Can't Have Thai Food Every Night

During the winter Friday night is pizza night. This has been a long-standing tradition in our household. Even before we had sonny, we usually had pizza night once a week, and we often made it ourselves. Then came the munchkin, and let’s just say time management became an issue. I simply didn’t have time to watch dough rise. If we wanted to eat as a family, we had to eat before sonny’s bedtime, so homemade was replaced with pick-up.

Recently, we’ve gone back to homemade. I still don’t have time to watch dough rise, though. Instead, I make it Thursday night and let it rise in the fridge. Same with the sauce. I’ve even prepared some of the toppings. It usually takes 30 minutes, tops. Come Friday evening, I just roll out the dough and throw on the toppings.

The dough recipe is from Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood CookbookI always use kosher salt and brown sugar, but regular is fine. It’s good for thin or thick crust, as well as calzones.

Dough ingredients:

• 1 cup warm water
• 1 ½ tsp dry active yeast (fast rising is fine)
• 1 tbs honey or brown sugar
• 1 ½ tsp kosher salt
• 2 ½ to 3 cups flour

In a bowl big enough to knead the dough in, stir the yeast, sugar and water together. When the yeast is dissolved, use a whisk or large wooden spoon to stir in the flour and salt. When the dough gets thick, use your hand to knead it. If the dough remains sticky, add flour as needed to get an elastic dough. Brush the dough with oil and let it rise covered overnight in the fridge or covered for about an hour in a warm place. If you let it rise overnight, take it out and set it in a warm place for 10 minutes up to 1 hour before using. Punch down the dough and roll out.
We usually divide the dough in three and make a pizza for each person . This is more than enough for our family of three, and we always have leftovers for lunch the next day. Depending on the thickness of the crust, there is probably enough dough for 4 dinner-plate size pizzas. The original recipe can give six calzones (but I’ve never tried).

Pizza sauce should be thick, so you don’t get a soggy crust. Our family likes it fairly spicy, so a lot of garlic and fresh cracked black pepper goes into it. You’ll probably want to embellish the recipe to get the taste you like. And if you like your pizza completely covered with sauce, double the recipe.

Red sauce ingredients:

• 28oz can of whole peeled tomatoes
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• 1 tbs fresh chopped herbs such as basil and/or oregano (can use ½ tsp dried)
• salt and fresh ground pepper to taste
• about 1 tbs olive oil

Start by fishing out the tomatoes and squeezing out the juice. You only want the pulp and as little liquid as possible. Then roughly chop the tomatoes. In a medium frying pan, heat the oil on medium-high heat. I recommend using a frying pan over a pot because the surface area of the pan will allow liquid to evaporate off faster. When the oil is hot, add the tomato and other ingredients and sauté until most of the liquid is gone, probably about 5 minutes. Transfer to a small food processor and quickly pulse until you get the texture you want. If you like it chunky (like we do), you may not need to process it at all.

The fun thing about homemade pizza is that you can experiment with different toppings. I like pancetta with carmelized onions and goat cheese. Sonny likes pepperoni and hubby likes olives and onions. Just make sure that the toppings are well drained or the pizza will be soggy. Don’t use anything that can’t cook within 10 minutes.

As you can see above, I bake my pizza on cast iron. I have used a pizza stone. Both give a great crust, but I find that it’s easier to work with the cast iron. The pizza stone has to be preheated with the oven, and I still haven’t figured out how to transfer a topped pizza to the hot stone. With the cast iron, I can roll out the dough and fit it to the size of the pan, then build the pizza in the cold pan. In a 475º oven, it takes about 7 minutes to bake. A thick crust pizza will take about 13 minutes.

*This cookbook is a classic, IMO. It doesn’t have the mouth-watering pictures found in most cookbooks today, but the recipes are keepers. Hummus, Black bean soup, marinara sauce…I still make these (and more) regularly.