Four Flavorful Homemade Pizzas!

Start with a little herbed ball of dough

Saturday I took a day off from sweets and focused on savory tastes. My uncle and his family came over and I was instructed to make dinner--pizza! Grammy and mom have been making pizza from scratch for as long as I can remember, and no matter how many pizzas I eat over the years, these are always the tastiest. It's a bit time consuming to make your own pizza dough, but the time involved in actually working is relatively little. Most of the time the dough is rising, and you're doing something else like reading or blanching tomatoes for sauce-making.

Let it rise and you have a giant herbed bowl of dough!

Mom uses a simple Fleischmann's master pizza dough recipe, which is really basic. You don't even have to wait for the yeast to rise--just throw it all together. While the dough recipe is wonderful, I like to jazz it up with garlic powder, and handfuls of basil, oregano, and parsley. The smell of the yeasty dough with all those herbs was intoxicating as I kneaded it all into submission.

Pizza 1 (right) & Pizza 2 (left)

Once the dough has soaked up enough flour, set the dough-ball into an oiled bowl and leave it in a warm spot to rise. I put it in the oven, light on, towel on top. I checked to see how much the dough had risen an hour later and found that I had put the rack too high because the dough had risen so much it was squishing between the coils--whoops. It didn't do much but deflate a little when I pulled the bowl out.

Pizza 3

I had quadrupled the recipe since we were having a bunch of people over, and we like to have our options, so I divided the dough into quarters, pamed the pizza pan and got started spreading the dough out. Sauce, sprinkled basil and oregano, and tons of mozzarella were next. Pizza 1 was a basic pepperoni to please the masses, while pizza 2 had chopped garlic, onions, peppers, and seasoned tomatoes (from the Mediterranean bar in Wegmas--these are awesome). Pizza 3 was the same as the vegetable pizza 2, but it included mushrooms, while pizza 3 had everything plus black olives. A little something for everyone. The dough turned out to be so thick, and the toppings were so delicious--the flavors from the vegetables, dough, and herbs radiated throughout.

Pizza 4

I had so much fun baking a savory dish. As much as I love to bake all the sweets, a girl needs to mix it up now and again to keep things interesting! It's good to have real leftovers, too instead of pie and cookies. There was a bunch leftover, so I'll have a meal for a couple of days at least! So good!