Homemade Pizza: Three Ways

Rosemary Potato Pizza

Recipe at a glance:

For crust (makes 1 thin crust):

2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp active dry or instant yeast
1/2 cup lukewarm water (plus 1-2 tbs extra)
2 tbs olive oil
1-2 tbs corn meal (for dusting)

For toppings:

Rosemary Potato Pizza:
1 link chicken bratwurst, cooked or 1 cup of cooked shredded chicken
3-4 small red or new potatoes
3-4 oz shredded mozzarella cheese
3-4 tbs of wine sauce (enough to lightly cover pizza, store bought or homemade, recipe below)
1 tsp dried rosemary

Sausage and Roasted Peppers Pizza:
1 link of hot italian sausage, cooked
2 bell peppers (I prefer using 1 red and 1 yellow bell pepper)
3-4 oz shredded mozzarella cheese
3-4 tbs of marinara sauce (enough to lightly cover pizza)

BBQ Chicken pizza:
1 cup chicken (cooked and shredded)
2 small onions (or 1 large onion, chopped, about 1 cup)
1 tbs brown sugar
3-4 oz shredded cheddar cheese
2-4 tbs barbecue sauce

Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 10 min
Wait time: 2 hours for first rise, 20 minutes for second rise. First rise can be 8 hours in the fridge.
Utensil/bowl use: Minimal – medium mixing bowl, measuring cup/spoon, large cutting board, baking sheet, rolling pin
Extra items: parchment paper

Prep and cook times for toppings are variable, but none listed here take more than 20 minutes for prepping and cooking. This is assuming that you have the leftover shredded chicken already made for the BBQ pizza.

BBQ Chicken Pizza

The irony of writing a post about homemade pizza while I currently have delivery pizza on its way to my door right now hasn’t escaped me. In fact, it makes me feel a little guilty for extolling the virtues of the homemade pizza (simple, cheap, tasty!). In fact, I feel so guilty that I am having a hard time finding anything more than pathetic excuses as to why I am not eating homemade pizza right now. I mean, I live in Chicago, the land of the deep dish pizza. That means I should at least get a pass in the homemade pizza department, right? Maybe if I had actually ordered deep dish pizza, that excuse might work. Or there is the fact that Chris and I hosted a waffle brunch for about 15 people this morning and spent two plus hours in the kitchen tending to waffles and bacon. This excuse has legs, at least. We absolutely do not want to be in the kitchen anymore. In all honesty though, homemade pizza should be the perfect meal for this sort of mood, it is just that easy.

But instead, we’re just being exceedingly lazy. Don’t be like us. Try homemade for a change. It really is that easy.

For a recent gathering of friends, Chris and I wanted to make a few pizzas. For seven hungry adults, three pizzas worked out well. For these pizzas, there are usually 2-3 moderately sized servings; Chris and I can split one and have something to take for lunch the next day.

Because we ended up making three pizzas that night, you are getting three recipes in one. I also hope that the variations in types of pizza I have thought up here might inspire you to try out your favorite pizza topping combinations. The crust is the main recipe here, the toppings are meant to be modified and played around with to your heart’s content. The three pizzas that I made that evening are well-loved combos that I have made often before: Rosemary Potato Pizza, Sausage and Roasted Pepper Pizza, and BBQ Chicken Pizza. Even though I made three crusts, I am only going to give instructions for making one.

To begin, put 2 cups of flour in a medium sized mixing bowl.

Add 1 tsp of active dry yeast.

Add 1 tsp salt.

Whisk these three ingredients to mix.

Once mixed, add 1 cup of lukewarm water. Hot water out of the tap works just fine.

Add 2 tbs of olive oil. Stir to combine the wet ingredients with the dry. Only spend about a minute on this step. The ingredients aren’t going to fully incorporate with just stirring.

Instead, they will begin to look like a shaggy mess. When you get to this phase after a short bout of stirring, start trying to work the dough into a shaggy ball with lightly floured hands.

Also, lightly flour a work surface that will be used for kneading the dough. I used a large glass cutting board. Because I can’t stand actually cutting on this board, it serves no other purpose than this one.

Turn your shaggy dough ball out onto your floured surface and knead it for about two minutes.

If you happened to have a few bits of dough left in the mixing bowl that weren’t incorporating into the ball, simply take the dough ball and rub/roll/toss it around the sides of the bowl. Make sure to get as much of the flour in the bowl as possible.

After a minute or two of kneading, shape the dough into a ball. It should have a consistent texture and color throughout and all shagginess should be gone. If it isn’t, add a few drops of water, briefly knead some more, and repeat until it does look similar to this.

Place the dough back on the floured surface for a moment and put several drops of olive oil back in the mixing bowl.

Spread the oil around so that the bowl is coated with oil. A spritz of cooking spray will also work.

Roll the dough ball around in the oil to give it a coating as well.

Now, every where I have found pizza dough recipes, suggest using plastic wrap to cover the top of the bowl while the dough rises. I have no idea why, but I can never seem to get plastic wrap to actually stick to anything. It says “Plastic Wrap” on the roll and I know that you want to stretch it and pull it tight around the edges of the bowl and somehow manage to get it to stick to itself on the sides of the bowl. I am perfectly aware of how it is “supposed” to work. But it never does. I have no idea how I fail at plastic wrap 101 every single time. Wadded up wrap or stretched out shards of plastic later, I always end up covering the bowl with foil and then covering that with a heavy plate. Wrapping the bowl ensures that there are no drafts around your dough. The foil/heavy plate method is not ideal for this. My dough tends to form a slight crust due because of my failure at plastic wrap, but the slight crust tends to fall apart during the second rise.

After tightly covering the dough, let it double in size. This can be done using two methods. The first is to let the bowl sit out for 1-2 hours depending on how warm your kitchen is. The second method, and my favorite, is to let the dough have a “cool rise.” I tend to make the dough in the morning, stick it in the fridge before I leave for work, give it 8 hours to rise in the fridge, and it is ready to be “punched down” in the evening when I get home.

When the dough has doubled in size, release the air in the dough by pressing down on the dough with your palm or “punch down” the dough with your fist. Recover the dough and let it rest for 20 minutes if doing a regular rise or about 30 minutes for a cool rise. This is usually more than enough time to prep topping ingredients. I am rarely precise with the second rise time and almost always cut it short. This dough is awfully forgiving.

Preheat oven as high as it can safely go. 450 degrees is the maximum I like to have my oven go.

Here are a few topping suggestions:

BBQ Chicken Pizza:

The base for this pizza is the BBQ sauce. Pick your favorite brand.

I had a cup of leftover roast chicken and a few onions.

Chop the onions into thin slivers by making long top-to-bottom cuts.

To caramelize the onion, cook it on medium-low with 1 tbs of brown sugar. To best caramelize onions, you want to cook them on low for about 30 minutes. However, I don’t have that sort of time, so I usually only cook them for about 10 minutes until they are soft and browned.

They will look like this.

After the second rise, turn the dough out on a floured surface and start flattening it out. I usually let gravity do most of the hard work so I do most of this step by holding up an edge of the dough and letting the dough stretch and flatten with its own weight until it gets too big and unwieldy to hold

Roll the pizza out to your desired size and shape.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and lightly coat with cornmeal. The cornmeal is usually used to ensure that the pizza won’t stick to the baking dish, but I think it gives the crust an amazing texture.

Once the dough is rolled out, start throwing on toppings. Lightly spread the BBQ sauce on the dough.

Cover the BBQ sauce with the caramelized onions.

Scatter the shredded chicken on the onions.

Lightly cover the toppings with the cheddar cheese.

Bake the pizza in the oven at the highest temperature you can get it. I never feel safe broiling in my tiny apartment oven or taking it over 450 degrees. At 45o degrees, the pizza is done after 10-12 minutes or when the crust is a golden brown and the toppings are lightly blistered.

Rosemary Potato Pizza:

Slice 3-4 small potatoes as thinly as you can. You want enough potato slices to cover the pizza in a thin layer.

Line a baking sheet with foil and roast the potato slices fro 10 minutes or until they are sweating and their edges are slightly browned.

Cut the chicken sausage into small chunks and cook on medium low until done. Since I had two pizzas that used sausage, I cooked both batches of sausage in the same skillet. The chicken bratwurst is on the left and the Italian sausage is on the right.

Normally, I make my own wine sauce for this pizza, but since I was making three pizzas at once, I used a generic sauce. Both work well. To make your own wine sauce, melt 4 tbs of butter in a medium skillet and add 1/4 cup of wine when melted. Simmer on low for 10-15 minutes until liquid is slightly reduced. Add 1/2 tsp of lemon juice to sauce right before applying sauce to pizza.

Again, roll the crust out to desired size on a cornmeal and parchment lined baking sheet. Thinly spread wine sauce on the crust. Dot the pizza with the cooked chicken sausage.

Cover the pizza with a layer of slightly-overlapping roasted potato slices. Lightly sprinkle pizza with rosemary and mozzarella cheese (I completely missed the picture of this step, whoops!). Bake in the preheated oven for 10-12 minutes or until crust is lightly browned and the toppings are slightly blistered.

Sausage and Roasted Peppers Pizza:

Chop off the tops and bottoms of the two peppers and remove stems and seeds.

Make a cut lengthwise down the pepper.

Cut the pepper into long, thin matchsticks.

If your peppers are long, cut the matchsticks in half so they are a bit more bite sized.

Put them on a foil lined baking sheet and place into preheated, 450 degree oven for 10 minutes.

Spread a thin layer of marinara sauce on the rolled out pizza crust.

Dot the pizza with the sausage and add a layer of roasted peppers on top of the sausage.

Lightly sprinkle mozzarella cheese on the pizza and bake for 10-12 minutes in your preheated oven.

It will look like this!

Here’s a shot of the BBQ chicken. My guests were so enthusiastic about eating it that it was stolen from my kitchen and cut up before I could get a fresh, just-out-of-the-oven picture.

Here is the favorite of the evening, the Rosemary Potato Pizza.

Homemade Pizza: Three Ways

Pizza Dough (mostly my creation but inspiration was found on Smitten Kitchen):

2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp active dry or instant yeast
1/2 cup lukewarm water (plus 1-2 tbs extra)
2 tbs olive oil
1-2 tbs corn meal (for dusting)

Makes 1 large thin crust pizza. The crust can be made 2 or 8 hours in advance depending on what type of rise you choose, either warm or cool, respectively.

Mix flour, salt and yeast in a medium sized mixing bowl. Add lukewarm water and oil to the bowl and stir to incorporate the wet ingredients with the dry. When stirring, try to incorporate dough into a shaggy ball.

Lightly flour a work surface. Empty dough and as much flour from the bowl onto the work surface. Knead dough for 1 to 2 minutes and form it into a homogeneous ball. If there are cracks still left in the dough, a few drops of warm water will help make it smoother. Try to avoid using too much extra water, the dough shouldn’t be terribly sticky.

Coat the inside of the mixing bowl with a few drops of olive oil and place the dough ball back into the bowl. Roll the dough around the inside of the bowl to coat the dough with oil as well. Tightly cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rise for 1-2 hours on the countertop if using a warm rise or 8 hours in the refrigerator if using a cool rise.

After the specified rise time, the dough should have doubled in size. Right before you begin making the toppings, press down the dough with a lightly floured hand in order to release air from the dough. Reshape the dough back into a ball and recover. Let the dough sit in the covered bowl on the counter top for 20 minutes if you used a warm rise or 30 if a cool rise was used.

Preheat oven to the highest heat it can attain (I use 450 degrees) and prepare your toppings.

Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper and sprinkle cornmeal on the sheet. On the floured work surface, roll out the pizza dough to the desired size and transfer it to the baking sheet. Cover the dough with toppings of your choice and bake for 10-12 minutes until the crust is browned and the toppings have lightly blistered.

Topping Suggestions:

Rosemary Potato Pizza:
1 link chicken bratwurst, cooked or 1 cup of cooked shredded chicken
3-4 small red or new potatoes
3-4 oz shredded mozzarella cheese
3-4 tbs of wine sauce (enough to lightly cover pizza, store bought or homemade, recipe below)
1 tsp dried rosemary

Sausage and Roasted Peppers Pizza:
1 link of hot italian sausage, cooked
2 bell peppers (I prefer using 1 red and 1 yellow bell pepper)
3-4 oz shredded mozzarella cheese
3-4 tbs of marinara sauce (enough to lightly cover pizza)

BBQ chicken pizza:
1 cup chicken (cooked and shredded)
2 small onions (or 1 large onion, chopped, about 1 cup)
1 tbs brown sugar
3-4 oz shredded cheddar cheese
2-4 tbs barbecue sauce

For each of these pizzas, spread a thin layer of sauce on top of the rolled out pizza dough. Leave about an inch of the dough uncovered around the edges. Dot the pizza with meat and other toppings. Some of the vegetable toppings will need slight cooking before putting on the pizza. Potatoes especially will require a bit of pre-roasting in order for them to cook fully on the pizza. Sprinkle with seasonings of choice. Lightly cover toppings with cheese.