Homemade Pizzas

Everybody loves a good pizza pie. Throw anything you want on there and bam, the perfect pizza. But it all starts with a good dough. And a good sauce. Then you can do your thing. For this recipe, I saw a good video tutorial about tomato sauces, and within that, there was a pizza dough recipe. So I figured I'd give it a go...

Dough Ingredients:

1 & 1/4 cups warm water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons instant dry yeast
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup all purpose flour
3 & 1/4 cup bread flour
2 teaspoons salt

In a large bowl, combine the water and the sugar. Sprinkle the yeast on top and wait for it to dissolve. Then add olive oil, and half of each flour. Stir a few times and add the remaining flours and salt.

Bring dough together and knead on counter top until it feels smooth. Form dough into big ball, cover lightly with olive oil, and place in bowl covered with plastic wrap. Place in fridge and leave there over night. This step is VERY important. I once only let my dough sit in the fridge for a few hours, maybe 3 or 4. NOT ENOUGH. You won't get the air pockets or the texture of a perfect pizza! Trust me, this is not a step you want to cut corners on! Or you'll regret it. There's my warning, what you do after this is not my fault.

Dough will be about double in size the next day.

Tomato Sauce Ingredients:

1 can crushed San Marzano tomatoes
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon salt
freshly ground black pepper
4-5 basil leaves, roughly torn
1 tablespoon olive oil

Combine all ingredients in medium bowl, and there you have it, pizza sauce. Simple, right?!

Roll out dough to about 8-10 inch rounds. Roll it out pretty thin. You can be all fancy and spread it out with your fingers, but I took the rolling pin approach because I tend to be hasty with the other method and always end up with holes.

The topping of the pizzas are pretty much up to your own preference.

Personally, I made three pizzas all together, the dough will make four, but with the fourth ball I made breadsticks because I had TONS of left over sauce. And 3 pizzas was way more than enough for the two of us.
Two of the pizzas were prosciutto, mozzarella, and parmesan.


The 3rd pizza was a sinful mouthful of heat. I had some shredded chicken, buffalo sauce, cheddar and mozzarella cheese, and Serrano peppers.


Make sure you put a THIN layer of tomato sauce on the pizzas. Too many people put too much sauce and it weighs AND waters down the pizza. In other words... it won't be perfect and it won't cook properly.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees and cook each pizza for about 10 minutes or until done to your liking. And no, I didn't have a pizza stone, I just put the pizzas on a baking sheet, but I'm sure they would have been even better on a stone, but you have to improvise when you have little to work with. Enjoy!