The Best Homemade Pizza You'll Ever Eat

Every city in the country, every city in the world probably, has a pizza place. Usually pretty good, it's usually pretty cheap, but there's something about making your own at home that just really drives the point home. Do you know anyone that doesn't like pizza? I don't want to know that person. Honestly, making pizza only takes a few simple ingredients. What you're going to need is a little bit of warm water that's going to activate a good amount of dried yeast, a bit of sugar that's going to act as food for the yeast, salt for flavor, flour for the base of the dough, extra virgin olive oil that's going to, one, make your dough a little bit easier to work with, and it's also going to add just a little hint of flavor. All right, so first things first, we have to bloom our yeast. So in warm water, and by warm I just mean like when you put your finger in, it shouldn't feel like anything. It's not cold or hot. So you're going to give it a stir, make sure everything's well hydrated, and then you're going to see that your yeast is going to start to produce a little bit of bubbles, and just means that it's kind of alive. If you don't see any change, that means that your yeast might be a little on the old side. Throw that out and start again with some fresh yeast. We're going to add salt to the flour and not to the yeast water mixture. Salt will slow down the production of yeast, so we want to make sure that we're adding that later on once the yeast is already activated. We're going to add extra virgin olive oil. Again, that's going to add a little bit of flavor. We're going to throw in the water and sugar mixture. It's easiest in a bowl because it won't like make a huge mess while you bring the dough together. What we're trying to do is just hydrate as much of the flour as we can. Once we're happy that we're not going to have like water or flour all over the place, we can toss it onto our board and start kneading it. So kneading is one of those things like people tend to not do enough. Set a timer and do it for 10 minutes. You want to be able to look at it and it's like so pokey and smooth and fun, and what you're trying to do is just roll the dough on top of itself and then push forward. You're not trying to tear the dough, you're really just trying to like rotate and make sure that you're getting like all parts of the dough incorporated. At the end of it we want like a really nice pretty top. You'll know when you're done kneading the dough when you press the dough and it springs back right away. So now what we want to do is get like the really gorgeous top part of the dough. You can just pull the sides of the dough from the outside in so that it makes a nice ball on the other side. Once you turn it over, push your pinkies in and kind of rotate the doughs into like a really beautiful round ball. All right, cool. So ready to rise and we're going to go into a big bowl, put a little bit of oil on there so that the dough doesn't stick, and then you're going to cover the dough itself in oil as well. This is going to rise significantly, we don't want to stick to the cling film. So I like to cover with cling so that it's much easier to get off. Like I've done a lot of doughs where you cover with a towel and then it gets stuck to the towel, so I prefer cling. So you can let this rise for an hour if you don't have a ton of time. Even better would be to let this rise overnight. So the one on the left is one that's been risen for 24 hours and the one on the right has been rising for an hour. It's still going to be a great flavor, it's still going to be a great texture. So the longer you let this process go, just like the more flavor and the more complexity is going to be in your dough. And what we're going to do now is just bring this dough back to life. So a lot of work has happened with all this yeast and it's been a little bit uneven in the way that it's grown and that's just a totally normal process. So we're going to turn it out and we're going to knead it again for another minute or two. Nothing different about this process, again we're just evening out the bubbles that are inside the dough. We're going to do that shaping thing again, so use your pinkies if you will to kind of push to make into a cute ball. And if you're using store-bought pizza dough, you want to do this as well. So knead it for a minute or two and leave it out at room temperature while you're doing all of your other pizza prep. And then we're going to cut it. So as you can see now that we've cut into this, you can look at that cool, I just love that, it's so cool. Okay sorry, back to the, back to what we're talking about. So you can see like just how much gluten development, just how much fermentation and you know growth and all the yeastiness, science-y stuff is going on, how alive our dough is. Like that's an awesome process to see. So we're gonna, this is a huge amount of dough, it should make about four good-sized pizzas. You can give one to each person at your party, each person in your family. You can shape them, you can freeze half of them or freeze three of them so you have some for later. It's really up to you. Add a little bit more flour, cover it with a towel and let it rise for one more hour. One thing that you want to recreate from a pizzeria in your own home kitchen is getting your oven as hot as it possibly can. One thing that's going to help that is having something in the oven already preheating that's going to give you really good bottom heat. So you could do a baking sheet turned upside down, you could do a cast iron which is really great at holding heat. And then third option if you are going to be making like a lot of bread or pizzas at home is to get a pizza stone and that really holds a lot of heat as well and it's like a nice open surface. So let's talk sauce. There's a lot of different options out there and people like never really know which ones to get. So there's puree and that's going to be like the finest of all of the tomatoes. Then there's going to be crushed, that might have a little bit of chunk left in it. Diced is going to be diced, so it's just cut up already, it's in its sauce, it's in its water. And then there's whole tomatoes. And so those are the most intact and those are the ones that I recommend. You can crush them with your hands or as we're going to do here we're just going to use an immersion blender. A little safety PSA, if you have any leftover sauce do not store it in the tin can, store it in a separate container and make sure to throw the can away. Now let's talk cheese. The thing about pre-shredded cheese is it has some product on it that prevents it from clumping in the bag. It just kind of doesn't allow things to melt as easily. If you shred the cheese yourself it's going to be much softer, it's going to be a better flavor in the end. So if you have the option we do recommend that you shred the cheese yourself. One thing about using fresh mozzarella is that you can leave the chunks as big as you want. So if you're super cheesy you can have huge chunks on your pizza. So now that our dough is rested it's ready to be shaped. There's a lot of different ways that you can get your dough out to a good shape. What I like to do is kind of do my like a finger poke, if you will, all over the dough. One because it's so fun. But also if you can see these kind of bubbles that are developing, I'm allowing those to stay in the dough and then those are going to help give you those awesome pizza bubbles. You can stretch the dough with your hands, just kind of being really careful. You can use your fingers and kind of spread it, if you will, do a combo of things. I used to work at a pizza place and the guy would actually put the dough like on the side of the table and kind of stretch it that way and he would let gravity work its magic and kind of let the dough stretch out itself. It was kind of fun. I thought it was like a cool technique. He was able to do it much quicker and smoother than I'm able to do. And then the classic way that everyone wants to know how to learn is the like tossing of the dough technique. So you kind of want to create a spinning motion with your knuckles as you're throwing it in the air. So on your knuckles, rotate and toss, catch. So now it's time to assemble our pizza. So we're going to use a turned over baking sheet. So this is going to act as our peel. And a peel is that cool plank that they have at a pizzeria that helps get the pizzas in and out of the oven. And we're going to use a little bit of semolina. If you don't have that, you can use flour, but we just need something that the pizza won't stick to the bottom, but also so that it helps us like move the pizza really quickly off our quote-unquote peel and onto the preheated baking sheet. And then we're going to just reshape our pizza ever so slightly, restretch it out just a little bit. So when you're adding like sauce and stuff to your dough, just try and work quickly here. So like don't panic or anything, but if you are too slow, it's going to be much harder to get the pizza off the peel and into the oven. So we're going to use just a ball of mozzarella and I like to tear it up pretty pretty small so that we can get like a really good even amount of cheese throughout the whole thing. So you want to take it off when the cheese is a nice dark deep brown and the crust is like a golden brown as well. And then we like to do a little bit of fresh basil on top. Again, I'm kind of a perfect biter, so I like everything to be like a good bite size. I don't want to like bite into a huge piece of basil and then like have it hang out of your mouth, you know what I mean? Like yum. So that's like a classic margarita. Look at the crunch. Yes. All right, cool. And now you eat. Really easy. And a little like pizza bianca, if you will, or like a white pizza or pizza without a sauce. That's just going to be a little bit of olive oil. Again, more cheese of your choice. We're using mozzarella. We put a bit of dried oregano on top of this as well. And this is going to go into the oven as is. Yeah, this is like a super easy one. At the end of the cooking process, we actually added some fresh ricotta, which is like a really nice, fresh, cool bite. This is like a great summertime option, I feel like. And then even on top of that, a little bit of fresh pesto that we had. So this is like a really gorgeous, light, fresh pizza. It looks like luxurious, right? There's something about it. It's just very like, I don't know, it's like kid-friendly, but it's also like bougie friendly. And then obviously the other fan favorite is a good classic pepperoni. So with that, it's just cheese, sauce, spicy pepperoni. You can grate some fresh Parmesan on top at the end of it. None of that weird stuff in the canister. You got to freshly grate it. So much better. Yeah. And the cool thing about pizza is whatever you want. My favorite toppings, seriously, I'm not even kidding, are like bacon and olive. It's like so salty and crunchy. It's so good. I love it.