secrets and pizza

Seeing as I can't much bear to tell anyone about writing here, this is like a little secret. I did tell Rashel, but no one else.

I found out how incredibly easy it is to make pizza this week. Yes, you probably knew that, but I had never tried before. I even used the dough recipe on the side of my new bag of bob's red mill flour. You simply mix up 2.5 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of sugar and then in a separate bowl you combine 1 cup of warm water (105-115 degrees) and a tablespoon of yeast. You add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil to the water and yeast bowl and then dump it into the sweet and salty flour, mixing everything with a wooden spoon until it becomes too irresistable to the hands or too hard to stir. You can then grab the dough and knead it until elastic. 

Then you make the dough into a ball and drop it into a greased bowl and cover it for an hour or two while it doubles in size. I made the dough a day early and crammed it into the freezer at my best friend Sarah's house after it had risen. The next day, she let it thaw and we had a pizza party. 

 

Each doughball, as described above, makes 2 smaller pizzas. Through trial and error we realized it works better if you make the dough thin by doing the sort of fist moves we've seen in pizza places. Simply rolling or smooshing the dough out on a baking sheet didn't neccesarily make it thin or round enough. And it's fun to work with dough, slowly stretching it out on the hands in fists and then lying it down on a baking sheet or pizza stone and sticking it in the oven.  Then you cover up the disks with sauce and cheese and stick it back in the oven. If I'm not mistaken, we baked the pizzas at 375, first alone for about 5 minutes and then with a blanket of cheese and toppings for maybe 10 minutes longer. It was a group effort, and I admit I wasn't paying as much attention to temperature and timing as I would when cooking alone. 

I was also making cilantro pesto, which involved a lot of stem removal and blender button pushing. It turned out great and I would highly recommend it for anyone with an extra bunch of cilantro on hand. I merely plucked the leaves, crammed them into the blender and added some decent olive oil, a nice pinch of salt, a handful of walnut pieces, a small clove of peeled garlic and a little parmesan, then pushed the blender buttons until it was all minced up and adjusted the ingredients too taste.  In the end it tasted far better smeared fresh on the pizza rather than baked. It is wonderful stuff, and really quite easy to make. I've thought of making it for years but somehow needed the impetus of a pizza party to make it a reality.