Imagine, if you will, a pizza with a creamy, garlicky ricotta-basil base, with marinated shrimp and zucchini scattered over it and covered with shredded mozzarella. Now, imagine that my ricotta had gone bad in the fridge, our basil plant finally died and there was only really expensive farmed shrimp at the store. What would you do?



If you had any memory left, you would make the gruyere, ham and onion pizza that you've been meaning to make for over a year. Or perhaps, inspired by the pineapple, peppers and onions you want to use anyway, you'd make some sort of sweet and sour sauce and make a Chinese take-out inspired pizza. Not I. I made garlic, pepperoni and olive for our main pizza. Then I made a pineapple, pepper, onion and olive pizza for me (and the children). A third pizza was half of each.

Our challenge was to take Peter Reinhart's recipe for pizza dough, use it exactly as written, and attempt to hand toss at least one of the pizzas. Rich got some video of me kneading, but only stills of me tossing. I fully expected to have some pictures of me picking dough out of my hair. Instead, it actually worked!



This is probably baking heresy, but I'm not all the way sold on the dough recipe, though it was a good one. We still really like my recipe, but this was good. I was skeptical about the method, and how well the dough would handle, but it was beautiful, soft and pliable, and worked perfectly. So, I think I will try the cold water and refrigerator rise using my recipe and see if it improves the texture at all.

The dough recipe said that it made six pizzas (9-12"), people were saying how much dough this made, so I expected to be putting some dough away for later. When I saw that the recipe used only 4 1/2 cups of flour, I knew it would just be dinner. We made three normal sized pizzas which left two small pieces after our family of seven eaters dug in. Yasmina got her share in her milk that night. I made the sauce out of canned diced tomatoes, garlic, dried oregano, dried thyme, some salt and red pepper. I used the stick blender to puree it. We shredded some fresh mozzarella (from frozen) and parmesan for the cheese topping.

Since I have a pizza peel, I used that to get the pizzas into the oven and onto the stone, rather than the back of a jelly roll pan. It seemed to work fine that way. I made sure there was enough cornmeal on the peel and just shook it off onto the stone.

All in all we were satisfied. It was tasty, the crust crisped nicely, especially using our round stone in a 500 degree oven. The timing was just about perfect on the baking, too.

Rich was certainly happy. He's a pizza lover, and I had been planning on making this as a surprise for him when he returned from a trip Saturday night (he knew I was making it this month, but not when), instead it was dinner Monday night. He's been excitedly waiting for this challenge to be completed since I told him what my task was this month. He even helped put the toppings on them.



Thank you to Rosa from Rosa's Yummy Yums for hosting this month! This was a fun and tasty challenge and has given me great ideas for how to make other pizzas at home. We make most of our pizzas, so it was a good exercise for me.

Labels: Daring Bakers, Family, Homemaking, Tales from the Kitchen