Yesterday, Heather made pizza at our house and left the remaining half jar of pizza sauce. William actually used the word "delicious" to describe the pizza, which is VERY unusual for him. So today I decided to use up the jar on another pizza. We had a ton of basil from our CSA share that we needed to use up, plus some fresh mozzarella. So, margherita pizza! Well, something close to it, anyway. I didn't have a store-bought crust but also didn't feel like spending hours on a totally-from-scratch crust. I've never tried my bread machine for anything other than a finished bread product, so this was the perfect opportunity to try it.
I found a recipe for Bread Machine Pizza Dough on food.com that looked simple enough. The only change I made was to add a dash of garlic powder and some ground Italian herbs. After a few minutes of kneading, it looked like the dough might be too dry, so I added maybe a tablespoon or two more of olive oil and used a rubber spatula to help the machine pick up the flaky bits from around the side of the pan until a single ball of dough had formed. Then I left it for the hour and a half of the dough setting.
It looked like the recipe was going to make enough dough for two pizzas, and I wasn't sure if the half-can of pizza sauce was going to be enough, so while the dough was mixing I made extra pizza sauce out of one can (14.5 oz) tomato sauce, one clove of garlic (crushed), a few basil leaves, about 1/2 a teaspoon of onion powder, and some salt and pepper to taste. I let this simmer for about half an hour.
When the dough was done, I divided it in half and spread it out on two baking sheets that were covered in olive oil and then a sprinkling of corn meal. I was really happy with this dough recipe - it seemed like the perfect consistency and was really easy to stretch out. The recipe I usually use tends to get holes in it and is almost too elastic to work with. This one really held its shape. My other recipe says that putting indentations in the crust with your fingers prevents it from bubbling, so I did that, then left it for about 10 minutes to rise just a bit.
Then I put it in the oven at 450 for five minutes (in hindsight I could have skipped this step, since the bottom ended up burning in places by the end). Meanwhile, I sliced up about two balls of fresh mozzarella and cut up a few basil leaves.
After the crusts came out of the oven, I spread the sauce over them and topped them with the mozzarella and basil, and put them back in the oven at the same temp for about eight minutes.
A strange thing happened with the mozzarella. We had two brands: Sargento and BelGioioso. The Sargento, when melted, had the look and consistency of normal mozzarella (kind of translucent and stringy?), whereas the BelGioioso was more opaque and not as stringy, which was more what I expected. But neither one of them was exactly like the cheese I'd seen on margherita pizzas that we've gotten from local restaurants, which was almost the consistency of stiff ricotta (?). So that remains somewhat of a mystery.
The other problem was the slightly burned crust, which I think could be solved by just not pre-baking the crust, or maybe not baking the full pizza for as long (I was hoping the sauce would become a bit less saucy during baking, but eight minutes was apparently not enough for that, so maybe cooking more liquid off the sauce would be another solution).
The ironic part was that I never even got to use Heather's sauce on this pizza since the 14-oz can of tomato sauce was exactly enough for the two pizzas, and I figured Heather's sauce would keep for longer than mine. So more experimenting later.
Anyway, the final product was quite tasty, and this pizza dough recipe is my new favorite. William didn't touch it, but I suspect he would have liked it if he tried it. And now he is threatening to make a big mess if I don't get off the computer, so off I go.
ETA: The next day, William ate FOUR pieces of this for lunch. I'm marking this recipe as William Approved™.
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