Meal: homemade pizza
Cost: more than our normal pizza, because of the vegetarian pepperoni and vegetable toppings that I don’t normally get, but still cheap compared to ordering pizza out. Adding up the cost of the pepperoni, especially, would be an exercise in tedium because I buy my spices in bulk. Maybe $3.50 each?
Time: about half an hour active, plus a couple hours for the dough to rise and 12 minutes baking time
Leftovers: a couple of slices of each pizza. Jeff’s is going with him for lunch, and I’ll eat mine today or tomorrow.
Local ingredients: cheese
Organic ingredients: some tomato sauce, olives, spinach, mushrooms

Last night was our normal movie night with my sister and my cousin, and feeling uncreative, we planned homemade pizza. However, this was different from our other homemade pizza nights (we do love pizza, as evidenced by the fact that we eat it almost once a week) in that I made vegeterian pepperoni, and I tried a new crust recipe. Both met with nearly unqualified approval.

I (for once) didn’t change much about the veggeroni recipe, other than the fact that I didn’t have liquid smoke on hand, so I substituted Worchestshire, and we didn’t have agave syrup on hand, so I used sugar, and it was still very good. We didn’t have aluminum foil on hand, so I formed it into a log and baked it like that. I’ve been waiting to try seitan before but had been intimidated, but this was very, very easy and came out great. It was as good as any commercial vegetarian pepperoni I’ve had, and won approval from the resident carnivores. Be warned - it’s rather spicy. It was too spicy for my sister, and almost too spicy for me at first. I’ll be toning down the heat with the next batch.

As for the crust… we like our normal bread machine crust, but it’s very dense and very chewy, resulting in a very thick crust, and Jeff had requested that we try a thinner crust. I tried just using less of it, the last time we made pizza for just the two of us, but it wasn’t very stretchy, and was difficult to thin up. So, I went off in search of a new crust recipe to try. The Moosewood restaurant cookbooks have yet to fail me, and they didn’t this time either:

Pizza Crust, from The Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates

Yeast Mixture:

- 3 cups hot water (100 to 115 degrees F)
- 1 tbs active dry yeast (not instant)
- 2 tbs unbleached white flour
- 2 tbs honey

Dough:

- 5 cups unbleached white flour
- 2 cups whole wheat flour
- 1 tbs salt

Clean your counter, a pastry board, or a very large cutting board. You are going to need some space to work here.

Mix together the yeast mixture ingredients until the yeast dissolves; let sit for 5 or 10 minutes. It should end up foamy and creamy.

Combine 4.5 cups of white flour with the wheat flour in a large (very large bowl), and mix in the salt. Stir in the yeast mixture and stir for a couple of minutes, until the moisture is evenly distributed and you can form a ball of dough. Flour your hands and the counter/cutting board, and transfer the dough to it. Kneed for 5 to 8 minutes, until you have a smooth ball of dough. This is going to be a soft, slightly sticky dough. Oil a large bowl, place the dough in it, cover, and let sit in a warm, draft free spot until the dough has doubled in size (about an hour). (I used a dutch oven in my oven, the only way to guarantee a uniformly warm spot in my house, even during summer. The recipe recommends covering the bowl with plastic wrap, but if you hate using it as much as I do, I would think a lid or clean towel would work just as well.)

When the dough has doubled, pull it back out, punch it down, and kneed 1 to 2 minutes. If you want to freeze the dough, now is the time to do it; pinch off the sections you want to freeze and store them one to a freezer bag or tupperware container. Otherwise, pinch off a ball of dough and roll it out to your desired size and thickness with a rolling pin. Place on an oiled pan and top, baking 8 to 10 minutes at 500 degrees F or until done.

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My notes:

This is a rather wet dough. This might be partly because I used all white flour instead of white and wheat in combination. I think I’ll use 2.5 cups of water next time instead of 3 (next time will be awhile, as I have 3 bags of dough in my freezer), and add more as I need to. On the other hand, I had wanted a more stretchy dough, and I definitely got that. It was almost too stretchy - when I rolled it out, it didn’t hold its shape very well and stretched out when I tried to put it on the pan. I ended up having to do some shaping once it was in the pan. We had been aiming for thinner, and got it, but next time, would aim for a little thicker than we got this time - the slices were a little floppy. However, this had a great flavor, and managed to be crispy and chewy at the same time. Freezing the dough might help with the stretchiness of the dough - I’ll report when we use one of the frozen dough balls.

I prebaked the crusts for two minutes before topping them, and they cooked for 12 minutes after that, not the 8 to 10 specified. Then again, the pizzas were loaded down. One was cheese and vegetarian pepperoni, and the other had mushrooms, spinach, tomatoes, and olives, as well as garlic and vegetarian pepperoni on one side.

This makes a lot of dough - I made one 16 inch round pizza and one 12 by 16 rectangle, and froze two-thirds of the dough.

In general, we were happy with this crust recipe, and have no need to keep using the bread machine recipe that we have been using, unless we’re specifically going for a thicker crust pizza.