Everyone loves pizza, right? But are you tired of spending money on takeaways or visiting the local pizza shop? Maybe you want to make your own pizza. It’s a great option. Not only is it affordable, it’s also creative. If you’ve got specific tastes or needs from your food or just want to try something different, making your own pizza is great fun and you could produce pizzas that are actually much nicer than the ones you bought in. Especially if you normally just buy them from the supermarket.
Creating pizza isn’t easy, but you’ll have fun and have a great sense of achievement when you’ve finished. They’re also tasty. But how do you do it? If you want to know how, then you’ve found the right article for you. In it, we’re going to look at all the info you might need to make the best homemade pizzas you can. Some of the best homemade pizzas might need your own pizza oven, but you can still get some good results without one. So let’s have a look at how to make pizza at home:
Get your ingredients
You’ll need to get together the ingredients for three separate things before you make your pizza. Those things are the base, the sauce and the toppings. The base is normally the hardest bit, and will need some strong white flour, or ideally OO flour if you want to make it as authentic as possible. That’s a special type of fine Italian flour that’s used in proper pizzas. You can find it in most supermarkets these days, but you can still do a good enough job with normal flour, it just depends how authentic you want your pizza to be.
As well as the flour you’ll need semolina, salt, yeast (dry or fresh) and olive oil for your base. The sauce can be as simple as some passata or fresh tomato sauce, or you could go a bit further and make your own sauce from tomatoes, basil, salt, garlic and more. Alternatively, you can just buy a jar or carton of pre-made pizza sauce to make this step a lot quicker. You’ve got a lot more creative freedom when looking at the ingredients for your toppings. Go wild with anything you like. Most people start with cheese and go from there.
Make your dough
Actually cooking your pizza should be an incredibly quick process, but making the dough isn’t something you can rush. You can buy in pre-made dough, or even regular pizza bases. This can make it much easier and quicker to make a pizza, but it won’t be the real thing. So let’s look at how to make the actual dough for your pizza:
For 2 pizzas, mix together 100g of semolina with 400g of flour and a couple of teaspoons for salt in a bowl. Add some dried yeast (or crumbled fresh yeast) and mix more. Make a well in the middle of the mixture so you can pour in around 250ml of lukewarm water and 50ml of olive oil. Mix together with a wooden spoon or your hands if you don’t mind getting messy. The dough will start to form as the flour becomes incorporated. You can add a bit more water here if the dough feels unreasonably hard.
This is where you’re going to get a bit tired. Knead the mixture for around 10 minutes on a flat, clean surface. Keep going until the mixture is smooth and elasticy feeling. Test with a small piece of dough to see if you can stretch it thin so that you can see your hand through it without it breaking. That means it has been kneaded enough for the next stage.
Next you need to prove your dough. To do this, knead it back into a big ball shape and leave it in an oiled bowl covered with a damp tea towel. Put it somewhere warm for around an hour to an hour and a half. After this, it should have doubled in size. At this point, you can knock the air out and divide the dough into two lumps for your pizzas. You can cover again and let these balls prove for another 15 minutes separately.
Heat the oven
To make pizzas, you’ll need a hot oven. The best results are achieved with a pizza oven, but if you don’t have one, you can still use your own oven. Put it on a hot setting.
Using a pizza stone
If you have a pizza stone, this can get your oven-cooked pizza close to the finish of one cooked in a real pizza oven. It helps distribute the heat better. You can pick one up from many cookery and homeware stores, so if you want to do this a lot it might be a good investment.
Using a pizza oven
The best way to cook a pizza is with a pizza oven. These can be wood-fired, or gas-powered. You can get indoor ones or outdoor ones. The thing about real pizzas is they should only take a couple of minutes to cook at a really high heat. A normal oven won’t be able to get anywhere near this level of heat, so your pizza will take longer. You can try making your own pizza oven, there are lots of guides online. Barbecues can also work well.
Prepare your base sauce
Get your sauce ready. Either out of a jar, or freshly made. Simple tomato can work here, or you can add basil, garlic, salt and more if you want.
Get your toppings
Be as creative as you want. Classics like mushroom and pepperoni work well here. And cheese, lots of cheese.
Shape the dough
This is one of the hardest parts. You might have trouble rolling out and spinning a pizza base at the start. Try and get it as close to a circle as possible, or just make square pizzas if you want.
Cook your pizza
Put your pizza in the oven and keep an eye on it. The length of time it’ll take to cook will depend on how thin the base was rolled, as well as how hot the oven is. Make sure the base has gone crispy. This could take around 10 minutes in a normal oven, if you rolled it thin enough.
Enjoy!
Now you can enjoy your pizza! You’ll get the hang of things and will be able to make better pizzas each time.
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