Pizza

One of the best things that my father makes is his homemade pizza. When my twin brother, John, would come home from his college days at Purdue, my dad would always make pizza for him. My father likes doing things from scratch. He makes the dough, he lets it rest, he shapes it. He selects his sauces and his toppings, he seasons with herbs, and he bakes. It's a very methodical process.

Tony shares my brother's love of pizza. In fact, pizza is pretty much Tony's favorite food. It's the food that he claims to never get tired of. I, on the other hand, tire very quickly of pizza. I can have pizza maybe once a month. More than that, and I just feel gross. It's a food that for me is more of a treat than a regular meal.

What I share with my father is a love of the methodical process. I like having a plan, a system. I like playing around with a recipe and tweaking it until it's right. That's how I've been approaching yeast-based breads and dough. I've been experimenting with yeast and breads, and I've been using a KitchenAid cookbook which came with my mixer to try some new recipes. When Tony came across the recipe for pizza dough, he got really excited to try it. How could I say no?

Thus far, the recipes I'd tried from the KitchenAid cookbook had been relatively unsuccessful. I was a little skeptical when I was making this dough since it didn't come together very well. First, it seemed too wet. Then, it became too dry. It took longer to mix than the direction said that it would, so it was a lot more glutenous than it should have been. When I let it rise, the outside of it got a little bit strange, like a crust sort of developed. I did cover the dough while rising, so that shouldn't have happened.

I told Tony I was concerned about the potential results, but we decided to give it a shot anyway. I managed to spread the dough out over a cookie sheet, though it did tear a few times. We coated it in pizza sauce and toppings. Half of it had a little less cheese for Tony. We baked it for about 15 minutes at 450 degrees.

It actually ended up being pretty good. The dough was not exactly as good as I'd hoped. I have found another dough recipe to try on Pinterest, and I don't think that I'll be trusting the KitchenAid cookbook anymore. That said, you could do worse than some fresh pizza. And since even bad pizza is still pretty good, it ended up being okay. Next time, though, a different dough recipe would probably make a better result. Since this dough was a little bit bland, I'd also like to experiment with adding some herbs to make it a bit more flavorful. All in all, not a bad first run. Homemade pizza was not as hard as I thought it would be.