Hi, Ron welcome to Little Gourmet Tv. Today we’re making pizza. Yesterday I made the pizza dough and stuck in to the refrigerator overnight just to let it rest, it develops flavor that way. And also cause you know, there are days when you’re going to want pizza and you just don’t have time to make the dough ahead, so you can make this dough 2 or 3 days in advance, out it in your tight container or Ziploc bag, stick it in the fridge and put it out about an hour, an hour and a half before you’re ready to make the pizza, just to allow the dough to come back up to temperature and relax a little bit. Before we start making the pizza, there are couple of things that I think are fairly important, couple of pieces of equipment that you really need to make an excellent at home pizza. And the first one is a pizza stone, now I’ve had a couple of different pizza stones over the years; I started out just using an unglazed tile that I got from a big box home improvement store worked fantastic. Probably once it cracked, upside of them cracking was that you know there are only 3 or4 dollars, you can go and buy another one. So I still have those, I still use those but I came across this one, it’s a ceramic pizza stone, holds heat beautifully and I’ve had really good luck with it. So what you do with this, put it in your oven, pre-heat your oven pretty much as hot as your oven can get. I usually pre-heat mine to about 500 degrees with the stone inside, my oven would go to 575 but I think that for me I felt 500 degrees seem to be about the best, so pizza stone. Something that is incredibly frustrating is getting the pizza from where you’ve made it with all the toppings to the pizza stone. You do really need a peel, baker’s peel. Lots of these on the market, lots of different ones to play with, there’ a trick to using them which I’ve never quite really mastered and then along comes the super peel and this is something that I absolutely not love, now that I use it, and it’s really simple, it’s kind of an easy concept, may look a little bit complicated, it picks your pizza out of the counter, deposits it on the pizza stone in the oven; no mess, no fuss really simple, really easy, takes all of the aggravation out of it. When I first started making pizzas at home I used the back of the cutting board. I used all kinds of different things, never really got anything that worked, this works I would suggest you get one.
So, on with the pizza, the first thing you do is to get our dough out and make a round. As we go and you see I haven’t quite mastered the round yet. So first thing is, as always, a little bit of flour on our work surface and a little bit on my hands just because the dough will be a little bit sticky, I put olive oil on it last night before I put it in the fridge just to stop the cross from forming on top. So, pizza dough out, a little bit of flour just to keep it from sticking and I just kind of work it around like this, just slowly grabbing the edges and letting gravity kind of pull the dough away; you’re not going to get a perfectly round the first time, I’ve been doing this for quite sometime and I still haven’t got the perfectly round but any shape actually works So just gently let the dough and you’re going to have and it’s going to be a little bit thicker around the edge than it is in the center and you’re going to start to see through it. You’re going to start to see light through it so you kind of get into a point where that’s about it for this piece of dough. Down on the counter top and just a little bit more gentle stretching and there you have it, a personal size pizza.
So on the toppings, toppings are incredibly personal. I have toppings that I like to use, you probably have toppings that you want to use and someone else in your family is going to have another list of toppings. The beauty of making these pizzas at home is that the dough recipe makes four pizzas, personal size pizzas. So everybody in the family can get together, they can choose the toppings that they want, put them on, you bake them, you can mix, you can match; it’s fantastic. One of the tips for putting toppings on your pizza is pretty much don’t go overboard. I have a list of ingredients that I like to put on but I don’t overload it, you don’t want to put too much on cause then it gets a little bit soggy or it doesn’t cook properly, you really want this to cook quickly and cook thoroughly. So I start of with a little bit of tomato sauce, and I say a little bit, maybe a tablespoon, a tablespoon and a half. I spread it on pretty thin. Right around you want to come right up to the edge, you know if you go to the edge that’s fine. Next I use a really hot pepperoni sausage and you just kind of toss this on, you want, you don’t want an every bite, black olives, love black olives on pizza, spread those over top, hot banana peppers, I leave the ribs and the seeds in so I do like it very hot. Sliced mushrooms, what’s a pizza without mushrooms? And finally cheese, this is mozzarella, grated mozzarella, you know what there’s a whole world of cheeses out there, you don’t have to use mozzarella. You do want to use something that’s going to melt well. So I just spread thin layer on top again, don’t put too much on and that’s it the completed pizza ready to go in the oven.
So this is where the peel comes in; now with the regular baker’s peel, you would probably build the pizza on the peel and then get it into the oven. With the super peel you can build it right on the counter top and you just come right up to the edge like this, get the edge just a little bit over top on to the super peel and then push in. Fix it right up off the counter and it’s ready to go to the oven. Once at the oven you just take your super peel and you reverse the process.
The pizza’s been in here now 5 minutes at 500 degrees and it is done. And you can tell that it’s done cause it’s just starting to brown around the edges and the cheese is starting to brown on top. So out on to the cutting board, so there you have it; pizza fresh out of the oven baked just the way you liked it with the toppings exactly the way you like it. Really not that difficult and every time you make it it’s going to be something just a little bit different, you can try all kinds of different toppings and it’s kind of fun to make. So remember to get the recipe, click the link below the video if you’re watching this on Little Gourmet Tv website, it’ll open up another page, the recipe for the crust will be there and if you’re watching this on YouTube or one of the other video channels, please come on over to www.littlegourmet.tv. Hope to see you again soon, thanks.
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