HOW TO: make pizzeria-quality pizza at home

After my last go round, I entered my kitchen with confidence.

The first step is gathering all the ingredients. In order to do that I had to make a fresh batch of my all-purpose homemade pasta sauce which deserves a post of its own. (Sauteed onions and garlic, crushed tomatoes, sliced peppers, brown sugar, oregano, basil, salt, pepper, garlic powder.)


Then I grilled some fresh Italian Sausage, and grilled some peppers and onions. I cut up a 8 0z. ball of fresh mozzarella and spread out my dough. (The dough, like the sausage and cheese, was fresh from Trader Joe's.)

A little bit of olive oil on your fingers helps the dough from sticking and adds flavor at the same time.

On to assembly! As opposed to last time, I went with toppings under the cheese, allowing me to get the cheese brown and bubbly like I wanted. (I actually had to turn on the broiler for the last two minutes, but be careful, it doesn't take long at all to brown up.) And as soon as it came out, I used a spatula to brush olive oil on to the exposed outer crust.

In a word...superdelicious. The biggest hit was using the fresh, grilled Italian Sausage. It is fast moving up the ranks of my favorite meats. (One thing I wish I had discovered earlier...for years I had been buying pre-cooked brats and sausages. They taste good and they turn out good on the grill or in the microwave if you're in a hurry. But I discovered that they don't hold a candle compared to fresh sausages. Another tip: on the Foreman, put the curved side down. It will flatten out, allowing you to cook all sides evenly. If you start by just cooking on it's side, you'll never get it to go flat.

But even in bites where I wasn't getting the sausage, the sauce was always present with big flavor. The veggies provide a nice balance with the meat and cheese, for depth of flavor. And the cheese, the fresh mozz is so good that I don't even want to try using regular shredded cheese.

I suppose the weakest link in the chain is the crust, but it's actually pretty good. So I don't feel like messing around with other dough recipes that could be a disaster.

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As I walking to work today, it occurred to me that baking the pizza itself is sort of a wonder. The fact that the same time and temperature you need to turn the dough into crust, is also the perfect time and temp for melting the cheese and heating the sauce, it's amazing really. Imagine if the sauce needed 20 minutes to heat up, the cheese burned in 10, and the dough wasn't perfect until 15. Or if the sauce was burning hot after more than 10 minutes, the dough started to burn after 15 minutes, but the cheese didn't melt until 20 minutes. That's terrible.

So of course the animation is cool, what about the details? Here's a hi-res shot of the finished product, that would beat out Papa John's and Domino's.

click for HD