Project Pizza

Hi, there!  I hope you had a wonderful 4th of July, filled with good food, surrounded by good people. This year, instead of grilling or having a cookout, we took some time out to do a little something different on the 4th.  My little one and I embarked on a little project I called, Project Pizza!

We finally made homemade pizza - as in dough and all.  It's been something I've wanted to try for a long time.  I think I first put pizza on my to-do list when I saw this post from Joy the Baker. Subsequently, there have been many hunger-inducing homemade pizza tutorials and posts that I've come across.  But things really tipped the scales when I saw pizza week over at little kitchie.  That did it, and I had to check it out for myself!

I procrastinated a long time because there are plenty of terrific pizza options around so I wasn't sure it was worth going to all the trouble (gotta be honest)!  I guess the same can be said of homemade ice cream and look how that turned out.  In other words, I had a sneaky suspicion that, like most things, homemade has its own rewards.  So to satisfy my curiosity, to finally try out Jim Lahey's famous no-knead pizza dough touted by the world and see if it really is as easy and sublime as everyone says, we got to work.

And with pizza being my 8-year old son's favorite food on earth, I thought I'd get him involved and make a little "project" out of it.  Pizza is the one thing he's expressed an interest in making.  So armed with recipes and my young helper, we made a date to work on our project, and it was a lot of fun!

No doubt, we had to make my son's favorite - Pepperoni!

When we talk about making pizza, I think we're really talking about going to the effort of making the dough.  I knew I wanted to try Jim Lahey's no-knead recipe but to confuse me further, it seems there's an original no-knead recipe and then there's the "updated" no-knead recipe, which requires a longer - as much as an 18-hour - rest time.  I planned ahead and opted to go with the updated version.  I've heard raves about it and given the choice, I assume updated is better, right?  We wanted to have pizza for lunch on the 4th so we started the dough the afternoon prior so that it'd be ready for lunch the next day.

As it turns out, making this pizza dough really is pretty easy.  Now that I've done it once, it'll be even easier next time.  The idea of working with yeast has always been daunting but this has gone a long way towards slashing that "fear" for me.  I think I may be on my way to bread-making soon!

This pizza dough needs just four ingredients and you don't do much beyond mixing it together.  Then, you just wait.  Actually, you simply set it aside and forget about it.  It looks like a mess of nothing at first but grows and comes alive, becoming bubbly and more than doubling in size.  My son was pretty amazed and I think it turned out to be a fun lesson for him. 

It's neat to do something you've never done before, and this was all the more fun since I got to learn along with my son.  And we really did learn as we went along.  The dough was a little stickier than I expected so I used a little more flour when handling it.  I had a big hole in the first pie so I just pinched it together - repeatedly - and took my time with it.  The one thing I've learned and that seems to hold true is: don't be afraid.  It's like turning over a fragile cake; it can sense your fear so be confident...at least, that's what I tell myself!

For the adults, a classic Pizza Margherita

Our first pizza-making endeavor was very successful!  The little one gives the homemade pizza a "9"!  We didn't burn anything (what a relief!) and got to have delicious homemade pizza for our 4th of July lunch.  This may sound crazy but the pizza tasted...light and clean.  I know we're talking pizza but there is something about homemade, where you control and know exactly what goes into it, that makes the food simply fresh and good.  The dough turned out better than I expected.  I was worried it'd be soggy but it turned out crispy, with a nice bit of chew to it.  Placing the dough on top of some cornmeal works really nicely and adds a bit more texture to the baked crust.

Our homemade pizzas might not beat one of those pies from a brick oven but I was very impressed by what we could do in our little home oven at 500 degrees.  Having a bite of the pepperoni pizza really took me back to being a kid in Brooklyn, and made me think about all the times I'd go out for pizza with my friends after school.  Food does that, doesn't it?  It creates and melds together with memories, and I have very fond memories surrounding pizza...and I know my son will too.