Recipe: homemade pizza from scratch

Pizza. That perfect slice of dough, topped with tomato sauce, cheese and anything else your fridge has to offer. It might not be good for your body, but its great for the soul. And it tasts heavenly.

At least if you don’t buy the deep frozen stuff, that almost always tastes like cardboard and old socks.

So here is our way of preparing this most famous of Italian dishes from scratch.

Ingredients for the dough:
500g of flour (plain)
2 satchels (7g each) of dried yeast
360ml lukewarm water
1 tablespoon of brown sugar
1 tablespoon of olive oil
a pinch of salt

The basic ingredients for the dough are very simple: flour, yeast and water. We start with preparing the yeast.

This will get the yeast working. In a few minutes, this brown mixture will start to froth a little, meaning it is ready to go into the dough.

In the meantime…

I prefer using a 1:1 ratio of plain white and wholemeal flour. But any combination of the two (or just using one or the other) works.

Add a pinch of salt and a bit of olive oil (about a table spoon).

Once the yeast is ready, put that in as well, add the rest of the water and start mixing and kneading.

After about 10 minutes you get a lump of very slightly sticky and elastic dough. Cover and set to rise in a warm, draft free place.

Once the dough has risen, take it out of the bowl and knead it again, just for a bit. Divide up into the number of pizzas you intend to make.

Dusting them with flour will keep them from sticking to the surface.

As Luka does not like tomato sauce, we always turn one of the pizzas into garlic bread with cheese, by leaving out the tomato and adding a few pieces of garlic butter.