Pizza Margherita and Sausage Pizza

I made my first ever pizza on Sunday! The fact that these were my first ever pizzas is, in and of itself something of a surprise since my mother, who would be the first to admit she was not the cook in our family, really enjoyed making one particular dish, and that was pizza. Let me tell you this my friends, my Mom can make some killer, damn good pizza. With those kinds of genes running through me, you'd think that all I ever did was whip out the pizza, yet before Sunday I never actually tried making any myself. All that has changed now, for I am the newly crowned QUEEN of PIZZA!

ok, ok, let me stop.

So what gives? Why did I suddenly, after all these years feel the urge to try making pizza?

Well, I was wandering through the freezer section of the supermarket the other day and came across a package of frozen pizza dough and was curious. Is frozen pizza dough any good? I had no idea; so naturally, I picked up a package and brought some home to try. I do know that making pizza dough is not easy and can even be considered an art form, especially to some pizza purists. I've read that true Italian style pizza dough uses a special 00 grade flour and that proportions of flour to other ingredients must be exact and never substituted. This has always intimidated me and kept me from trying my own. My mother never made her own pizza dough, she was lucky because in the neighborhood were I grew up in Brooklyn, folks could buy freshly made pizza dough from the local bread bakeries 6 days a week (call ahead please for orders over 10 pounds). This dough, along with whatever magic and special touches my mother added made the pizza that I knew and loved as a kid so very very good. This frozen block of doughy ice had big shoes to fill, let me tell you.

The instructions on the package were quite simple, "rub dough lightly with olive oil, place in a bowl and cover with a towel for 4 or more hours". Ok, easy enough. The package DID give a recipe for pizza, but I was set on trying to make a Pizza Margherita, pizza made with buffalo mozzarella, smothered in sauce and sprinkled with fresh basil, oh yes! The sausage pizza came out of a request from Tom, who, upon hearing that traditional pizza Margherita contains no meat went into panic mode imagining a meal without meat and so, in an effort not to deprive Tom of meat WHATSOEVER, I made a sausage version just for him. (I know, I’m such a saint).

The sauce was my own homemade recipe. Take enough olive oil to coat the bottom of a saucepan with a thin layer, then, add 6 cloves or more of crushed garlic, sauté until just beginning to turn brown, then add 2 cans of peeled imported Italian plum tomatoes, use a potato masher to break up the whole tomatoes, add salt and pepper, a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes, a healthy dash each of dried oregano, parsley flakes and marjoram and lots of fresh basil leaves that have been washed and torn, stir and let simmer uncovered on the lowest possible heat setting for 2 or more hours. Here's a secret, if the sauce tastes too acidic add a little bit of sugar to cut the acid down. The goal is NOT to make a sweet sauce but just to take the bite out of the acid that sometimes makes a sauce taste bitter.

While the sauce was cooking I had taken the ball of buffalo mozzarella and wrapped it in paper towels, placed it in a dish, placed another dish on top and weighed the whole thing down in an effort to extract as much of the moisture from the cheese that I could. I have read that buffalo mozzarella can ruin a pizza if it’s too fresh. Ideally it’s best used on pizza when it is at least 2 days old because some of the moisture would have evaporated by then. The mozzarella I picked up on Sunday was pretty fresh and therefore pretty moist so my weighing down method worked out really well. The sausage was sweet Italian with anise and fennel, I removed the casings and pre-cooked the meat then set it aside to cool and be ready to crumble over the top of the pizza.

At the four hour point, I removed the balls of dough from the bowls and kneaded them with some flour for 10 minutes, then lightly covered them with olive oil and set them back into the bowls, covered, for another hour. I got a little nervous in that last hour because I was expecting the dough to double in bulk but it never really got any higher than let's say an inch over it's original size. Hmmm, frozen pizza dough so far, did not impress me. After the hour was up, I rolled out the dough and did my best to simulate what I used to see my mother doing to her dough to help it get a round shape, but of course being that it was me, I had no such luck. Then I tried to simulate what I've seen the pizza guys doing in the pizza joints, you know the tossing and stretching thing they do, then the tossing into the air in such a way that the dough spins as it comes back to earth and you try catching it with your hands, THAT was proving to be too scary for my clumsy self so I did my best to get a sort of round-ish shape by doing a combination of moves that looked more like I was spastic than anything else, but HEY! It worked so who's complaining. Pizza number one was topped with a layer of sauce, shredded mozzarella, grated Parmesano Romano and a layer of sausage. Pizza number two was first topped with a layer of sliced mozzarella, then the sauce and 3 minutes before cooking was done a layer of fresh basil. Both pizzas were cooked in a 500 degree oven for 15 minutes then removed and cooled for 10 minutes before slicing.

The Verdict:

I was impressed. I thought the frozen dough wasn't bad at all. It made a nice crisp crust that was also pleasantly chewy in the thicker areas. Although I didn't have a proper pizza stone, the bottoms DID get cooked and the flavor of the dough wasn't bad at all either. Ask anyone that knows me, I detest the undercooked pizza that pizza parlors sell these days and so when I inspected the bottoms after 15 minutes of cooking and they weren’t raw I was in happiness overload. I was expecting a bland tasting crust, but much to my great pleasure it was not. The pizza themselves were fantastic too. My sauce came out really well, the mozzarella did not leak out any liquid that would have ruined the pizza and overall the whole experience, from start to finish was really great. Of course I'd like to make my own dough one day, but until that day comes, or if I'm ever in a pinch, this frozen stuff wasn't so bad after all.

Written by Deb on June 15, 2003 10:00 PM