Pizza from scratch
I've been making mozzarella for a while, and baking for even longer. Last year I started growing herbs on my balcony, and ever since then I've wanted to make pizza from scratch -- flour, milk, and tomatoes. I finally pulled it off last night, so I thought I'd post the results for everyone to see.
This recipe makes two 13" thin crust cheese pizzas. Pizza is very flexible, so feel free to substitute your own component recipes and seasonings. All temperatures are in degrees Fahrenheit.
Crust
Source: PizzaMaking.com
I boosted the quantity a bit to aid in rolling out the dough by hand.
20oz bread flour (about 4-1/3 cups)
8oz water (1 cup)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1-1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1-1/2 teaspoons sugar
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
IMPORTANT: DO THIS THE DAY BEFORE YOU WANT PIZZA. In a mixing bowl, combine the water, oil, yeast, and sugar and stir until thoroughly mixed. In another bowl, stir together the flour and salt. Dump the flour mixture into the mixing bowl. Mix on low speed with a dough hook (or stir by hand, whichever) until almost all of the flour is incorporated. This only takes a few minutes. Don't knead the dough after it combines.
Squish the dough into a ball. It'll be crumbly and kind of dry -- think pie crust, not bread dough. Put it in a sealed bowl and refrigerate for at least 24 hours. Longer might work better. That's it for the crust for now.
Sauce
Source: Everyone had more or less the same recipe
A bunch of tomatoes (I used 3 home-grown Big Beef tomatoes and 8 store-bought Roma tomatoes)
1 yellow onion (you'll need about a tablespoon)
1 bell pepper (also a tablespoon)
1 head of garlic (a few cloves)
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
Some ground black pepper (I used maybe a teaspoon at most)
1 tablespoon corn starch (optional)
Some grated parmesan cheese
1 bay leaf (for simmering only -- DO NOT EAT)
To taste: oregano (I used a couple dozen leaves)
To taste: basil (I used about a dozen leaves)
To taste: whatever else you want (I added half a jalapeno because that's how we roll in Texas)
Pizza sauce is all about the tomatoes. Everything else is optional. I think plain tomatoes taste bitter (weird sense of taste), so I threw in a bunch of other stuff. Most people like tomatoes, so find the best ones you can. Meaty plum tomatoes like Roma are best. Home-grown tomatoes have more flavor than store-bought, but my apartment balcony faces west and Houston's not ideal for tomatoes anyway, so I supplemented.
First, prepare the tomatoes. Start by blanching them in boiling water. I like to suspend the tomatoes in a colander.
My home-grown tomatoes took about 30 seconds, the store-bought ones took a few minutes. Regardless, what you want is for the skin to split open. This is not a subtle thing, but it can be hard to see through the steam and bubbling water. Hence, the colander.
Blanched tomatoes are easy to peel with your hands. Once you're done, you'll have a bunch of freaky-looking skinless tomatoes.
Slice off the green stem, then cut in half and scoop out the seed-filled goop. You want to save the fleshy outer part. I wasn't sure about the center, so I kept it too. The goop is between the center and the outer flesh. This part is really messy. I found that gently scraping the flesh with a knife got most of the seeds off, but you might have a better method. Regardless, the purpose of all this is to get rid of the bitter skin and seeds. If you don't care about that, I guess you can leave them in.
Once you're done, you'll have a bowl full of tomato bits. Crush them with your hands. CRUSH THEM!
Once they're crushed, pour them into a colander with some cheese cloth in it. This will drain out some of the water. Dump the solid remains into a blender.
Chop up the onion, bell pepper, and garlic and add them to the tomato chunks. Only add the stuff you need to puree. Fresh herbs are a great addition.
Herbs are our friends!
Anyway, at this point you should have a bunch of stuff in the mix. You'll probably throw away most of the onion, garlic, and bell pepper unless you had something else planned.
Now you're ready to puree the tomatoes. ACTION SHOT!
I think it can go for a long time, but I stopped when it looked like a saucey salsa.
Dump the puree into a pot. Add the salt, sugar, pepper, some more fresh herbs, the corn starch, the grated parmesan, the bay leaf, and whatever else you want. IMPORTANT NOTE: bay leaves can supposedly perforate your intestines if you eat them. This may be apocryphal, but I have one reputable book that says so, so I wouldn't take any chances. Be sure to remove the leaf after you're done simmering.
Speaking of which, start simmering the sauce. Heat it on medium while stirring until it starts to bubble, then switch to low or medium low and let it sit while stirring occasionally. You just want to evaporate the water; cooking it a lot will kill the flavor. About 30-60 minutes should be good, but it depends on how much water is in your tomatoes. I added corn starch to help mine thicken but most people think this isn't necessary. While you're waiting, you can do the cheese. P.S. Tomatoes stain, so don't stir with a white spatula. Especially not the brand new white spatula you just got yesterday. Speaking from personal experience here.
(Fun fact: canned tomato is supposedly better for sauces than whole tomato, and this simmering is the reason. A lot of flavor molecules are volatile and break down or evaporate easily under high heat. Commercial canners can get the water out using a vacuum evaporator, which lets water boil off at low temperatures. At home, we're stuck with the high temp/long time method.)
Cheese
Source: Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll
Note: I doubled the rennet to make this recipe more reliable. Cheese making ingredients are hard to find. I order mine from CheeseMaking.com. Health food stores might have citric acid, but I don't know of any brick and mortar store with liquid rennet or lipase.
1 gallon milk (not ultra-pasteurized -- I used 2% but whole should work too)
1-1/2 teaspoons powdered citric acid
1/2 teaspoon liquid rennet (either animal or bacterial is fine)
1/4 teaspoon lipase powder (optional -- for flavor)
1/4 teaspoon calcium chloride (optional -- supposedly helps with store-bought milk, but this may be apocryphal)
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
Distilled water (as needed)
Do not deviate from this recipe or there is a good chance it will fail. Cheese is VERY temperamental.
Stir the citric acid into 1/2 cup of distilled water until it dissolves. Stir the rennet into 1/4 cup distilled water. Stir the lipase into 1/4 cup distilled water. It won't dissolve completely, but keep stirring for a long time so the clumps break up.
Start by pouring the milk into a large pot. Like I said before, you can do this while the sauce is simmering. Supposedly it's a 30-minute mozzarella recipe, but it usually takes me 45-60. Anyway, turn on medium-low heat and wait for the milk to reach 55 degrees.
I use an instead meat thermometer to measure the milk. Be sure to stir the milk before you measure. At 55 degrees, stir in the citric acid solution and the lipase solution.
Continue heating on medium-low until you hit 90 degrees. You'll probably get a bit of curdling along the way. This is normal; don't worry about it.
At 90 degrees, gently stir in the rennet solution. At this point, start gently stirring once every 30 seconds or so. The milk will quickly begin to separate into solid white curds and liquid yellow-green whey. Keep going until the whey gets over 100 degrees (you can go up to 105 if you really want).
The first time I did this I didn't use enough rennet, so there are two sets of pictures showing good curds and bad curds. Good curds will be firm, and will clump together and sink to the bottom of the pot. Bad curds will be very soft, float, and won't totally separate from the whey. Remember, this takes time, so don't panic if they're not perfect at first.
Bad curds:
Good curds:
Once the curds have heated, pour them into a colander filled with cheesecloth. (This is what cheesecloth is for!) Good curds will stay clumped in the pot, so mostly you're just pouring out the whey. Bad curds will flow like jell-o mixed with cottage cheese.
Bad curds:
Good curds:
Once you've drained the curds, you can lift them up in the cheesecloth and gently squeeze them to eliminate some of the extra whey.
Bad curds (really wet and squishy):
Good curds (firmer and drier):
Now, dump the curds into a microwave-safe bowl. Drain out any extra whey.
The next step is the big test. Microwave the curds on high heat for 60 seconds. If your curds are good, they'll stay solid and there will be some new whey in the bowl. If your curds are bad, they'll turn into ricotta and there will be milk in the bowl. Sometimes you can save the ricotta by massaging it a lot with a spoon, but usually it's a lost cause.
Bad curds (ricotta with milk):
Good curds (curds and whey):
Now you're almost done. Knead the curds with a spoon or spatula, stretching it and folding it on itself. Do this for a minute or so, then spread out the curds and sprinkle the salt onto them. Microwave for another 20 seconds.
Again, knead the cheese with a spoon. Now, pick up the cheese and gently stretch it with your hands. Key word: GENTLY. A constant force *will* stretch it out. This part can burn your hands, so have some cold water ready for when you need a break.
At first, the cheese will be rough and there will be pieces sticking out. That's okay. Stretch it, then fold it in half and stretch again. Do this until it cools down and gets harder to pull. Microwave for another 20 seconds. Be careful -- it's hotter on the inside, so when you start to pull it'll burn you. Now it should stretch a lot.
Stretch once or twice more, then fold it up. Hold it with both hands like you're going to break it in half. Gently push your fingers up into the center while stretching the outsides down with your palms. Turn the ball so that you stretch the top in all directions. The goal is to form a smooth ball by stretching the outside and folding it up into the center. Pinch the bottom together to seal the seam, which probably won't work very well. It's easier to show in pictures than in words.
Congrats. It's cheese. Dunk it in ice water and leave it for a while to keep it ball-shaped, or put it in the fridge and let it flatten out. You can also eat it fresh, but for pizza we need to grate it, so be sure to refrigerate it for a while. You have to refrigerate overnight to get the firmness and whiteness of store-bought cheese, but that's not important for our purpose. It will be very soft when you grate it. By the end, I was mostly just mashing it into the grater.
By the way, the sauce should be done now. It'll be thicker than when you started. Pull out the bay leaf and refrigerate for a while. The refrigeration isn't super-important, but it helps keep the top of the pizza from burning.
Final preparation
Preheat your oven to 500 degrees. Place a rack at the bottom of the oven. Leave the dough out for 30-60 minutes to warm up.
Now you have crust dough, sauce, and grated cheese. Cut the dough in half and start rolling out one piece. Be sure to thoroughly flour your work surface.
I can never roll out dough properly. It always comes out oval-shaped, too thin here, too thick there. Tossing it seemed to work as well as anything. The goal is 1/16 of an inch thick, but I only got down to about 1/8. It worked, so I'm not complaining.
Lay the dough out in the pan and prick it with a fork. This is called docking. I don't prick too deeply since it needs to hold the sauce.
The pan I use it called a cutter pan because it lets you cut off the excess dough with a rolling pin. Mine is a nice commercial one with holes in the bottom for better crust cooking. I got it at PizzaTools.com, which has other nice pizza paraphernalia as well.
Bake the crust by itself for two minutes. When you pull it out, the crust will have some bubbles. Push them down with the fork to release the steam.
Pause for a moment to feel good about yourself. Are you glowing? I'm glowing.
Now, with a burst of energy, spoon some sauce onto the dough! Spread it out, then sprinkle on some cheese. Don't put too much! Add a few basil leaves if you wish, then throw it in the oven!
It'll take about ten minutes to bake. Halfway through, rotate the pan 180 degrees. Don't get too hung up on the time -- watch for the edge of the crust to brown.
The finished pizza looks perfect and professional, mostly thanks to the nifty cutter pan. The cheese is just a little burnt on top for flavor. The bottom of the crust is brown and slightly charred, as desired.
But the most important question still remains -- does Katie like the pizza?
SUCCESS! The pictures speak for themselves -- this is actually a reasonable tasty pizza.
So where could I go from here? The ultimate pizza project would be a true post-apocalypse pizza, made only from ingredients I grow myself or find in the wild. I could grow the tomatoes and herbs locally, and evaporate seawater from Galveston for salt. Cheese is trickier -- I'd need a live cow for milk and a piece of a stomach from a dead one for rennet. Fortunately, there are lots of cows in Texas. I'd need a bacterial culture, too. Flour would be hardest since it takes a wheat field and a mill, but once I've got it I could make a sourdough culture. Finally, the bake itself would have to be done with a wood-burning brick oven. Living in an apartment, I don't think I'll be pulling that off anytime soon, but it's fun to think about.
I hope you all enjoyed this journey into pizza!
This recipe makes two 13" thin crust cheese pizzas. Pizza is very flexible, so feel free to substitute your own component recipes and seasonings. All temperatures are in degrees Fahrenheit.
Crust
Source: PizzaMaking.com
I boosted the quantity a bit to aid in rolling out the dough by hand.
20oz bread flour (about 4-1/3 cups)
8oz water (1 cup)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1-1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1-1/2 teaspoons sugar
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
IMPORTANT: DO THIS THE DAY BEFORE YOU WANT PIZZA. In a mixing bowl, combine the water, oil, yeast, and sugar and stir until thoroughly mixed. In another bowl, stir together the flour and salt. Dump the flour mixture into the mixing bowl. Mix on low speed with a dough hook (or stir by hand, whichever) until almost all of the flour is incorporated. This only takes a few minutes. Don't knead the dough after it combines.
Squish the dough into a ball. It'll be crumbly and kind of dry -- think pie crust, not bread dough. Put it in a sealed bowl and refrigerate for at least 24 hours. Longer might work better. That's it for the crust for now.
Sauce
Source: Everyone had more or less the same recipe
A bunch of tomatoes (I used 3 home-grown Big Beef tomatoes and 8 store-bought Roma tomatoes)
1 yellow onion (you'll need about a tablespoon)
1 bell pepper (also a tablespoon)
1 head of garlic (a few cloves)
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
Some ground black pepper (I used maybe a teaspoon at most)
1 tablespoon corn starch (optional)
Some grated parmesan cheese
1 bay leaf (for simmering only -- DO NOT EAT)
To taste: oregano (I used a couple dozen leaves)
To taste: basil (I used about a dozen leaves)
To taste: whatever else you want (I added half a jalapeno because that's how we roll in Texas)
Pizza sauce is all about the tomatoes. Everything else is optional. I think plain tomatoes taste bitter (weird sense of taste), so I threw in a bunch of other stuff. Most people like tomatoes, so find the best ones you can. Meaty plum tomatoes like Roma are best. Home-grown tomatoes have more flavor than store-bought, but my apartment balcony faces west and Houston's not ideal for tomatoes anyway, so I supplemented.
First, prepare the tomatoes. Start by blanching them in boiling water. I like to suspend the tomatoes in a colander.
My home-grown tomatoes took about 30 seconds, the store-bought ones took a few minutes. Regardless, what you want is for the skin to split open. This is not a subtle thing, but it can be hard to see through the steam and bubbling water. Hence, the colander.
Blanched tomatoes are easy to peel with your hands. Once you're done, you'll have a bunch of freaky-looking skinless tomatoes.
Slice off the green stem, then cut in half and scoop out the seed-filled goop. You want to save the fleshy outer part. I wasn't sure about the center, so I kept it too. The goop is between the center and the outer flesh. This part is really messy. I found that gently scraping the flesh with a knife got most of the seeds off, but you might have a better method. Regardless, the purpose of all this is to get rid of the bitter skin and seeds. If you don't care about that, I guess you can leave them in.
Once you're done, you'll have a bowl full of tomato bits. Crush them with your hands. CRUSH THEM!
Once they're crushed, pour them into a colander with some cheese cloth in it. This will drain out some of the water. Dump the solid remains into a blender.
Chop up the onion, bell pepper, and garlic and add them to the tomato chunks. Only add the stuff you need to puree. Fresh herbs are a great addition.
Herbs are our friends!
Anyway, at this point you should have a bunch of stuff in the mix. You'll probably throw away most of the onion, garlic, and bell pepper unless you had something else planned.
Now you're ready to puree the tomatoes. ACTION SHOT!
I think it can go for a long time, but I stopped when it looked like a saucey salsa.
Dump the puree into a pot. Add the salt, sugar, pepper, some more fresh herbs, the corn starch, the grated parmesan, the bay leaf, and whatever else you want. IMPORTANT NOTE: bay leaves can supposedly perforate your intestines if you eat them. This may be apocryphal, but I have one reputable book that says so, so I wouldn't take any chances. Be sure to remove the leaf after you're done simmering.
Speaking of which, start simmering the sauce. Heat it on medium while stirring until it starts to bubble, then switch to low or medium low and let it sit while stirring occasionally. You just want to evaporate the water; cooking it a lot will kill the flavor. About 30-60 minutes should be good, but it depends on how much water is in your tomatoes. I added corn starch to help mine thicken but most people think this isn't necessary. While you're waiting, you can do the cheese. P.S. Tomatoes stain, so don't stir with a white spatula. Especially not the brand new white spatula you just got yesterday. Speaking from personal experience here.
(Fun fact: canned tomato is supposedly better for sauces than whole tomato, and this simmering is the reason. A lot of flavor molecules are volatile and break down or evaporate easily under high heat. Commercial canners can get the water out using a vacuum evaporator, which lets water boil off at low temperatures. At home, we're stuck with the high temp/long time method.)
Cheese
Source: Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll
Note: I doubled the rennet to make this recipe more reliable. Cheese making ingredients are hard to find. I order mine from CheeseMaking.com. Health food stores might have citric acid, but I don't know of any brick and mortar store with liquid rennet or lipase.
1 gallon milk (not ultra-pasteurized -- I used 2% but whole should work too)
1-1/2 teaspoons powdered citric acid
1/2 teaspoon liquid rennet (either animal or bacterial is fine)
1/4 teaspoon lipase powder (optional -- for flavor)
1/4 teaspoon calcium chloride (optional -- supposedly helps with store-bought milk, but this may be apocryphal)
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
Distilled water (as needed)
Do not deviate from this recipe or there is a good chance it will fail. Cheese is VERY temperamental.
Stir the citric acid into 1/2 cup of distilled water until it dissolves. Stir the rennet into 1/4 cup distilled water. Stir the lipase into 1/4 cup distilled water. It won't dissolve completely, but keep stirring for a long time so the clumps break up.
Start by pouring the milk into a large pot. Like I said before, you can do this while the sauce is simmering. Supposedly it's a 30-minute mozzarella recipe, but it usually takes me 45-60. Anyway, turn on medium-low heat and wait for the milk to reach 55 degrees.
I use an instead meat thermometer to measure the milk. Be sure to stir the milk before you measure. At 55 degrees, stir in the citric acid solution and the lipase solution.
Continue heating on medium-low until you hit 90 degrees. You'll probably get a bit of curdling along the way. This is normal; don't worry about it.
At 90 degrees, gently stir in the rennet solution. At this point, start gently stirring once every 30 seconds or so. The milk will quickly begin to separate into solid white curds and liquid yellow-green whey. Keep going until the whey gets over 100 degrees (you can go up to 105 if you really want).
The first time I did this I didn't use enough rennet, so there are two sets of pictures showing good curds and bad curds. Good curds will be firm, and will clump together and sink to the bottom of the pot. Bad curds will be very soft, float, and won't totally separate from the whey. Remember, this takes time, so don't panic if they're not perfect at first.
Bad curds:
Good curds:
Once the curds have heated, pour them into a colander filled with cheesecloth. (This is what cheesecloth is for!) Good curds will stay clumped in the pot, so mostly you're just pouring out the whey. Bad curds will flow like jell-o mixed with cottage cheese.
Bad curds:
Good curds:
Once you've drained the curds, you can lift them up in the cheesecloth and gently squeeze them to eliminate some of the extra whey.
Bad curds (really wet and squishy):
Good curds (firmer and drier):
Now, dump the curds into a microwave-safe bowl. Drain out any extra whey.
The next step is the big test. Microwave the curds on high heat for 60 seconds. If your curds are good, they'll stay solid and there will be some new whey in the bowl. If your curds are bad, they'll turn into ricotta and there will be milk in the bowl. Sometimes you can save the ricotta by massaging it a lot with a spoon, but usually it's a lost cause.
Bad curds (ricotta with milk):
Good curds (curds and whey):
Now you're almost done. Knead the curds with a spoon or spatula, stretching it and folding it on itself. Do this for a minute or so, then spread out the curds and sprinkle the salt onto them. Microwave for another 20 seconds.
Again, knead the cheese with a spoon. Now, pick up the cheese and gently stretch it with your hands. Key word: GENTLY. A constant force *will* stretch it out. This part can burn your hands, so have some cold water ready for when you need a break.
At first, the cheese will be rough and there will be pieces sticking out. That's okay. Stretch it, then fold it in half and stretch again. Do this until it cools down and gets harder to pull. Microwave for another 20 seconds. Be careful -- it's hotter on the inside, so when you start to pull it'll burn you. Now it should stretch a lot.
Stretch once or twice more, then fold it up. Hold it with both hands like you're going to break it in half. Gently push your fingers up into the center while stretching the outsides down with your palms. Turn the ball so that you stretch the top in all directions. The goal is to form a smooth ball by stretching the outside and folding it up into the center. Pinch the bottom together to seal the seam, which probably won't work very well. It's easier to show in pictures than in words.
Congrats. It's cheese. Dunk it in ice water and leave it for a while to keep it ball-shaped, or put it in the fridge and let it flatten out. You can also eat it fresh, but for pizza we need to grate it, so be sure to refrigerate it for a while. You have to refrigerate overnight to get the firmness and whiteness of store-bought cheese, but that's not important for our purpose. It will be very soft when you grate it. By the end, I was mostly just mashing it into the grater.
By the way, the sauce should be done now. It'll be thicker than when you started. Pull out the bay leaf and refrigerate for a while. The refrigeration isn't super-important, but it helps keep the top of the pizza from burning.
Final preparation
Preheat your oven to 500 degrees. Place a rack at the bottom of the oven. Leave the dough out for 30-60 minutes to warm up.
Now you have crust dough, sauce, and grated cheese. Cut the dough in half and start rolling out one piece. Be sure to thoroughly flour your work surface.
I can never roll out dough properly. It always comes out oval-shaped, too thin here, too thick there. Tossing it seemed to work as well as anything. The goal is 1/16 of an inch thick, but I only got down to about 1/8. It worked, so I'm not complaining.
Lay the dough out in the pan and prick it with a fork. This is called docking. I don't prick too deeply since it needs to hold the sauce.
The pan I use it called a cutter pan because it lets you cut off the excess dough with a rolling pin. Mine is a nice commercial one with holes in the bottom for better crust cooking. I got it at PizzaTools.com, which has other nice pizza paraphernalia as well.
Bake the crust by itself for two minutes. When you pull it out, the crust will have some bubbles. Push them down with the fork to release the steam.
Pause for a moment to feel good about yourself. Are you glowing? I'm glowing.
Now, with a burst of energy, spoon some sauce onto the dough! Spread it out, then sprinkle on some cheese. Don't put too much! Add a few basil leaves if you wish, then throw it in the oven!
It'll take about ten minutes to bake. Halfway through, rotate the pan 180 degrees. Don't get too hung up on the time -- watch for the edge of the crust to brown.
The finished pizza looks perfect and professional, mostly thanks to the nifty cutter pan. The cheese is just a little burnt on top for flavor. The bottom of the crust is brown and slightly charred, as desired.
But the most important question still remains -- does Katie like the pizza?
SUCCESS! The pictures speak for themselves -- this is actually a reasonable tasty pizza.
So where could I go from here? The ultimate pizza project would be a true post-apocalypse pizza, made only from ingredients I grow myself or find in the wild. I could grow the tomatoes and herbs locally, and evaporate seawater from Galveston for salt. Cheese is trickier -- I'd need a live cow for milk and a piece of a stomach from a dead one for rennet. Fortunately, there are lots of cows in Texas. I'd need a bacterial culture, too. Flour would be hardest since it takes a wheat field and a mill, but once I've got it I could make a sourdough culture. Finally, the bake itself would have to be done with a wood-burning brick oven. Living in an apartment, I don't think I'll be pulling that off anytime soon, but it's fun to think about.
I hope you all enjoyed this journey into pizza!