Yesterday, before the Superbowl I cooked up a couple of pizzas that were made from scratch. I found a decent looking recipe in the Fearless Chef cookbook that seemed easy enough. I made the dough in the morning, punched it down early in the afternoon and then let it rise again right before rolling it. I almost messed up the recipe because it called for activating the yeast in a half cup of apple juice- which we did not have. I substituted 1/2 cup of water instead, but when I mixed the wet ingredients into the dry, things seemed a little odd…there wasn’t enough liquid. I went back and read over the recipe and noticed that I was supposed to add 3/4 cups of water and the 1/2 cup of apple juice. I added the additional water, but that made it too wet but another
tablespoon of flour helped that out. The recipe also calls for 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, but I substituted 1 cup of whole wheat, so that probably accounted for some of my problems as well. The sauce also came from the same book and was very simple- onion, garlic, red wine, oregano, and canned crushed tomatoes (really good sauce!). I cooked one of the pizzas in a cast iron skillet and one on a cookie sheet at 500 degrees- I was supposed to use the grill, but it ran out of gas. The skillet pizza had some of our homemade sausage on it and Naragansett Creamery mozzarella. The cookie sheet pizza featured artichokes and the mozzarella. I think the final results came out in a tie- I liked the skillet pizza and Ingrid liked the cookie sheet version. Neither came out crispy on the bottom, but were good nonetheless. The sausage tasted good, but was a little dry and grainy…so we’ll have to hone those down during the Sausage Session, Act II.
