Last night we had Pizza - Building the perfect beast ...

Ok - so I get to build the pizza. Kinda like the crust our technique has evolved over time. We have always wanted to have that "wood fired" look and taste so we obviously chose to use a pizza stone. Now by any sane perspective this should be easy - right? Not for us, we didn't recognize the need for a good pizza paddle until late in the game - I think you'll find this a recurring theme for us..

So for our first several attempts at using the pizza stone we would turn the oven on high (550 degrees F - it's gotta be hot you know) and let the oven with the stone in it really soak in the heat (1+ hours). We then took the stone out of the oven (carefully of course), placed it on hot pads, and then built the pizza on the hot stone. Now after a couple of times doing this we finally realized we were pulling a 550 degree piece of stone out of the oven and if anything happened we would either scorch our wood floors (best case) or really hurt someone (worst case)! Made a pretty good crust like we wanted but definitely not a good way to make pizza.

That's where the pizza paddle comes in - you build the pizza on the paddle (putting a little corn meal and flour to make sure it slides off) and then slide the pizza onto the stone in the oven!! What a concept - and it's a whole lot safer...

Pizza really is easy. For toppings we think simpler is better. Last night we had margarita pizza. Only three ingredients on these: a light coating of pizza sauce (homemade of course - but Jenifer gets all the credit for the great sauce she makes and, I will let her write up the recipe), chopped fresh basil (which we can now buy at the grocery store although this past summer we grew 7 plants in the garden and made tons of pesto, etc. - but that's another topic) and cheese spread over the top (we use a blend of mozzarella, 7-cheese blend and parmesan) - we did learn that if you put the basil on top of the cheese it dries out and is not near as good.

We also made a sausage pizza and a white pizza with grilled chicken - I'll cover those next time around. But, here is what we ended up with - and it was absolutely delicious!