PIZZA PARTY!

As most of you know, Tom and kitty moved in about 2 months ago. So we thought it'd be good to have a house warming party with all our friends over. (and I wanted to try out Tom's under utilized pizza stone). Initially, I wanted to buy pizza dough from Clear Flour, but as our guest list grew, it made more sense to make our own pizza dough. I had found a very simple recipe for pizza dough in Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" cookbook, and after making it 10 times, I'll repeat it by memory for you right now:

3 cups flour (ap or bread flour- I used ap)
1 tsp dried yeast
2 tsp salt

2 tbsp olive oil
1 cup water (plus a little extra)

So you chuck the dry ingredients in a food processor, and turn it on. Then using the feeding tube of the food processor, you dribble in the olive oil, and the water and let it go for 30 seconds. After 30 seconds, turn it off and touch it. If it's slightly sticky, then it's ready. If not, add water a little at a time until it reaches the right consistency. Knead and from into a ball.

Then set it aside for 1-2 hours until it doubles in size. And that's it. When you're ready to use it, you can either use the whole ball or split it in half for 2 smaller pizzas.

I wanted to make enough dough so that everyone could have at least one pizza. And I added different things to the dough as I got bored making the same one over and over. If you want to add stuff, you do it with all the dry ingredients. I added roasted garlic to some, pepper to others and I substituted one cup of the AP for whole wheat flour in others.

I prepared the dough before everyone arrived, rolling it out onto sheet pans. We also had a ton of toppings for everyone: anchovies, roasted garlic, sun dried tomoatoes, anchovies, prosciutto, pepperoni, chicken sausage, and on and on. During this entire time, I was covered in flour, so I didn't take any pics. I'll be relying on Big Ed's pics instead. So here's his happy face pizza before cooking:

and after:His turned out to be one of the heaviest pizzas. Using the pizza stone and cooking for 6-7 minutes on the broil setting and I thought they turned out great, even though we could only cook one pizza at a time, and had a pizza queue for most of the night. They turned out to be much denser than I expected. And we had set out all our cheese from Vermont as an appetizer, so most people had one pizza or shared. I was left with a ton of dough that I guess we'll be using in the future for calzones, etc. Even at the end of the night when I made my own pizza, I could only finish half of it. (Though the other half was a great snack the following day.)

We finished the dinner with gelato from TJ's. I think everyone had a great time, so if you ever what to make pizza at home, follow the simple recipe above and I think it'll turn out great.