$5 Gourmet Pizza Recipe

Well bakers I'm going to show you how on a $5 budget you can make a gourmet pizza at home and you will never order a pizza again, I promise you. This is a fantastic recipe, gourmet pizza using really good quality ingredients for just $5. It's pretty unbelievable but believe me it's true. So we're going to start out by making this dough. Now this is a new dough and it's a really fantastic one. I start out by using 00 flour which is a really popular flour in Italy. It's a really light flour and the results it gives you are really kind of a delicate crust that cooks really quickly. So I've tested this recipe using bread flour and it does work but the 00 flour is way better, it gives you a really lovely elastic pizza with a really good structure. It is a little bit on the pricier side, it's more expensive than bread flour, it comes in at $2.47 but this dough makes three pizzas so that makes perfect sense, it comes way cheaper. Add in our instant yeast, I love to use instant yeast because you add it in to the dry ingredients. If you use active yeast, I'll put a note on BiggerBolderBaking.com with the recipe of how you can use active. You just have to activate it, it's a little bit more work and so if you do that, that's totally fine. And here we have a nice bit of salt, you know pizza dough really needs a good amount of salt and that is less than a cent. Now I'm just going to mix those ingredients together, as you can see they're on the opposite sides of the bowl because I don't like to lay them on top of each other. And just give them a quick mix up. So once your dry ingredients are all really well mixed together, I'm going to add in my olive oil which is 20 cents. Next goes in our water and that is free and lukewarm. You always want to make sure that you have kind of lukewarm or what I like to call blood temperature water. Just lightly warm so it helps activate the yeast. Now this is quite a lot of water for a pizza dough, normally I don't do such high hydration but I have to say it produces like the fluffiest pizza dough and you'll see that at the end. So we're going to put this on you know roughly a medium speed and let it knead for around 8-10 minutes. The reason I do it so long at such a high speed, because of the hydration it really needs to knead. So you'll see what it looks like when it's ready to come out and it's all come together. So while the pizza is kneading, this is a great time to tell you about the fact that I do a lot of savory baking and a lot of bread doughs, pastries and things like that. So if you're into the more savory side of baking, I've been making pizza dough for many years and I feel like I've perfected it at this stage. So go to BiggerBolderBaking.com, check out all of my savory recipes. We're even releasing one for like a chicken pot pie with homemade biscuits on top. We have so many great sweet and savory recipes there so make sure to go check them out. So here you go, you see the way the dough is pulling together off the bottom of the machine? It has really changed it's shape, it's gotten a lot smoother. It has come together. It's still a loose dough, not super loose, I'll show you now. But like I said, it's a softer dough, there's more water in it. But this is perfect, giving you know 8-10 minutes in the machine, it's all it needs. Here I have a nice glass bowl, I'm going to put in a splash of olive oil. I'm going to turn my dough in that oil, just like that, give it a toss around. And that will just make life easy on the dough when it's proofing, it will just glide up the bowl with ease rather than struggling. You know a dough is a living thing, it has yeast in it, so you want to make life as easy as possible. You want to like give it a nice little warm environment, so that's why we're going to cover it over with cling wrap, nice and tight so no air gets at it. And I'm also going to lay over this towel. So now you're going to be amazed, this dough cost $3.30 to make. Remember, I said it makes 3 pizzas, so that is $1.10 for each pizza crust, that's pretty amazing. Now here's what we want to do, we want to let the dough sit at room temperature for 2 hours, let it proof, and then we're going to come back and move on to our next step. So it's been 2 hours, let's have a little sneaky peek at our dough, look at that, beautiful. It is well risen. Now here's what I like to do, this is a really important step when it comes to really great pizza dough making. See this? This is what you're going to do. Take one side of the pizza dough, pull it from the outside up, stretch it, bring it in towards the middle. Go to the other side, pull it up, fold it down into the middle. Turn it another quarter, because we're going in 4 turns here. Pull it up again, down into the center. Then we're going to go around the 4th time, pull it up, and around. And I actually like to continue doing this until the dough literally refuses to do it anymore. Now let me tell you the reason why we're doing this. We are strengthening the dough. Strengthening the dough is going to help us incorporate more gases and more bubbles later. So we're giving it more strength to give us a lovely bubbly crust. I have made pizzas every which way possible, stretching your dough makes the world of difference. And it is stretched. So now here's what you can do, you can take this dough and divide it up into your pizzas and you can let it sit at room temperature and then use it straight away. That is totally up to you. Here's what I think you should do. You should take this dough, put it into your fridge for up to 4 days. My sweet spot is 72 hours, which is 3 days. And let it sit there in the fridge, let it ferment, let it slowly rise, let it get flavor, let it get texture. And the pizza dough at the end of those few days is going to be phenomenal. Remember, we are making a 5 star pizza here today, okay? We're not messing around. I want you to have the best pizza dough possible. So for that reason, I'm popping mine into the fridge. So while our dough is proofing, this is the perfect time to make our hot honey. Hot honey is so delicious. And because we're using soft risotto and we're having it on pizza, it's going to have a little bit spicy kick to it. It's going to be really good on our pizza. Also, like extra fancy. So perfect. In my small pot here, I'm going to add in honey. Just so you know, this recipe makes a lot of hot honey and we're only using a small bit for our pizza. This amount of honey costs $2.04. This is clover honey. And now for our peppers. These are Calabrian peppers and they are from Italy. They are spicy and they're absolutely delicious and they work so well with the honey. These peppers cost $1.49. We only need a tablespoon of this sauce for our pizza. And then lastly, we're going to add in literally a pinch of salt, which costs a fraction of a cent. Now what we're going to do is just turn on the heat. Let this mixture slowly come to a simmer. What we want to do here is infuse that honey with those chilies. And once it's hot and just come to a simmer, we can take it off the heat. It'll be ready to go. So when it comes to a simmer, turn off that heat. I'm going to set this over to cool down and continue to infuse. And the longer it infuses, the spicier it'll get, which will be absolutely delicious. So this whole mixture costs $3.58 to make. However, it makes like 11 tablespoons. We only need one tablespoon. So for our pizza, it's going to cost 33 cents. That's a pretty good deal. So here is a dough that I made three days ago. I wanted you to see the benefits of aging pizza dough. This is what your pizza is going to be like. Really light, really fluffy. If you use the pizza dough straight away, it'll still taste good. It'll be lovely. Aging your pizza dough is next level pizza making. And this is a gourmet pizza video, so we're pulling out all the stops here. We're going to go big. Let me show you this dough. I had it in the fridge for three days. The flavor has been improving. The texture has been improving. Now remember, I said that this dough makes three pizzas. You're getting even more value for money. So we're going to divvy it up to 275 grams per pizza. So here's something I want to show you, and I want you to do this to your pizza as well. Pull it, give it a bit of a stretch like we did before to shape that dough into a ball. Stretch out that dough. Dough loves to be stretched. You're probably thinking, well, I'm knocking out all those bubbles. No, this is actually what you want to do because doing those pulls will actually strengthen your dough, which will help you capture even more gas, will give you even more bubbles. So this is what you want to do. Roll it up into a nice smooth ball just like that. Lovely. I've got a tray here. I'm going to put some flour on it. Everything we're doing in this video is making the end result better, which is just an amazing pizza. Now some people like to freeze pizza dough. If you're one of those people, that's fine. I have to say the best results I've ever had is when you use it like straight away without freezing it. But I do know some people always freeze their pizza and get like really good results. So that's up to you. Lovely. Onto your tray. So I like to take my pizza dough out of the fridge around an hour and a half to two hours before I want to bake off my pizza. Because what I'm going to do now is cover them up just like we always do with our dough. We're going to put a tea towel on top, make them nice and snug. We want these guys to proof a little bit. We want them more so to relax and come to room temperature. When they come to room temperature, they're going to be so much easier to pull into shape. We're just going to set these over to the side, give them a few hours and they're going to be perfect for stretching and to get into the oven. So to make our pizza, I have all my toppings here. I have everything ready to go. I like to give my dough a little preliminary pull because this helps just to stretch out the dough. You let it relax for a few minutes and then you can continue to pull it. Often what happens is the dough keeps on pulling back and retracting and it makes it very difficult. You think you're doing something wrong and you're not. You just need to give it more time. You need to be patient. Like me, I'm so patient. We're going to flour our surface and we are going to pull our dough. There's a few different ways you can do it. You can do it on the countertop or you can put your hand underneath and just pull your dough like this. And the elasticity in our 00 flour and the fermenting is actually allowing us to do this. To pull it bigger and bigger without it ripping. Now I've been making pizzas since I was a young girl. I've had my pizza oven for like eight, nine years and I really feel like it took me this long to get the hang of working with the pizza oven and my pizza dough at the same time. So this takes practice. You know, you're not just going to wake up a morning and be Gemma Stafford. You can't. I wouldn't expect that from you, okay? But you can keep on getting better and better the more you practice. Just keep on stretching and stretching. This will make a 12 to even 14 inch pizza. You want to get it even and thin all the way in the middle and we still want to have kind of a thick edge because that's what's going to pop for us. You see, this is what they do in pizza restaurants. I'm teaching you what they do in pizza restaurants so you never have to leave your house again. That's my MO. I just don't want to leave my house. So I make everything here. So our pizza is looking good. Here I have my pizza peel. I like to use this to get into the oven. I'm going to put a little bit of semolina down on my pizza peel or tray or whatever you're using. I would say use semolina and I'll tell you why. This is a pro tip and what happens is they work like little ball bearings and they will slide your pizza into the oven. Your flour will not do that. Flour will kind of get stuck on it so you need something to kind of like move it along. So semolina will do that and let me tell you something from experience. Cornmeal, especially medium ground cornmeal, is not semolina. Okay, don't do that. Big mistake. Once it's on your peel or on your tray or whatever you're using, pull it out a little bit further because it does tend to spring back. So there's our pizza. Now let's talk toppings. So we are doing tomato sauce. Now I went out and I got a really good tomato sauce like Rao's. Just make sure it's good quality because remember we're making a good pizza here. You can of course make your own which will be cheaper and you can use my recipe but I really wanted to go like really high end with this and Rao's makes such a great sauce. You only need a quarter cup. So this tomato sauce costs $0.69 and it is well worth it. Next up, some fresh buffalo mozzarella because why not? We are fancy. This cost $0.59 and I always thought that buffalo mozzarella was like so expensive and it can be but for the pizza we just need one ball. Two ounces is all we need. If you like to use different cheese that's totally up to you. This is the perfect amount. For our meat we are using soppressata. This is an Italian salumi. Very fancy, very yummy. Even though this is kind of one of the higher end salamis. Here's the thing, you can buy this actually really inexpensively. I got a really good quality one and for the pizza it just cost $2.49 which is not that bad for our topping considering that it's such good quality. Now we don't want to waste any time. My pizza oven is at like 750 degrees. It's the perfect time to get my pizza in there. So follow me outside. If you have the luxury of a pizza oven like I do, light it until around 750 degrees otherwise put it in your oven for as high as it can go around 400 to 500 degrees. My fire is blazing. My oven is nice and hot. I'm going to go in with my pizza. So if you look in the pizza oven you can really see the crust kind of come to life and like pop which is exactly why I love to use my pizza oven. When you're using a pizza oven it's good to turn it so it gets evenly scorched all the way around. This is cooking beautifully and the 00 flour that we use made sure that our pizza is going to cook really fast and traditionally pizzas in pizza ovens could take around two minutes to cook. They're really really quite quick. Let's have a little look at our pizza and it looks amazing. The crust is lovely and scorched all the way around which is exactly what I want because that gives you really good flavor. Our toppings are sizzling. It smells amazing. There's only one last thing left to do and that is drizzle over our hot honey and that is how we're going to finish this gourmet pizza. So you're not going to believe this from scratch this whole pizza cost $5.17. That is absolutely insane. This looks like a five-star pizza from a restaurant. Usually they're around $30 here in LA but for you at home $5.17. I really hope you're enjoying my $5 series. Let me know in the comments below what other recipes you'd like to see me make for $5. I'll see you back here again next week. Right now I'm going to enjoy some delicious pizza.