On our mission to make healthier food at home, we decided a pizza was still permissible, as long as it didn’t contain pepperoni and we used low-fat cheese. Thus begins our (really, John’s) pizza-making journey.
We planned to have pizza Saturday night, so we went to the grocery store for the second time that day, got all the required ingredients and got to work. We knew the dough needed to sit for two hours to rise, so we had to start early. Attempt #1: Failed. We forgot to add the honey to the honey wheat dough, so it wasn’t really the right consistency, nor was it very tasty. We also found out that not only did the dough need to rise for 2 hours, but for optimum flavor, after rising for 2 hours, it should sit in the refrigerator over night. Bah! We couldn’t have pizza on Saturday night after all.
John went to the commissary for the THIRD time on Saturday, and picked up groceries to make ham, cheese and spinach omelets and wheat waffles with blueberries on top. The dinner was delicious!
Last night, I was lucky enough to have my husband cook a wonderful dinner for me again. After we finished dinner on Saturday, we gave the dough another shot and it seemed to work. So Sunday, John set out to finish making the pizzas. The first problem was the dough wouldn’t stretch out to 9 inches. We were hesitant to work the dough too much, because we had read that can make the dough tough. In the end, we settled for two 7-inch pizzas instead of two 9-inch pizzas. We also didn’t have a pizza peel, which is one of those long wooden paddles used to put the pizza in the oven. John decided to use our wooden cutting board as a substitute.
While rolling out the dough and putting the toppings on the pizza, the pizza stone was warming in a 500 degree oven. The instructions also said to cover the pizza stone liberally with corn meal. What it failed to mention was that we should not put the corn meal on until right before putting the pizza in. When we opened the oven to put the pizza in, John’s eyes got burned with a great deal of smoke, and he couldn’t see to put the pizza on the pizza stone. We had a bit of a disaster – the pizza flopped over and the tomato sauce and cheese started burning on the stone. Yikes.
We got it turned over and cooking. It turned out ok, but attempt number two turned out much better. I even documented the second attempt for you guys:
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Don’t wash the stone with soap.
Also, the reason it tasted strange was because yeast needs sugar to really proof properly. That’s what the honey is for. You can also use a pinch of sugar, but if you do, proof it with about 1/8 of a cup of flour as well. Should take about 15 minutes.
Thanks, Hunter! I didn’t know you knew about cooking pizzas – that’s awesome!
Luckily, our second round of dough (the one we actually ate) had the honey in it. The first one we threw out without baking.
And yes, good reminder about no soap on the pizza stone! We wouldn’t want the chemicals seeping into the stone or our pizzas forever tasting like soap. Yuck!
mmm sounds fantastic..and fun :)))
I’m all about baking.
And yeah, soap soaks into the stone, and gets baked in. Not only will anything you cook on it smell like soap, there will be a faint taste of it as well. The best way to clean a stone is to put it in the oven and set it to self cleaning, then just wipe it down with water afterward to remove the ash.
Oh, and if you don’t have a self cleaning oven, just set the oven to the highest heat for 3 hours. Same thing. It’ll take all day for it to cool down, so do it on a day you don’t need the oven.
Thanks! That’s great to know. I’m sure we’ll use that at some point. As you can see, our pizza stone was fairly scorched in our first pizza-making trial.