When I was growing up, my family had a tradition of having homemade pizza every Friday night. For a number of years I remember we would order sourdough pizza crusts from a place called Foodees in Keene, NH. Sadly Foodees closed after many years, and my family had to change our weekly routine.
Luckily my mom is a great cook, so she decided we would just skip the convience of buying premade crusts and make the crust herself at home. We had a bread machine, so making pizza dough was really simple, but we had to switch from the standard sourdough crust to yeast based crusts. I didn’t really mind the swicth as homemade pizza crust is always delicious. I forgot what I was missing until one of our friends got us a sourdough starter from her mom.
Now that we had our own sourdough culture, I immediately wanted to start making sourdough pizza crust to restart my weekly tradition of having homemade pizza on Friday nights. To my delight, sourdough pizza crust is really easy. You can find the recipe I use (here). Once you get into the habit of making pizza dough, you can always have some on hand to whip up a homemade pizza. We like to freeze our pizza dough until we are ready to use. I will try to remember to thaw it out by popping it into the fridge on Thursday, but if I forget, putting the dough into a warm bowl of water for a half hour also works well.
Pizza is really a blank canvas and you can make unlimited differnt permutations of pizza, depending on what you like. I will walk through how we make our basic pizza, but change out the toppings for whatever you like. Even we make two different types of pizza each week, splitting the pizza down the middle. I like peppers and onions on my pizza, while Mariya thinks that both of those veggies are gross. So just make the pizza how you want your pizza. Be creative.
Preheat your oven to 525ºF (double check the oven is empty).
Next, get a clean working area on the counter to roll out the dough. Sprinkle a liberal amount of cornmeal on the counter to help prevent sticking. Don’t be afraid of the cornmeal.
Begin to roll out the dough, flipping it a couple of times to get cornmeal on both sides. I will usually sprinkle more cornmeal as I roll out the dough. Ideally, you want to end up with a round crust about the size of your pizza pan. I check a couple of times while I’m rolling to make sure I get the right size. Once you are satisfied, transfer the crust to your pan.
With the crust on the pan, it’s time to slather on some sauce. Spread the sauce out to the edges, leaving a small crust around the outside.
Now get your pepperoni and place them onto the pizza. We usually go for almost total coverage.
Add the cheese. Try to get total coverage, just like the sauce.
On top of the cheese, start to place your other toppings. Try to get even coverage across the entire pizza. For the hamburger, we like to mix the meat with some spices (onion powder, Camp Mix, pepper) and then form small little balls or patties. We then arrange those onto the pizza.
Once your oven has reached temperature, put the pizza into the oven on the middle rack. Your total cook time will be about 8 minutes, but make sure you check about halfway through for large bubbles, which you should pop with a fork or knife.
When about 8 minutes is up, you will want to check the bottom. You are looking for a golden brown crust. Once it is done, take the pizza out of the oven and enjoy!