’m having pizza tonight.
I find myself really loving thin, ultra thin crust pizzas.
With lots of sauce.
Pretty much any and all toppings are welcome.
I make my own dough in a bread maker and make home made pizza with that. I do not equate it with my favorite type of restaurant pizza. My dough tends to be much thicker and puffier than real pizza. I like it both ways but put mine in a different category than New York style pizza.
French bread pizza. Since I can’t have sauce the bread is a good medium for being liberally coated in butter before being smothered in cheese. Back before sauce was a horrible idea for me, I used to like deep dish, though.
Speaking of French bread pizza, you can lose the carbs by making them on slabs of baked squash or zucchini.
My pizza sauce is too easy to be real but it’s good. A can of tomato sauce (size depending on how many.) A dollop of olive oil and a liberal sprinkling of oregano. Cook on medium low till reduced.
Cosa???
If you want pizza, you want pizza. If not, have a salad.
I prefer thin crust and no stinting on the tomatoes sauce, the quality of which to me is almost as important as the base. No, exaggerated amount of toppings, probably aubergines (that’s eggplant for the Americans) or just plain margherita.
Is that American terminology? Because where I am Neapolitan is the slightly thicker one. Then there’s “normal” pizza, which is the thinnest one and finally there’s a really fluffy “deep pan” style which is and usually sold by the slice to eat on the go. I don’t like it, but it’s seems to be “trendy”.
I like all sorts of styles, but my preferred one is Neapolitan or Neapolitan-NY, cooked in a wood-fired (or coal-fired) oven. Ingredients should not be overdone, as in most American-style pizzas. Just a simple tomato sauce (usually, just crushed tomatoes), fresh mozzarella, and basil (for the classic Marghareta pizza.)
Of course there is. Just go to pizzamaking.com and look through the techniques and recipes for pretty much any style of pizza you want. I don’t like any of the pizza kits I’ve tried: way too doughy, and the crust tastes of nothing. If I really want a quick pizza and have no time to make the dough, if you can get your hands on Lebanese flatbread, that works great. Otherwise, you can also use any kind of Middle Eastern or Indian flatbread, and I find those taste a heck of a lot better than the crust in pizza kits. I prefer the thinner kinds of flatbread, myself.
Anyone else making pizza on the grill? I just tried it and was pleasantly surprised at the results.
Current favorite home-made is Arugula/smoked mozzarella pesto with thick slices of Roma tomatoes.
Neapolitan pizza is usually fairly thin, and puffy around the edges. I’ve never had one that I would describe as “cracker crisp,” though. The edges tend to be charred and have some crispness to them, but the middles of the pie tend to be a bit soggy and soupy. This would be a typical picture. It’s usually best eaten with a knife and fork because of this.
The intrepid Jeff Varsano (ever on the search for replicating his favorite NY high-temp pizzas at home), describes it very well: " In Naples, the dough is very soft and hard to hold and often eaten with a knife and fork. NY street pizza is easily folded and held. They typically use a strong Hi Gluten Flour. My pies are closer to the Neapolitan, but not quite. You can still hold it, but sometimes it flops a bit at the tip."
Neapolitan pies are generally pretty floppy, not cracker crisp.
Favorite pizza style? The one that’s within arm’s reach!
There’s a regional chain of convenience store/pizza/doughnut shop called Casey’s that has just about the best crust I’ve ever paid someone else to make. They stretch a nicely chewy crust out so it’s thin and floppy and build up a thick edge crust. Their toppings are kind of nasty, overloaded with cheap cheese and cheaper meats, but their crust is fantastic.
In my experience, and I grew up in Los Angeles which is more or less a pizza wasteland so take this with a [del]grain[/del] mound of salt, when pizza is advertized as Neapolitan you a small 8 inch personal pie with a paper thin crust that has been baked at extreme heats so that the edge of the crust crumbles like a cracker and the bottom is slightly blackened. The ability of the center to hold up generally depends on how wet the toppings are and will vary from place to place. But you don’t get a chewy crust, rather you get a crispy one (and I am talking the crust edge) and the whole pie is very very thin.
If this isn’t what is typically thought of as Neapolitan then blame LA. If you see Neapolitan advertized in LA that’s what you get. If it is then blame my poor powers of description for not properly letting you know what I meant. Out here in Jersey I see NYC and Sicilian style advertized primarily. I haven’t tried Sicilian, but from the looks of it it’s a puffy almost but not quite deep dish style pie usually served square which might be what PookahMacPhellimey was thinking of as Neapolitan.
Hmmm, no, I think pulykamell’s picture is more or less what I see as Neapolitan. Here* your normal work-a-day unspecific pizza is probably a bit flatter, using less yeast, I suppose. Neapolitan pizzerias specify that’s what they are offering or they offer both kinds.
Is what you think of as “Sicilian” like in the changing pictures at the top of this website? That’s what I meant by “trendy” pizza. I don’t think this style has any Sicilian connotations in Italy, though.
It’s all so confusing. Hungry now…
Here is the north of Italy. Which is not actually originally a pizza-region, even though it’s very common here now.
Yeah that looks similar to what I am seeing sold as Sicilian pizza. Maybe not quite that thick. Looking it up on Wikipedia it seems to be connected to the pizza style found in Polermo. It looks kinda like this in the neighborhood shops.
Yeah, that’s not really standard Neapolitan. We have a few places here in Chicago that do traditional Neapolitan (like Spacca Napoli or Nella’s), then there’s a few that do a more Americanized version that is a bit crisper (like Coalfire, or Stop 50 in Michiana Shores), but still not anything that I would compare to a cracker. The crunch on the crust edge is akin to that you get on a freshly baked baguette, but slightly lighter. The 00 type flour type (which is a very finely milled flour with a protein content similar to AP flour in the US) used in a Neapolitan pizza makes for a very tender, fine crust. Also, Neapolitan pizza is almost never cut into slices, but comes out as a single pie.
Now, there are variants of this, of course. There’s Neapolitan-American hybrids which may feature high-gluten flours and crisper crusts than a standard Neapolitan pizza, since most Americans are put off by the limp and often soupy center of a regular Neapolitan pizza. A lot of the better NY pizza places (like Grimaldi’s or Totonno’s) are more of this type. That’s what I mean when I refer to “Neapolitan-NY” upthread.
Forgive the geeky pizza taxonomy. I just find the myriad of pizza styles and their differences fascinating.