The title Pizza sells this pizza a little short.. this pizza is the ‘BEST’ pizza!

We go back nearly a year when Regan and I first made pizza together, so she had just turned four. We of course have bought pizza from famous pizza restaurants and takeaways but making your own is much more fun and if you use this recipe it is much, much tastier.

Now, without demeaning any pizza favourites you may have, pizza started it’s life as a peasants food, and because of this, it is a simple food. I’ve read the word “pizza” is thought to have come from the Latin word pinsa, meaning flatbread (although there is much debate about the origin of the word, so don’t quote me). We want to taste the ingredients and with the best will in the world a fully loaded pizza may taste ok, maybe even good, but you’re not tasting the ingredients as such, so my recommendation on top of the tomato and mozzarella cheese, use only one, maybe two toppings.

Regan and I make the dough from scratch, we make the tomato sauce from scratch, but we have yet to milk a buffalo for the mozzarella, and to-date have not made our own salami.

Before I go in to the ingredients and method, let me just go through a few options and no-nos. I prefer to make the pizzas on a pizza peel, and transfer the made pizza to a hot pizza stone in a very hot oven, but at 4 years old and even now at 5 years old that is a step too far for Regan’s skill set. So, we use a bought pizza screen/tray which makes it much easier for her and it works well. The ‘no-no’ is despite seeing many simple recipes for pizzas that suggest rolling out the dough with a rolling pin, this ruins the pizza in my opinion, so use your hands.

The pizza dough recipe is for a New York style pizza and is a cold proof/rise dough which is proofed in the fridge, so we have to make it at least 24 hours in advance, but best made 3-days in advance. Making the dough, if you’ve made bread before is pretty simple. Regan will often help me do the dough after school on Wednesday, to make the pizzas for Saturday. This recipe makes three 14″ pizzas, but you can alter the ingredients to make more or less (divide ingredients by 3, then multiply by how many pizzas you plan to make).

Pizza dough ingredients: 600g of Strong Bread Flour; 370g of Water (room temp); 2.7g of Yeast; 12g Salt; 6g of Caster Sugar; 2-3 teaspoons of Rapeseed Oil (or Olive Oil).

Method: Put the flour, salt and sugar into the mixing bowl. Again we use the KitchenAid with dough hook and start mixing at low speed. We weigh the water in this recipe rather than measure, I’m not sure why but we get a more consistent dough by weighing. We add the yeast to the water and allow it to start to bubble. Mix on low speed until all the flour has been incorporated. We then add the oil and allow it to continue to knead in the mixer for another 5 minutes.

Divide the dough in to four equal pieces, which will weigh around 320g, make them dough ball shape and put them in individual greased sealed containers, or greased freezer bags and seal. Put the dough balls in the fridge, for a minimum of 24 hours. I recommend the 3-days (72 hours).

One-hour before you make the pizzas, take the dough out of the fridge. If your dough is too cold it’ll bubble and blister in the hot oven, so room temperature works best.

On a floured or ideally a cornmeal dusted work surface we make the pizza shape with the dough. Remember no rolling pin, we are doing this with our hands. You want to define an edge to the pizza, not too big, but enough to keep the pizza sauce and toppings on the pizza. Using your flat finger tips, go around the edge of the pizza pressing down forming an edge around 1cm.

We then turn the dough upside down and stretch out the dough with the flat of your hands, turning and stretching until we have a round pizza shape approx. 14″ in diameter. There is a skill to this, but don’t be put off my making mistakes, trial and error can be fun as well as frustrating, but then when your cooking with a 5 year old, you have to be prepared for some frustrations. If you finish with a more rustic shape initially, it doesn’t really matter. Whilst the way we do it is slightly different (only slightly different), Diana Coutu’s video on YouTube (5 times Canadian Pizza Baking Champion) shows a good way to get the perfect pizza shape.

Pizza Sauce ingredients: 1 tin of good quality chopped tomatoes; 1 clove of garlic (crushed); 2 teaspoons of copped or dried Oregano.

Method: Make the pizza sauce in advance and put it in the fridge overnight, but just like the pizza dough, take it out of the fridge so it is at room temperature before you use it. To make the sauce, simmer the tomatoes, the garlic and the herbs (basil works well too) for 20 mins on a really low heat to infuse the flavours. Take off the heat, allow to cool a little and then blitz it with a stick blender to get a sauce consistency, we use an older version of the Braun but others are available.

Topping the pizza: Like I said earlier, less is more. This dough tastes good, the sauce tastes good, so we don’t want to over power these with a dustbin lid amount of toppings! We tend to do three pizzas, each slightly different. To be honest 3 pizzas for 2 adults and a 5-year old is too much, so I do over eat… eating through greed, rather than need, if you know what I mean.

Pizza 1: Simple Cheese and Tomato. Only use mozzarella cheese. I know you can buy all sorts of fancy cheeses and a crumble of Stilton added for top cheese works well, but lets keep things simple. We buy mozzarella in a block and grate it, but you can buy it and slice it thinly to spread around the pizza. Again don’t overload with cheese, we want to taste the dough, the cheese and the tomato.

Pizza 2: We do a Cheese, Tomato and Garlic pizza. The one difference to Pizza 1, is that we grate our homemade roasted garlic butter over the sauce, before we add the mozzarella. Regan and I make garlic butter a lot, it is so much better than bought garlic butter! It’s great for homemade garlic bread and fun to make with Regan. We roast a whole bulb of garlic in the oven wrapped in foil, cut off the top of the garlic bulb and drizzle oil over it and roast for around 30 mins at 180C. Once cool, squeeze the garlic out into a pack of butter, mix it well in with your hands (messy fun), add chopped parsley and shape in to a sausage shape. Wrap in cling film and put it in the fridge. We grate the butter on to the pizza straight from the fridge. I’ll cover garlic bread when I write about our Italian Meatball recipe another time.

Pizza 3: A copy Pizza 1, but we add Salami and 1 chopped chilli from the plant in the kitchen. These chillies are HOT, so one is plenty. Add the chilli under the salami, as it will burn in the oven if it’s on top. You could sprinkle crushed chillies if you prefer.

NB: If we’re making pizzas on the trays, the pizza dough is put on the tray before topping, if we’re putting it in the oven straight on to the pizza stone the pizzas are assembled on the cornmeal dusted pizza peel.

We cook the pizzas in a HOT oven at at least 220C for approx 6 mins. It is well worth investing in a good quality pizza wheel to cut the pizzas. We serve them on a long wooden board placed in the middle of the table and eat with our hands, the New York way, but you could serve with a knife and fork if you really wanted.

NB: Beer NOT included for Regan, and clearly optional as an accompaniment. Additionally, as per usual no brands mentioned in this blog post are endorsed by me and we receive no remuneration for mentioning these brands.