It’s Friday night. Bring on the pizza
One of our family “traditions” is to have pizza on Friday nights. The kids invite a friend over, they watch a movie and then eat pizza for dinner. It would never occur to me to buy pizza. It’s such a no-brainer to make it. Pizza is incredibly easy to make. I just chuck the pizza-base ingredients in the breadmaker about 1pm, and by 5pm it’s light and fluffy. The ingredients only cost a few cents, compared to several dollars to buy horrible bases from Third World (New World) or ready-made pizza’s from Pizza Hut or Hell’s Pizza (the two local chains).
Then it’s a matter of popping the oven on, rolling out the dough and adding cheese and a few toppings. You don’t need much on a pizza. Currently I have an excess of tomato sauce (bought by accident) so will use that instead of pizza sauce (which is usually pasta sauce anyway, because it’s reasonable).
Hey presto. A wonderful dinner costing next to nothing.
Hi “Betty”,
Would you care to post a link to your ingredients for the bases. I’ve been looking for a good machine one for ages but haven’t been happy so far.
Many thanks,
Andy
I originally took a recipe from Allrecipes.com, but have altered it slightly for my own purposes. I’m also a bit slap-dash about the amount of yeast I put in and the sugar. But I’ve put my official recipe below.
Ingredients:
500g high grade bread flour (I buy Pams)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tsp yeast
50g olive oil
270g water
I usually put the ingredients in the breadmaker about 1pm and put it on a 45m cycle. It stays warm afterwards and keeps rising. I usually roll it out about 5pm, to give it time for rising and bake at about at 5.30pm/6pm. This 4-5 hours of rising time makes all the difference for nice fluffy light pizzas.
A lot of the success is in the cooking.
My friend Virgil Evetts, foodwriter at http://www.Foodlovers.co.nz recommends putting the oven onto its top heat an hour before you put the pizzas in to make sure that it’s really really hot. I heat up the dishes that the pizzas are going on. I have one pizza stone and a large baking tray.
When these are super hot, I slide the pizzas in on top of the pizza stone and baking tray, with a sprinkling of semolina underneath them.
I then bake them. Usually I’ll swap them around half way through (about 3-5 minutes after going in) to give one a good baking underneath and the other a good baking on top.
Where my friend the foodwriter would be horrified, is that because I’m baking these for my kids, I often use tomato sauce, or even Watties condensed tomato soup, as the tomato base. The kids love the sweetness of both.
If you manage to refine this recipe, please let me know. I’ve meant for ages to test out some other pizza base recipes.
PS: It is correct that I weigh out the oil and water. I know this is a bit odd. But I’m using scales anyway for the flour, and just add the oil and water at the same time so I don’t have to find other measuring devices. The original recipe had the oil and water measured in cups and grams. I no longer have the original recipe.
Hi Betty, thanks for the recipe and the tips. In fact, I’m giving it a go this afternoon 🙂 I heard that about letting it rise a good amount beforehand. Thanks for posting!
[…] in place of cheddar. But I’m not sure what’s going to happen on Friday. Friday is pizza night in our […]