My First Pizza From Scratch

I've been toying with the idea of making one starting with the crust. Yeast was a big mental barrier; I've never been very lucky with it. I found a recipe for the crust on a great local web site: www.simplyrecipes.com

Elise is wonderful about explaining how to do things. In this case she actually had pictures about how to make the dough. Plus she has the same Kitchen Aid mixer that I have.

Warning: in making this dish I used just about every pan and dish in the kitchen. Kerry, the person who cleans up when I cook (bless his heart), was dumbfounded at the mess I made.

The recipe is enough for two pizzas so right now I have another dough in the freezer (keeps for two weeks well) to make yet another pizza.

Kerry had a pizza stone, which I placed in the oven to heat up. I learned, however, that getting the pizza to the stone is not best accomplished with a cookie sheet. Elise suggested and piece of very stiff cardboard if you didn't have a pizza peel (the big paddle you see restaurants using to get the pizza into the oven). I will do that next time. I ended up putting the cookie sheet on top of the stone which had been heating in the oven for an hour at 450 degrees.

The basis for the topping is small pieces of chicken from our last bird (we got a total of four meals from that Chaffin Farms chicken) mixed into homemade BBQ sauce. I placed zucchini from our CSA on top of that and then cut slices of mozzarella to lay on top of that. It was heavenly. Cold leftovers have been great for breakfast with my coffee.

My relationship with yeast has improved thanks to Elise. Try her web site. She's great.