Saturday, December 4, 2010

Design your own pizza with whole wheat pizza crust and cherry tomato pizza sauce

Tonight for the big game, we made design your own pizzas. My husband and I have drastically different taste in pizza toppings, so I made personal size pizzas and we each put what we wanted on two pizzas.

First, I  made the crusts. Now, these crusts are a little bit of trouble. So, every time I make them, I go ahead and make a bunch and freeze them. I made 3 batches today for a total of 24 personal pizza crusts.

Here are the necessary ingredients:


1 1/2 cups warm water
2 packets of active dry yeast
2 tsp course salt
2 tbsp sugar
1/4 cup olive oil
2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups whole wheat flour

First, in a large bowl, combine yeast and water. Let it sit for about 5 minutes until it starts to bubble:

Use a whisk to stir the yeast and water, then whisk in the salt, sugar, and olive oil. Then, with a wooden spoon, stir in the flours. You may have to use your hands to get the last of the flour folded into the dough. Then, take a seperate bowl, and brush the bottom and the sides with olive oil. Put the dough in the olive oil lined bowl. Brush the top of the dough with olive oil. Cover the bowl with saran wrap:

Place the bowl in a warm dry place for about an hour (I turn the oven on and put the bowl on top of the oven), or until the dough doubles in size:

Take the dough out of the bowl, and place on a well floured surface (I just flour the heck out of my counter-top). With floured hands, knead the dough about 15 times. Then divide the dough into two balls. Out of each of those two balls, divide the dough into 4 smaller balls (you will have a total of 8 balls of dough). Using your floured hands, kneed, squeeze, and manipulate the dough into 8 inch disks. Place the disks on a cookie sheet or other hard surface with parchment or wax paper between each disk. Then put the entire thing in the freezer for at least an hour before baking. Or, freeze for up to 3 months (6 months with a deep freezer):

Next I made the pizza sauce. I took 2 weeks worth of beautiful cherry and hierloom tomatoes from the CSA, I washed and took the stems off each one, and I cut them in half:

 Then I drizzled a little olive oil over them, added 1 tsp minced garlic, and plenty of salt and pepper. Then I used my immersion blender to get the mixture going. I did not keep going until it was a puree, I wanted to keep some of the chunkiness of the tomatoes. I had plenty of this left over, so I froze several portions of it as well:

I pulled out the pizza stone, and put 4 of the whole wheat pizza crusts on it. Then I spread about 4 tbsp of the tomato sauce on top. Then we each added our own toppings:

Each of these has 4 cheese mexican mix shredded cheese on top. The pizza in the upper left hand corner has spinach, black olives, mushrooms, and goat cheese. The pizza in the upper right hand corner has sausage and black olives. the pizza in the lower left hand corner has mushrooms, spinach, and goat cheese, and the pizza in the lower right hand corner is just cheese.

I put them in the oven on the pizza stone for 20 minutes at 450:

The pizzas were delicious, and the pizza making went much better than the football game. Here is my sad little Gamecock:

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