We’re a fan of making our own pizzas, once you’ve had home made you don’t want to go back to store bought if at all possible (though that does go for most things, not just pizza). The best thing about home made pizza, you can top it with whatever you like, whatever takes your fancy. I’m going to show you the crust here, and then a couple of suggested toppings.

We use a sourdough starter for our crust, it doesn’t really add much flavour unless you let it proof for hours upon hours. The downside of that is it makes the dough harder to handle, more delicate, more likely to tear. Leave it for an hour though, and it produces a perfect pizza crust, slightly elastic and able to take some handling and stretching.

Equal quantities of the starter and bread flour are mixed together with a touch of olive oil, when the dough is starting to come together add the salt. It makes a firm but supple dough, it’s not sticky, but it holds together while kneading, if the dough hook is tearing it apart you need to add a touch more water. We leave it for about an hour to rest and relax, then split it in two and wrap them up so they don’t form a skin before we shape them.

Start your oven pre-heating at 425 – 450 degrees, and your grill pre-heating on high.  Spritz the pan lightly with cooking spray, spread and shape your dough on a flat surface (not too thick, not too thin.. we go for pretty damn thin though) and brush one side lightly with olive oil.  Flip it over onto the grill pan and lightly brush the other side with oil.  Once your grill is pre-heated and rocket hot, place the dough and pan on it and immediately lower the heat to medium/low — you need that initial burst of heat to “set” the bottom of the crust and start the browning so that the dough doesn’t sag through the perforations in the pan.  Keep an eye on the crust by flipping up an edge every so often and check for browning — the crust will start to rise and firm up, and that’s a sign that the crust is starting cooking through — and once the crust is firm enough, rotate it around a bit to ensure even heat distribution.  Once the bottom is evenly and lightly browned, flip it over (I use a combo of a broad flat spatula and tongs) and toast the other side lightly as well.  If you’re doing multiple crusts, re-heat your grill to high between each one.

We start the crust on the grill for the high temperatures.. A standard oven just doesn’t get hot enough to produce a nice crisp crust without burning everything on the top of the pizza, so we start on the grill to get it crispy. Then we bring it inside and add the toppings.

The trick there is to not have a mountain of toppings (we do sometimes fail there). Too much sauce, or too much other stuff piled on top and the crust will get all soggy. We slide the crust off the tray then and straight onto the oven rack.

If you toasted the crust well enough on the grill, there should be sufficient structural integrity to keep the crust firm and prevent drooping.  Putting the crust directly on the rack rather than on a pan will let the indirect heat from the oven travel directly into the pizza and finish making the crust crispy, rather than insulating it from that heat with the pan — which, yes, does eventually get quite hot but that takes time to get so… and metal pans have poor heat storage, so that even if you pre-heat the pan, it’ll lose all that heat the instant you put the cool pizza on it.

Optimally, if you have a pizza stone, you have the best of all worlds.  You pre-heat the stone with the oven, it stores a lot of heat and transfers it into the pizza when you place it on the stone in the oven.  In the absence of a stone, put the pizza directly on the oven rack.

Your three goals here are to 1) heat all the ingredients through, 2) melt the cheese and brown it a bit and 3) make the crust nice and crisp.  If you have too much stuff piled up, you lose all claim to balancing those and will either burn your crust to a cinder and/or render the cheese on top inedible long before the ingredients heat up.  Show some restraint, it’ll be worth it.  This is all done by keeping an eye on things, but aim for about 10 minutes as a general guideline.

Take your pizza out of the oven, and show about 2 minutes of restraint.  Let it cool for those 120 seconds before cutting, and you will be rewarded with slices of pizza that don’t miraculously heal themselves back together with molten cheese.  Again, trust me on this.

At the end of those two minutes, cut up your pizza and savour and enjoy. Feel good about yourself for making something so delicious!

Of course, sometimes you want pizza but you don’t have the time to go through all this process. The goal then, is to plan ahead. We make twice the amount of dough, so enough for two pizzas. Then the first two crusts are left to cool once they come off the grill. Once your pizzas are assembled and in the oven finishing off, turn your attention back to the two (now cool) crusts. Top them with whatever you like, then wrap well in cling wrap. I generally go for at least two layers. Label (if you’re a freak like me who labels everything in the freezer even when it’s perfectly obvious what it is), and freeze. Make sure they’re flat for the initial freeze, then they can be stack or stored on their sides in the freezer.

Next time you feel like pizza, don’t go to the store, just pull out your own ready made pizza and bake it off!

The pizzas in this post are a selection of toppings, we have a tomato sauce with pepperoni, portobello mushrooms, sweetcorn and our homemade mozzarella that we showed you on Monday. The next one uses pesto as the sauce (home made with home grown basil), grilled chicken (slightly underdone so it finishes cooking on the pizza rather than drying out), sweetcorn and a blend of Italian cheeses. The frozen pizza is pesto, pepperoni, mushrooms and sweetcorn (can you tell we like corn on pizza.. we also like broccoli on pizza too!). Come up with your own combinations, find what you like and then impress all your friends with your gourmet pizzas!

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Recipe
Yields 2 crusts, about 10″ diameter

16oz (by weight) Wet Sourdough Starter
16oz Bread Flour
1tsp Salt
1tbsp Olive Oil