I wasn’t really expecting to write about pizza making this week. There are so many sources on-line, and so many opinions about the stuff, I thought I’d just keep mine to myself. But there’s this new blog started by three people who already have their own individual blogs. Beth, Kevin and Susan have invited people to bake along with them for a whole year exploring different methods and types of baking bread and they are posting their experiments, thoughts and recipes for 12 different kinds of bread for a whole year. They’ve called it A Year in Bread.

They announced their project in January and I held my breath to see what kind of bread they’d start with and…it was pizza dough. At first I felt a little let down. Here I was expecting to follow along and bake some perfect bread to go with my Easter feast next weekend and they served up a tomato pie. But then I thought, pizza really is a good way to start. It somehow seems less scary than other yeasty things. People don’t expect greatness from it. Unless of course you are like the guys who write Slice, a blog dedicated just to pizza.

I’ve been making pizza since I was about 14 years old. Back then, it was from some awful mix that came in a cardboard can, kind of like how breadcrumbs are packaged. All I had to do was add water, knead it a little, let it rise and roll it out. I used sauce from a jar and piled on the cheese, pepperoni, ham, bacon, sausage and any other meat that my brothers were begging for. The crust wasn’t very good and I always put on too much sauce. It was really just a topping delivery system. You really can’t blame me, though, this was the 80s in middle America and my family ate it up and begged for more.

Our neighbors were a pizza obsessed family. They ordered delivery a lot more often than we did. They made pizza bagels all the time in their toaster oven. You put pizza sauce and mozzarella cheese on top of a bagel and put it in the toaster oven until the cheese melts. Voil?, you have the perfect afternoon snack. They also always had bags of pizza rolls in their freezer. They are like pillow shaped spring rolls, about an inch long and they have pizza flavoring inside. Kind of. Do those things still exist? I haven’t had them in years. So Sara, the youngest of the family, once got suspended from school because of pizza. She was in middle school and they were having a picnic to celebrate the end of the school year. I think it was supposed to be a pot luck or the kids were supposed to bring their lunch or something. I don’t recall the details. Sara ordered a pizza delivered to the park. For some reason, the teachers at the school got all bunched up because of pizza being delivered to the park during the school picnic. It’s not like she didn’t have the money to pay for the pizza or anything. I’m not sure if this happened before or after Spicolli ordered pizza delivered to his class in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Sara got to stay home from school for three days and her mom had to go to work, so she was home alone. She probably got to make herself pizza bagels for lunch every day.

I started making pizza again after a long hiatus about 8 years ago and since then I make it once every couple of weeks. Other than the rising of the dough, pizza is a pretty easy thing to make and it always feels like we’re having something special. When I tell Erik we’re having pizza for dinner, he never fails to yell out, OH BOY! For a long time I used the recipe out of Moosewood Low Fat Favorites, which is a great book. The dough recipe calls for 1/2 cup whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup oatmeal flour (that you make by whizzing oatmeal up in the mixer, a genius idea) and about 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. This is a great healthy alternative to all white flour pizza dough and it’s how I made pizza dough for about 5 years. Then Erik started making baguettes based on the method in Cook’s Illustrated magazine (and some suggestions from my brother who used to be a baker). One day he had several baguettes chilling in the fridge doing their long slow rise and we were trying to figure out what to have for dinner to go along with the bread. After poking around in the fridge one of us came up with the idea for making the “bread” into a pizza instead. This was the best idea ever. It made the ideal crust, the paradoxical combination of crispy, chewy, bready, bubbled up goodness that is so elusive when making pizza at home. So we switched camps and made pizza from this method until the no-knead bread recipe came out in the New York Times and we stopped making our good baguettes and started making awesome boules. But then we stopped making pizza. How could this happen?

So, the invitation to bake bread is well-timed for this household and pizza now seems like the perfect place for us to start. We’ve made three versions this week. On Monday, we had a guest for dinner who told me he doesn’t really like cheese, so we made a focaccia with carmelized onions, mushrooms and rosemary. For the dough, I had just thrown together warm water, yeast and sugar in the bowl of my kitchen aid, let it foam up and then put in salt, a little olive oil and some flour. I let the machine do most of the work, but then gave it about 5 minutes of kneading at the end. I let this rise once on the counter, punched it down after 2 hours and then put it in the refrigerator until I needed it. I stretched it out, slicked on a bit of oil, put in some dimples and scattered on the toppings. After about an hour on the countertop, I slid it into the oven and then…I overcooked it a little, it was too dry. And there wasn’t enough salt. But the toppings were awesome and so were the tapas that Erik made to go with it.

Last night, we made the Moosewood recipe for old times sake and because we’re looking to put more whole grains in our diet. From what I’ve learned about making pizza and yeasted dough in the last few years I figured I could get a lighter, crispier crust out of those whole grains than I had in the past. I was right. I used to just cook it in a rectangular baking sheet slicked with a little oil, but it’s so much better to divide the dough in half and cook it in two separate shifts. The crust is thinner, crispier and has a more authentic feel to it. It’s also really important to let the dough have a good long rise in the refrigerator overnight and to have your oven at maximum heat for about a half hour to an hour before you cook the pizza so that the pizza stone has a chance to really heat up. We didn’t really respect the essence of the Moosewood collective, though, because we put bacon, mushroom and onions on one of them and sausage and mushrooms on the other one.

Tonight we had pizza again. Are we getting boring? No way. You know those people who say they could eat pizza every night? We are those people. Just change the crust and the toppings a little, though, please, and we could probably eat it for weeks straight before craving something else. This time, I followed Beth’s directions from the A Year in Bread site. This dough was awesome. The one thing that was different from the baguette recipe we used to make was that there was no poulish to start it out, but I think that if I used one, it might be even better.

Pizza toppings can be contentious. When we order pizza, we usually have it with mushrooms and onions. I judge a pizzeria by their crust and their mushrooms. Those mushrooms from a can are out the door. When I make pizza at home, I’ll usually make a salad to go with it, but lately, I’ve been into steaming some spinach and layering some on top of my pizza. Back when I lived in Ann Arbor, I knew a guy who worked for the international division of Domino’s pizza (that’s where the headquarters is). His job was to help people start Domino’s franchises in different areas of the world. He had lived in Paris while they were working on operations in Europe and then he had been to Southeast Asia after that. Part of his job was to work with marketing people to figure out what toppings to put on the pizzas depending on the tastes of that country’s population. My favorite French topping is an egg, it’s placed right in the middle of the pizza about halfway through the baking of an individual pie. The yolk has to stay really runny and you sop it up off of the plate as you eat the pizza. I’m not sure if the Domino’s pizza in France offers that option, but it’s on the menu of every pizzeria in Paris. I guess in India they had to develop versions with chicken curry and different kinds of chutney. And I thought I was adventurous by ordering anchovies. Those of you who are vegan in search of things that taste like meat will be overjoyed with the recent recipe for vegan pepperoni posted at the FatFree Vegan Kitchen. It’s on my list of things to try out soon. Not that I’m vegan, I just like those vegetarian things that taste like meat without having all the fat. And I like to make my vegetarian friends happy.

For making the dough, I recommend that you have a look at Kevin, Beth and Susan’s recipes. Their proportions are all very similar, though Susan doesn’t use any oil and all three of them have good advice. I particularly like Beth’s recipe because you make it the night before and forget about it until the next evening, but I’m a plan ahead sort of person, so you may prefer Kevin or Susan’s method. Here is how I make my sauce. I use it for pizza and also as a base for pasta sauce. Sometimes it ends up in other things like osso buco. I usually make lots of it at one time and then freeze it into one and two cup plastic containers. It can easily be doubled or tripled. I used about 3/4 cup of sauce on each pizza.

Marinara sauce

• 1 T extra virgin olive oil
• One onion, peeled and roughly chopped
• 3-4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 t red pepper flakes
• 1 T oregano
• 1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped
• 1 t salt
• 1/2 t freshly ground black pepper
• 1 box Pom? chopped tomatoes

Put olive oil in a pot over medium high heat. Add next six ingredients, onions through basil. Turn heat to medium low and cook until onions become soft and translucent and everything else becomes really fragrant, about 6-8 minutes. Add salt, pepper and tomatoes. Cook until all the flavors meld together and sauce has thickened somewhat, about 20 minutes. If you want a smooth sauce, you can use an immersion blender while it’s still hot, or let it cool and use a blender or food processor. Makes about 3 cups.