Truly Homemade Pizza

 

Snail Taffy, originally uploaded by radstu.

 Now you may be asking yourself what taffy has to do with homemade pizza and the answer is not much. I (N.) just couldn’t find or take any pictures that I liked of the mozzarella making so I decided to improvise. A tenous connection at best but I’ll have you know that you pull mozzarella just like taffy

I’ll leave most of the explaining and actual pizza making pictures to J. but I will say that making everything was quite fun and only took a couple hours from starting to eating the best pizza ever. 

We got the pizza sauce recipe here but then I added our organic basil and oregano from our window boxes and some red chili paste that we had in the fridge. I liked the added spice since I find most pizza sauce recipes to be too bland.

We made the mozzarella using a kit from the Cheese Queen. We used a gallon of raw milk that we get from our cow share. It was AMAZING!! Seriously I could have just eaten the bowl of mozzarella for dinner and been perfectly content. We only added 1/2 tsp of the cheese salt and it was just the right amount. Of course this meant we have been without milk for a week but it was worth the sacrifice. I had a lot of fun pulling the cheese although it does get very hot.

We won’t repeat her instructions here but you can find them on her website. We were hesitant about how is going to work about since it started out looking like this:

Thankfully after we separated the curds and whey and gave the curds a couple shots of heat in the microwave it looked like this:

It took us three trips to the microwave in order to get the shine and elasticity that tell you the cheese is ready to be stretched.

 

Stretching is the best best

The dough was also a recipe from the Cheese Queen that we used because it was a way to utilize the excess whey (and there was a lot of it). We have more in the fridge (a half gallon to be exact) and we are going to try and see what else we can do with it. 

This is basically what we did for the dough recipe:

1 Cup very warm whey (about 120 F, but not too much warmer than that, and not cooler than 110 F or the yeast will do nothing for you)
3 Cups flour
1 Yeast Package
3/4 TSP Salt
1 Tablespoon Olive Oil

Mix the dry stuff briskly, then add the whey and oil. Mix the ingredients until you have a shaggy mess, then knead until smooth on a floured surface. Let it sit for 10 mins or so, then dust with corn meal on the top, flip it over and roll into the shape you need.

Cook at 400 F for about 20-25 mins.

I (J.) pretty much did exactly what the recipe, and it turned out very good.

We probably used 1/4 cup of our sauce, and spread it in a nice little layer evenly over the rolled-out dough. We then took cheese and hand shredded the clump over the sauce.

In the future, I think we’ll try to roll out the dough a little thinner (ala- New York), and cook it at about 350 F until its done all the way through, though not too crisp. We’d also like to add more cheese. A lot more cheese. It’s not the most Italian thing to do, but I don’t really care. The cheese is just too good.

It might sound like a lot of work, but look at it like this: 1) this pie probably cost us something like three dollars once it was all assembled; 2) we can tell you exactly the ingredients that went into it.

If you like to try new things, and you like something that is entirely homemade then this is a really easy way to start. Give this one a shot, and let us know what you think:)