One of my favorite food blogs is 80Breakfasts.blogspot.com. As I was reading it earlier this week, I found out that the host of this blog won the Hay Hay it’s Donna Day foodblog event last month. So- as part of her prize winnings, she gets to host this month’s contest and choose the theme. She chose pizza, one of my favorite things. In an effort to become a more active blog writer and to honor one of my favorite food blogs, I decided to enter the contest this month.
My friends Shane, Tonya and Sarah invited us over for movies last night, so I offered to make pizza dough so everyone could make his/her own pizza. I figured I’d shoot the results and send it in for the contest. You can see more shots of the fun on my flickr page. Actually, Tonya shot it as well and she takes way better pics than I do, so go to her page, too.
I made the dough from a very simple recipe that I believe originated in “Cooks Illustrated.” The recipe is for grilled pizza, but I use this dough recipe even when I’m baking it.
You take 1 cup of room temp water and 2 tablespoons of olive oil and mix them together. Then, in the food processor you put 2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of sugar, 1 1/4 teaspoons of table salt and a teaspoon of rapid rise yeast and take it for a 5 second spin. After that, leave the motor running and pour in the liquid ingredients. Process until the dough forms a ball and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. You can add a bit more flour if you need to.
Then put the dough in a bowl to rise for an hour or so, or put it in the fridge overnight.
I divided the dough into 4 equal portions (actually I doubled the recipe to make 8 individual crusts), and roll or stretch them into the desired shape. Mine always look like abstract cell drawings because I am really bad at shaping doughs.
The toppings we had available were cheese, sweet italian sausage, green peppers, onions, mushrooms and pepperoni.
Unfortunately, some of the doughs stuck to the peel (we were using a pizza stone to bake them). Next time we should par bake the crusts and maybe that won’t happen again….
But everyone had fun and that was the point!
