Pizza Night!

Mike and I love pizza.  Well, Mike loves it more that I do-- he could eat pizza just about every day.  And he likes things like pizza rolls and those two dollar frozen pizzas, which  I honestly think are guy things.  I mean, I've never met a female who loves her some pizza rolls.

Anyway, delivery pizza is expensive.  Having worked for tips for many years, I tip well.  The pizza delivery person gets at least five bucks from me, more if it is raining.  We usually get breadsticks, and Mike likes chicken wings.  It wasn't unusual for delivery pizza for us to cost upwards of twenty-five dollars.

That is way too much.  AND I don't know what is in the crust, sauce, etc.  So a couple of years ago we started making pizza.  At first we only managed to make pizza about once every month or so.  It seemed like a lot of work, and even though it was better pizza, it seemed like such an inconvenience that we didn't get into the habit of it.

Eventually we started making more pizza than we ordered.  I'm not sure how this happened, but now we almost never order it.  It is so super easy.  I'm generally torn between two dough recipes.  The first is from Vegan with a Vengeance.  It is a simple recipe that make a nice medium weight dough, nice and chewy and good enough for breadsticks.  The problem is that it is a "double rise" dough, and sometimes I don't have enough time, or planned my day well enough to do this.  The second is from Dinner: A Love Story.  Simple dough, single rise, thinner crust.  (I haven't tried this recipe as breadsticks so I don't know how it works.)  Mike has been liking the Dinner/Love recipe, but he prefers a thin, crispy crust.

Which leads me to the point of this post.  We've been baking the pizza on a baking stone lately.  I use the Pampered Chef stoneware.  (I am not affiliated with Pampered Chef.  I do not sell their products.)  I've been using the large bar pan for pizza.  I have one that is about two years old, but decided I need another for making a second pizza or breadsticks.  I had no idea how well mine was seasoned until I saw my new one this afternoon.

Sisters.  The older one is much prettier.

Isn't that crazy?  I use my bar pan for everything from pizza to roasting vegetables to making baked french fries.  This is probably one of the top five most-used things in my kitchen.  I am very excited to have another!  I almost feel like I should take a picture before each use and make a flip-book of the seasoning of it.

Like I said, the perfect crust is a work in progress.  Right now we are experimenting with baking the topping-less crust for a few minutes to crisp it up, then adding the sauce, cheese, and topping.  This is probably the best way to ensure a crisper crust, but we are still finagling the time.

Ready for the oven, for the second time.

We also make our own sauce and shred our own cheese.  (Do you know what is in those pre-shredded bags of cheese?  Wood fiber!  Not for me!)  I mix up a batch of season mix for the sauce that makes about forty pizzas and just add a scoop of that to tomato sauce with some honey and parm.  Shredding our own mozzarella is easy and much cheaper than buying it.

And the final pizza?  De-lish.