Pizza Pizza!

Pizza is one of my favorite things to eat.  My mom always made us home made pizza growing up and it was the best.  We never had delivery pizza growing up because my mom's was just so good.

But pizza can be a lil tricky to make because you need to use...yeast.  Now for bakers out there yeast can be intimidating.  Yeast can be temperamental, the water has to be the perfect temperature and if you mess up then the whole recipe could be ruined.  Pressure, I tell ya.

But fortunately my mom told me I had nothing to be worried about and I trust her.  So I went off the make my pizza dough.

So here's what you do:

Put 1 teaspoon of sugar in 1 cup of warm water (just make sure the water is warm to the touch, like bath water.  Other people might say to use a thermometer but I was good without it) then you add 1 packet of yeast (ok, so I got over zealous - shocker - and bought a whole jar of yeast instead of just a packet because I WILL make pizza and yeast breads more often!) and stir.  Let it sit for about 5 minutes.  The yeast will bubble and I wish I took a picture of this but I was kinda shocked by it so I tots forgot about the camera...sorry.

Next you add 1 teaspoon of olive oil (I used my tasty rosemary flavored olive oil from Croatia) to 2 1/2 cups of flour.

Then you mix it all together and knead it until it forms a dough, like below:

Now cover this with a damp towel and let it rise in a warm oven for 30-45 minutes.  (Sorry that wasn't very exciting so no picture.)

Then you punch the dough down - the fun part - and you then roll/pat the dough into pizza shapes, like below:

Now, I forgot to do this next part even though my sister Jeannie told me I should (yes, Jeannie was right.  There I said it!)  You need to pour the tomato sauce on the pizza shapes before you let them rise a second time.  Otherwise they puff up too much and it's kinda tricky to put the sauce on then.  Anyways, with the sauce on let them rise another time for an hour.

Then you can put on any toppings you want and bake them at 425 degrees for 10-20 minutes.

And above are the tasty pizzas displayed by the lovely models.  Sorry about the poor picture quality but I'm still learning to use Jeannie's camera.

Yummmmmm!