San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
HOW TO MAKE BETTER PIZZAS AT HOME.
Crusts, sauces, toppings — how to do them right
First, the good news: You do not need an imposing woodfired, Neapolitan-style brick oven to make a good pizza at home. Your kitchen’s standard-issue oven is perfectly capable of delivering delectable results.
Now comes the hard part: To avoid a leaden or limp crust, watery toppings or otherwise sad results, you’ll have to flex a few culinary muscles. Nothing too demanding, mind you. And chances are, you can pull off a respectable pie with the tools you have on hand.
Our handy pizza primer will walk you through all the tools, tips and trade secrets you’ll need the next time
you crave a slice.
Hardware
The market’s crawling with brilliant innovations and ridiculous gimmicks for at-home pizzaiolos. In short, you probably don’t need it, whatever it may be. The following, however, are on our list of tools that will help step up your game.
• A pizza stone ($30-40) is a fairly costeffective way to get pizzeria-caliber results. Look for a rectangle shape
• For about twice the cost ($60-$80) of a stone, a baking steel at least a quarter-inch thick will cook faster and more evenly, never break and can double as a griddle on the stovetop.
• Wooden pizza peels are not only effective for transferring pies to the hot oven, they’re an ideal cutting board and serving platter.
• On a tight budget? Then a big cast-iron skillet or pan can do the job of a stone or steel and peel for a fraction of the cost. See this week’s recipes for proof.
• Yes, a dramatically large mezzaluna is the sexiest way to cut a pie. You could even use your fancy chef ’s knife. But a
basic $5 restaurant-grade wheel cutter is still the most efficient tool for the job.
The crust
With virtually all pizzas, success starts with the dough.
• Nothing beats homemade. And no homemade dough will outperform the no-knead version we’ve included in this week’s batch of recipes. The downside? You have to plan at least 12 hours in advance.
• Short on time but still craving scratch-baked results? Embrace the Midwestern-style unleavened cracker crust (see recipe). It’s satisfying, fail-safe and sturdy enough to carry a generous payload of toppings.
• Bottom line, if you want to buy premade pizza dough, you will not beat Trader Joe’s fresh ready-to-bake varieties for value and results. The stuff costs a little over a buck and works particularly well with our Cast-Iron Margherita Pizza recipe.
• The pro move is to source dough from your favorite neighborhood slice joint. Plenty of local pizzerias — Dough Pizzeria Napoletana, Cerroni’s Purple Garlic and Grimaldi’s among them — will gladly part with a ball of their expertly made dough for a few bucks.
• Unless you’re looking for a gluten-free, cauliflower or other specialty crust, pass on the preformed frozen crusts. At that point you might as well save a few bucks and buy a whole frozen pie.
Saucy secrets
There’s nothing like a longsimmered ragu over pasta. But this is pizza. The rules are different.
• Stop cooking your pizza sauce altogether. A 15-ounce can of tomatoes, a couple garlic cloves, a tablespoon each of dried oregano and dried basil, and a pinch of salt run through the blender is all you’ll ever need. The oven will take care of the rest.
• Feeling lazy and don’t want to wash the blender? Swap the tomatoes for a 4-ounce can of tomato paste and thin that out with a cup of water in a bowl.
Add olive oil, garlic, oregano, salt and other flavors as desired.
• Olive oil is a perfectly legitimate “sauce.” It’s even better mixed with garlic, Parmesan cheese and a generous fistful of herbs.
• If you love pesto on your pizza but don’t like the dull brown color it gets after baking, blanch your basil in boiling water for 15 seconds first.
• Want something completely different? Spread your pie with roasted and pureed sweet potatoes or fig jam or chimichurri or hummus or barbecue sauce instead of tomato sauce and top accordingly.
Top it off
The right type and combination of toppings can make or break a pizza.
• In most cases, sauce first, then cheese, then the rest of the toppings. The cheese forms something of a watertight barrier. If mushrooms, peppers, onions and other veggies are trapped below that cheese shield, you’ll get soggy and soupy results.
• Restraint, generally speaking, is your friend with homemade pizza. A three-topping pie will bake up crisper and quicker than a 13-topping super-deluxe monster pie.
• If you must have the megatoppings, partially baking the crust first until it’s just firm will prevent all that meat, cheese and veg from wrecking the crust.
• For a luxe touch, drizzle your pizza with a ribbon of top shelf olive oil when it comes out of the oven.
• Tender greens like arugula and baby spinach are terrific pizza toppers, but wait until the pizza is done cooking to sprinkle them on. Bonus points if you toss those greens with a little salt, olive oil and lemon juice first.