Pizza FROM SCRATCH BC IT’S NOT HARD

Listen up, my hoes. Everyone is always surprised when I say I make pizza from scratch, as this entertaining yet entirely fictional dialogue evidences:

— “I made some pizza yesterday.”

— “what, like the base and sauce too?”

—“well yeah…otherwise it would just have been a ready-made pizza, y’know.”

—“omg that’s so cool; how do you have time for that?”

—“I actually don’t have any friends and do nothing with my time except make pizza dough. I’ve changed my name by deed poll to Luigi Giovanni and only bathe in 100% extra virgin olive oil.”

So, I want to share with you all how bloody easy it is (hint – this recipe involves you leaving the house). And it’s so customisable too – you can add anything you want. I tend to keep toppings light so that the base doesn’t go soggy (excluding mass genocide, there’s not a lot of things worse than a soggy, pallid pizza base).

It’s quite important that you have a flat baking tray or a specific pizza one with perforations if you’re fancy. If you’re weird and have a pizza stone, please PM me so we can have an in depth chat about food. I went into a cooking shop to find a pizza stone and they cost £30 so my £2.99 perforated pizza tray will have to do for now.

This is a really chilled out recipe that you can do in stages throughout the day, or over a couple of days if you wish. Or you can be proper about it and condense the timings down to a couple of hours but I often think leaving it for a while makes it better. Just remember that you’ve got a big mixing bowl full of live yeast in the corner of your kitchen at some point in the week.

This recipe makes quite a lot of pizza dough (at least 3 10″ pizzas worth), which I like to keep in the fridge or freezer and make doughballs or bread or more pizza when I like, which is fairly often.

So here we goes:

Dough

500g (1/2 a bag) of flour. Sometimes I use wholemeal if I’m feeling healthy but for an authentic yummy pizza base, you’re better off using either plain flour or bread flour. None of that cauliflower dough shit here, thank you please. – 22p (1kg of plain flour at Lidl is 44p)

1 teaspoon of yeast. Yeast is a great word. Yeasty yeast yeast. – 5p

Teaspoon of sugar or honey or whatever. Something sweet. Not haribo. – 2p

330ml hottish water. Like, actually quite hot. What your mum would have a bath in. Not quite hot enough to make tea, but that temperature when tea is just the right amount of hotness to drink. 330ml is the exact size of a can of coke, so go figure that quantity if thou possesseth not a jug.

1Big Spoon of Olive oil. Veg oil will be fine at a push but the dough tastes nicer with olive oil – 13p

2 teaspoons of salt. Seems like a lot but v worth it for flavour.

What u do

Get a jug or bowl and spoon your water into it 1 teaspoon at a time, to add oxygen (JOKE just pour the bastard stuff into anything that’ll take it.)

Add your yeast and sugar and leave them to do their dirty business for as long as you wish. I often leave mine to do this while I’m in the shower or getting dressed or wishing that I’d had a gap year. You can probs go to a lecture at this point if you want, just make sure to cover it as it goes v bubbly.

When you’ve got at least a cm of boobly bubbles, pour this mengsel into your flour (which should be in a nice big mixing bowl), along with the salt and olive oil and mix with a big spoono. When it gets too tough to spoon-mix, use your hands and squish it around a bit to activate the gluten in the flour. Oh yeah, you’re impressed now. You could take it out of the bowl and knead it a bit more if you want, but I normally just leave it be and forget about with with some cling film over it in a warm place, having first covered the dough in olive oil for the kinks.

After an indefinite period of time (for me this is often overnight, or  like 8 hours, or when I remember that I want pizza), the dough should be fucking massive and smell like beer, a bit like a darts player. You should tip the dough out onto a floury surface and sprinkle flour on it and knead that badboi till it’s as stretchy and elastic as the government’s attitude to tax-havens. This is a good break when you are in the middle of an essay.

Pizzering the actual pizza.

Put your oven on the highest setting it will go. This mimics but does not quite equal the temperature you’d find in a real clay pizza oven and is very important for a nice base.

You can now shape you dough. I pull off just over a third of this mix to make a 9-10″ base. I tend to freeze the rest for later. I happen to own a rolling pin but a wine or big beer bottle works well for making it pizza shaped. Even a full can of strongbow will suffice as a rolling implement, provided you flour it first. There’s a sentence you didn’t ever think you’d read.

I bash mine out into a circle and roll it pretty thin. Put this on a tray before you add toppings, or chaos will quickly ensue. Now read below for topping advice:

TOPPINGS

All of this is entirely optional; I mean, you could just have a big ol’ wheel of bread dough to eat with nothing on it but that’d be boring af.

What I put on mine and how I do it:

Once I’ve rolled my dough as thin as I can without it breaking, I heat up half a clove of garlic in the microwave and dip it in olive oil before rubbing it sensuously all over my pizza base. You can choose not to do this but I think it adds an extra dimension, without it being too garlicky. Also, I’m extra.

I then get a big spoon of pure tomato passata and splodge it right in the middle of the pizza base, spreading it out to the edges with the back of the spoon. It’s important not to add too much of this as again, soggy dough is gross.

I sprinkle oregano, chopply freshed basil and black pepper all over this before adding a as much torn, fresh mozzarella as possible. Gram for gram, excluding cream cheese, mozzarella is cheaper than most other cheeses by a long way. It’s also sodding delicious and takes all of my self control not to eat the whole thing before it goes on top. You can use cheddar if you’re a pleb.

I then add whatever is floating around in my fridge that needs using up (usually very thinly sliced red onions and some spinach), but you can add whatever the hell you want: pepperoni, glitter, ham, mushrooms, pebbles, egg, bacon, more cheese, feathers – you name it.

I then add some more basil, or more recently, that homemade pesto from a couple of posts back. I then season everything, drizzle with a little bit of olive oil and chuck the tray in the oven for around 14 minutes, or until the crusts are golden brown and the mozzarella makes you want to cry with happiness.

Shave parmesan all over it when it’s still hot if you want, and then top it with rocket and more olive oil. Voila – une Pizza.

I won’t cost this one fully as it depends what you put on it. But just to let you know, a ball of mozzarella is 43p at Lidl and pasatta is like 34p. So cheap af really.