Pizza Night!

We love pizza around here.  It took me so long to find a recipe that my husband and I could agree on.  He's from the East coast where evidently they make "real" pizza.  The best pizza I've ever tasted was from a gas station up on Jefferson and Kimbrough that has since closed down.  It was operated by a Middle Eastern couple who churned our this pizza that was thin and foldy and had the charred little bubbles of cheese and Christian and I spent many an engaged afternoon splitting a pizza on our lunch breaks. 

The other problem we had was our affinity for delivery pizza.  It was really a love/hate relationship because the fat and salt was soooo bad for us.  When I was pregnant I would wake up the next morning swollen so that my skin was tight over my knuckles!  Not worth it! 

So I've been experimenting and we finally have a pizza we love.  I'm sorry if you love deep dish pizza because this is not that kind of recipe.  To cut down on the carbs, we've switched to a thin crust.  I've tried to sneak in whole wheat flour or ground flax seed and he catches me every time! 

Here's the recipe:

3 cups of all purpose flour
2tsp salt
2tsp active dry yeast (or one packet)
2tsp sugar
1 cup warm water (slightly warmer than body temp)
2 tbsp. olive oil

Throw the flour and salt into a big mixing bowl.  In a measuring cup, put your water, yeast and sugar.  Stir it up and let it sit for 5-10 minutes.  Add the oil.  Then pour it all into your mixing bowl and combine everything until mixed together.  Knead the dough for about five minutes and add more flour if you need to so that the whole glob doesn't stick to your hands.  It's possible, depending on the humidity, that you may need to add a half cup more of flour. 

Cover the dough with a little olive oil and a towel or plastic wrap and let the dough rise for about an hour or until it doubles in size.  Find a warm place.  My best idea is putting it an empty dishwasher and turning on the drying cycle.

Once the dough is done rising, turn the oven on 425.  Coat your pizza trays with a little oil to help spread them out.  If you have a pizza stone, you rock.  I'm jealous.  Once the dough is spread out top it with whatever you want and pop it in the oven for 10-15 minutes.  Yum!

Another thing I discovered this week was cooking pizza on the griddle.  We've cooked it on a grill before but this was an alternative we tried to keep from heating up the oven. 

 

Tobin took this picture and helped me top the pizza.  We stretched it out on the pizza pan and then lightly brushed the griddle with oil, heating it to 350.  After transferring (very quickly and luckily, I might add) the dough from the pan to the griddle, I let it cook for about 5 minutes, just until it started to get golden on the underside.  Then we flipped it, topped it and laid the pizza pan, or in our case, a cookie sheet, over the top so the cheese would melt.  Again 5 minutes or so, lift off the pan, and voila!  Pizza without heating up the oven and the whole house!  There's no reason to go without pizza or spend a lot of money on delivery and eat all the salt and fat you don't need.  Of course, that's if you can resist the fact that it just tastes good.  My husband said he actually liked this method better than cooking it in the oven!  Hope it works for you!