Home-Made Pizza

Elly and I have fooled around with home-made pizza off and on over the years and have recently come up with an approach we feel is close to perfect. The result is tastier (not to mention healthier!) than what is available at most restaurants and takes surprisingly little time to accomplish.

Making the Dough

The dough recipe comes from Baking Illustrated, a book from the editors of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, and my most frequently referred to baking book. We use a variation of the recipe on page 154, reducing the yeast to 1/2 teaspoon and letting the dough rise all day. Many bread recipes call for a quantity of yeast designed to complete the rise in an hour or two. Reducing the yeast causes the rise to take much longer. As a consequence, the dough develops much more flavor.

4 cups (22 ounces) of bread flour

Use Better for Bread flour, not All Purpose flour, for pizza dough. The result will be a crispier crust with a nice, chewy interior. Also, if you do much baking, I recommend getting an Oxo digital scale. These cost about $32 and are well worth the price. Flour is highly compressible. Measuring by volume, rather than weight, requires careful technique for consistent results. Measuring flour with a digital scale is quick and fool-proof.

Mix the following two ingredients into the flour with a wooden spoon, a Danish dough whisk, or with the mixing paddle attached on a standing mixer.

1&1/2 teaspoons salt (Kosher or Sea Salt, never table salt!)
1/2 teaspoon of Bread Machine or Instant yeast


Danish dough whisks cost about $9 and are designed for mixing doughs of various types. Bread machine or instant yeast is similar to regular yeast except it doesn’t need to be dissolved or proofed prior to mixing with dry ingredients. Oddly enough, many recipes, including the Cook’s Illustrated recipe referred to here,recommend using bread machine / instant yeast and then call for proofing the yeast before mixing it into the flour. It’s a total waste of time and completely unnecessary.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1&3/4 cups of warm water

We have a Brita pitcher and use filtered water for all of our cooking. The water should be warm to the touch, but not too hot. About 100 degrees is good. I heat the water in our microwave for one minute to get the right temperature. (It’s cold coming out of our refrigerator.) Making the water too hot (over, say 120 degrees) can kill the yeast, though this risk is considerably diminished by mixing the yeast into the flour dry. The flour acts as a buffer, reducing the shock of pouring yeast directly into hot water. Still, keep the temp about 100 degrees.

Mix the olive oil into the water, then pour the liquid into the mixing bowl with the dry ingredients and mix to a wet, shaggy dough.

It is not necessary to knead the dough. Books have been written on the subject, including Suzanne Dunaway’s delightful No Need to Knead, which offers not only delicious recipes but stories and watercolor illustrations by the author. It is out-of-print now, but an absolute gem. Not to be passed up if you come across a copy. Anyway, just mix until all the flour has been incorporated, spray the top with cooking spray, cover with plastic wrap, and leave the bowl on your kitchen counter for the day. You can do this Friday morning for pizza Friday night.

That said, I’m in the habit of mixing the dough in our standing mixer, swapping out the mixing paddle for a dough hook once the ingredients are combined, and then kneading at the lowest speed setting for five minutes. My theory is that it can’t hurt, and why not use a tool we already own? If you don’t own a standing mixer, don’t worry about it and don’t mess with kneading the dough.

Pizza Stone and Peel

Tools you definitely do need for home-made pizza are a good baking stone and a pizza paddle. Old Stone Oven baking stones are the best. They cost about $50. We have an Epicurean pizza peel, made from some sort of composite material with a comfortable rubber handle. It is far better than any wooden pizza peel we have used. It cost about $40.

Preheating the Stone

Put the stone on a middle rack in your oven and heat it up for at least an hour before baking your pizza. Set your oven at the highest possible temperature, which will be something like 500 or 550 degrees. Our temp dial only goes up to 500, but I turn it up above the 500 mark, stopping just below the Oven Clean setting. This is important. You want that stone hot. The biggest difference between a home oven and a commercial pizza oven is the heat level (commercial pizza ovens run at 700-800 degrees and have a stone baking surface). Using a pizza stone properly will get you nearly the same result.

Shaping the Pizza

This dough recipe makes three goodly-sized pizzas. Sprinkle some flour on a clear area of your kitchen counter, and plunk the dough down on it. You’ll have to scrape the dough out of the bowl. Use enough flour to keep the dough from sticking. Put flour on your hands and shape the dough into a thick roll. Cut it into three even pieces and shape into balls. If you’re only making one pizza, wrap the remaining two balls in plastic wrap, but each one inside a ZipLock freezer bag (1-quart is a good size bag), and freeze them.

The dough will hold perfectly for several months this way. When you want to make a pizza, remove the frozen dough from the bag and wrap, spray a mixing bowl with cooking spray, drop the dough in, spray a little more on top, cover the bowl with the plastic wrap, and let it thaw. If you do this in the morning, just leave the bowl in your refrigerator. Take it out when you get home from work and let it warm up for an hour before shaping.


Okay, this is important. DO NOT use a rolling pin to roll out your pizza dough! A rolling pin will squash all the lovely little gas pockets created by the yeast out of the dough, leaving a flat, lackluster crust that won’t be worth a darn. Instead, spread the ball into a six to eight-inch disk gently using your palms, and then, with your fingers, coax it into a nice 14-inch shape. Use flour as necessary to keep it from sticking and flip the disk over so the same side isn’t always facing up. The object here is a thickness of around 1/4 inch. Some areas will be a little thicker and thinner. Be careful about making the crust too thin, which can cause it to burn.




You would think that throwing dough on a blistering hot stone would cause it to burn immediately. However, the moisture in the dough prevents that from happening. Instead, you get a lovely crisp crust with a chewy crumb (the interior). If the crust is too thin, however, the moisture cooks off, and once dry, the area will burn.

Don’t worry about making a perfectly rough crust. It is more important to have a consistent thickness. Let the crust be square or oblong or shaped like an amoeba, just as long as it fits on the pizza paddle.

Forget about Cornmeal!

Most recipes will tell you to use corn meal to keep the pizza from sticking to the paddle. The idea is you spread cornmeal on the pizza paddle, put the dough on top, cover it with the ingredients, and slide the whole thing off the peel onto the stone. This works reasonably well as long as you have used enough corn meal and are competent with the peel, but cornmeal is messy, and your crust will likely be flat and undercooked.


The trick is to forget the cornmeal and pre-bake the crust (on a truly hot pizza stone) before adding any toppings. If you use enough flour to keep the dough from sticking when you shape it, it should slide off the peel with ease as long as you haven't put any ingredients on it. Just fold the shaped dough in half, and then in half again, put it on your peel, and unfold it. Prick it all over with a fork to reduce air pockets when it bakes. Give it a gentle shake to make sure it slides easily, and then slide it onto the hot pizza stone and bake four minutes.


It will look something like this. There will be some bubbles. That’s fine. It’s rustic. It’s authentic. Pre-baking like this causes a nice “oven-spring” when the crust expands rapidly before setting. It creates a wonderful texture that never occurs when toppings are added first.

Pre-baked crust, top and bottom views.




Slide your pizza peel under the pre-baked crust and take it out of the oven to add the toppings. The crust won’t stick at all now, regardless of how many toppings or how much cheese (Elly-Ann!!) you add.

Quick Pizza Sauce

The following recipe makes a delicious sauce in only a few minutes. We started with a pizza sauce recipe from the Cook’s Illustrated Baking book mentioned above and then got real with the seasonings.

1 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes in puree.

We have come to prefer Hunts canned tomato products to all others.

2 tablespoons of olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, pressed through a garlic press

1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon sugar
salt, black pepper, and hot pepper flakes to taste.

Heat the oil in a heavy sauce pan for a few minutes, then add the garlic and cook for 30-45 seconds. The garlic should sizzle slightly when you add it to the pan. Don’t let the garlic brown or burn. Add the crushed tomatoes in puree and stir to incorporate. Stir in the basil, sugar, salt, pepper, and hot pepper flakes. Cook on medium low heat 10 minutes or so to cook off some of the moisture at a gentle simmer. Don’t let the sauce boil.

Final Assembly


Probably a little too much sauce here. :-)


Most recipes will warn you not to put too many ingredients on your pizza. The thing is, if you pre-bake the crust, you can load on as many as you like.


That goes for cheese too, of course.


Canine supervision helps.


The pizza will bake in about six to eight minutes. Faster than you might think. Keep a watchful eye on it, and don’t let it get too brown. After removing your pizza from the oven, let it cool on a wire rack for a few minutes — maybe five — before cutting it. And don’t cut it on your pizza peel! :-)

Pumpkin Soup

I'll be the first to admit that Pumpkin soup doesn't sound promising. It calls to mind soupy pumpkin pie, which seems disgusting, even for someone who likes desserts. The source of the recipe was also one to inspire skepticism: Ghoulish Goodies: A Frightful Cookbook by Sharon Bowers. Elly brought it home before Halloween. It includes lots of clever ideas for treats like "Swamp Creature Toes" (pretzel sticks dipped in chocolate with sliced almonds painted with green food coloring as the toenails). Honestly, though, in addition to terrifically amusing themed treats (suitable for making with kids) it also contains wonderful recipes, including one for pumpkin soup, which is savory, not sweet. Bowers' first comment about pumpkin soup is the biggest mistake most people make is trying to play up the sweetness of pumpkin. Ah.

Pumpkin Prep

Habitues of The Life Less Hectic may be familiar with my post on pumpkin pie, in which I discourse on the importance of choosing a "pie" pumpkin, NOT a carving pumpkin, for cooking. The same applies for soup. Indeed, for any meal involving pumpkin.

The method for preparing pumpkin for pies is simplicity itself, as described in the pie article. Prepping pumpkin for soup is more labor intensive, as the pumpkin needs to be cubed. Banish thoughts of peeling a pumpkin at the outset! Directions for peeling a pumpkin with a sharp knife are available on the web. I've tried (and failed) to imagine a more likely scenario for slicing off a finger. Instead, dice the pumpkin as you would a cantelope, first cutting it in half lengthwise and scraping out the seeds and pulp (blessedly easy with pie pumpkins as opposed to carving pumpkins). Then cut the halves into wedges, cut those into squares, and then cut off the shell. This takes a bit of time, but the odds of completing the task with all fingers intact are good. So much for cubed pumpkin.

By the way, even a small pie pumpkin yields more than you'll need for this soup (16 oz. cubed). Faced with this problem, I tossed the remaining cubes in a bit of canola oil, and roasted them in a 400 degree oven for around 40 minutes (turning them about four times). Then I pureed the roasted cubes. Somewhat to my surprise, I found the flavor AND texture superior to roasting pumpkin in the shell as in my pie post. Elly's theory is that the additional surface exposed when roasting the cubes develops more flavor and concentrates the pumpkin by lowering the moisture content.

Roasted Vegetable Stock

The only significant deviation I made from Bowers' recipe was to use roasted vegetable stock, instead of chicken stock. You want to make this yourself. It's not hard to do, and the result is far superior to any commercial product. This is true, in fact, even if you want to use chicken stock. Not only will the flavor be fantastic, you'll also eliminate chemical preservatives, which is no small advantage.

I followed Martha Rose Shulman's roasted vegetable stock recipe from her book, The Best Vegetarian Recipes.

• 1 large onion, coarsely chopped


• 4 carrots, trimmed and sliced


• 6 large garlic cloves, peeled


• 1 large leek, white and light green parts, cleaned and sliced


• 1 pasnip, peeled and sliced


• 1/2 pound mushrooms, stems trimmed, whipped clean


• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil


• 1 cup dry white wine


• Bouguet garni made with several parsley and thyme sprigs and one bay leaf


• 6 whole peppercorns


• Salt to taste (about 2 teaspoons)


• Soy sauce to taste (1 to 2 teaspoons)

Toss the veggies with olive oil in a large roasting pan. I also included some kosher salt (NEVER use table salt). In fact, banish it from your house and use only kosher or sea salt. Your food will taste infinitely better, and people will assume you are a "foodie." If anyone actually uses the term, please slap them! Roast them (the veggies, not people who use the term "foodie") in a preheated 400 degree oven, turning about every 10 minutes, for 40 minutes until the vegetables are browned. They'll look like this. Note: these could actually stand a bit more browning.

Transfer the veggies to a soup pot, pour the cup of white wine into the roasting pan (a splash of cognac added to the wine won't go amiss here, or sherry), and scrape up any brown bits, stirring into the wine. This is called "deglazing" the roasting pan, and it is a serious flavor enhancer. Add the wine to the soup pot, along with 8 cups of water. A note on water: several years ago we got a Brita pitcher and filter all our drinking water. We also filter all water we use for cooking. This is inexpensive and quick, and noticeably improves the flavor of our food.


Back in June Elly made up some herb and flower pots, shown in this post, which included flat-leaf (Italian) parsley. If you're afraid of snakes, skip the first part of the post which includes pictures of a large black rat snake I found on the back porch and almost tried to pick up before I realized it was not a "stick"! :-) The parsley didn't do much until about October, when for some reason it took off. I took this picture a few days ago. We haven't had a hard frost yet, so in late November we're still enjoying delicious parsley from our own garden, along with sage, rosemary, thyme, and even tarragon (though that is getting a bit dodgy). The basil is long gone, alas. Standard herbs are truly hardy plants, inexpensive and easy to grow, and a real boon for the kitchen.

Okay, so the bouquet garni. (You may be wondering about that.) Essentially, it is a cheese cloth bag (or just a scrap of cheese cloth tied up with some string) into which you have stuffed various herbs, in this case parsley and thyme from our garden and a bay leaf. We got these garni bags from Prydes in Westport, and they are fun. A clever trick, if you don't have garni bags, is to empty a tea bag and use that instead. (But the garni bags work better!)

Add the bouquet garni, peppercorns, salt and soy sauce (I use 2 teaspoons of each) to the soup pot, bring it to a boil, and then reduce heat, partially cover, and simmer for an hour.

Keep in mind, we haven't gotten to the soup yet. This is only the stock! In case you haven't already guessed, this is what slow food is all about. Frequently, when the subject of slow food comes up, all sorts of exotic locales (like Italy, where the slow food movement got started) or ingredients are mentioned. None of that is essential to slow cooking, however, and people who think it is usually also think cooking is a bore and needs some hype to make it interesting. All of the ingredients called for in this recipe are available in just about any reasonably stocked grocery store. Also, keep in mind that while you can't make this soup in half an hour, much of the time required is cooking time, during which your involvement is little more than an occasional stir and a quick check to ensure an appropriate simmer. And, needless to say, your kitchen and home will be filled with the delicious aroma.

So, once the stock has simmered, it needs to be strained. This can be done with a strainer and spoon (used to mash as much juice as possible from the roasted veggies). If you have a food mill, you can really wring the last drop of liquid from the veggies. We started our compost pile this year, which is where the leftover pulp ended up.



Now for the Soup

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil


• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped


• 1 celery stalk, chopped


• 4 garlic cloves, minced


• 1 pound pumpkin, cubed


• 1 medium potato, peeled and diced


• 1 teaspoon dried sage


• 1 teaspoon salt


• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper


• 8 cups roasted veggie stock

Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium heat and then add the chopped onion and celery and saute until softened and lightly browned. Deviating from Bowers' recipe, my advice is NOT to add the minced garlic until the onion and celery are done. Add the garlic and saute for only a few moments before adding the stock and other ingredients. Otherwise, the garlic will burn. The fact that recipes often call for sauting garlic along with ingredients like onions and celery is a puzzle to me. The result is always burnt garlic. Why is this standard advice?

Bring to a boil, lower heat, and simmer for 30 minutes. (Or longer if you like.)


Once the cubed pumpkin and diced potato is tender, remove the soup from the burner and puree it a few cups at a time in a blender. The result will be smooth and creamy. I apologize for not having a picture of this process. I used two large pots, the soup pot and an empty pot, one on either side of the blender, and a ladle to transfer the soup into the blender. Do NOT attempt to use a food processor for this! :-)

The finished soup will look something like this.

This is a time-consuming project. Is it worth the trouble? In a word, yes! The first time I made it, I had to insist that Elly (a vegetarian) step away from the soup pot before she consumed an entire bowl in what was intended to be a simple taste. :-) Apart from the olive oil, this soup is fat-free. And yet it is richer and creamier than the Lobster bisque served at the Bravo's restaurant (a frequent lunch venue for myself and close friends Dahl and Erin Metters). I have made the soup for three weeks running. Elly, who NEVER eats the same meal two nights in a row, is happy to have pumpkin soup every night until it is consumed. And honestly, it is not difficult to make. It doesn't require any exotic or expensive ingredients. It is super-healthy and an absolute treat. There's no down side. You will simply never taste any soup from a can than comes within 100 miles of this for flavor.

Bowers suggests serving the soup with French bread croutons, rubbed with garlic and covered with melted cheese like cheddar or parmesian. It's a wonderful combination. But, even better is to serve it with Andrew Whitley's recipe for Cheese Bread from Bread Matters. That's a subject for another post...

Cinnamon Roll Disaster

Just in case you were wondering if every culinary effort at the Miles house turns out well, the answer is "No!" Here you see the result of my first experiment with making cinnamon rolls. I thought about taking a picture of what they looked like straight out of the oven but I just wasn't brave enough to do it. I was also a little concerned for the grackles, but have not found any lying dead around the yard. They must have strong constitutions. This one does have an expression that looks something like "I'm going to find who did this and peck his eyes out."

So what happened? Well, surprisingly few cinnamon roll recipes are to be found in baking books. Cooks Illustrated did have one, but it sounded like one of their wacko we're better than everyone else because we're different affairs. I skipped it and went for my mom's old Betty Crocker recipe. I mean BC couldn't possibly let me down. Right? Wrong! The cooking time was WAY too long, and like an idiot I wasn't keeping a close enough eye on what was going on in the oven. And yes, I used an oven thermometer and had the oven pegged at 375 following the directions. The BC icing recipe is also way wrong, basically resulting in confectionary sugar concrete.

What to do? A trip to the library, where I found two books whose cinnamon roll recipes seemed like winners. My second attempt is from Abigail Johnson Dodge's The Weekend Baker, and the result was superb. :-) Abigail knows a thing or two about mixing up icing, as well. Heavy cream makes a much richer icing than milk! I haven't tried recipe number 2, yet, but will definitely give it a go. It's a potato dough approach and calls for Irish Cream liquor in the icing. Anyway, this is one of the Dodge cinnamon rolls. The grackles won't be getting any of these...

Easter Sunday

Elly, Basie, and I had a wonderful Easter Sunday. A few weeks ago I put up a new Spiral Feeder from backyard bird and the finches just love it. It's about 3 feet tall. They really like being able to slip along the spiral perches from hole to hole. So much so that our older finch feeder, with individual perches, only serves as a backup feeder now -- the birds spend 90% of their time on the new one. I took this picture Sunday afternoon.

We decided to spend the day at home (a typical holiday choice for us) cooking a multi-course dinner. Elly had the clever idea to listen to choral masses. We have a good-sized collection of classical CDs, both instrumental and vocal, but haven't listened to them much over the past few years. We listened to three Tallis Scholars CDs -- Palestrina Masses, Allegri Miserere, and a Josquin CD with Missa Pange lingua and Missa La sol fa re mi. We also listened to Dvorak's Stabat Mater.

Basie seemed to think it was good napping background music.


I started off making biscuits, following a recipe from the Cook's Illustrated Baking book. These turned out marvelously. I won't tell how many Elly ate. My first adventure in making biscuits.


Elly made a Gruyere and leek tart, combining multiple recipes, which turned out quite nicely.


And also a puff pastry with an asparagus and shitaki mushroom filling that was another triumph.


I took charge of dessert, making a parfait with layers of strawberries, lemon mousse, and white chocolate mousse. I used some more of the lemons from Dick Harshaw's yard in Phoenix.


Here is one of the parfaits. They weren't quite a photogenic as the Bon Apetite version, but they were delicious.


We enjoyed a terrific bottle of 2005 Treana Red supplied by my sister and brother-in-law (Karen and Tom) with our dinner and ate leftovers for days.

Impulse Book Purchase

It's windy in Kansas City this morning, though the stiff breeze doesn't seem to bother these red winged-blackbirds. Robins aren't the true harbinger of spring, as some people suppose. They actually remain with us the year round. But, not so with red winged-blackbirds. Their arrival really does signal that spring is near.

One of my New Year resolutions is to avoid impulse book purchases, and I have done fairly well in that regard. But, I could not resist Charles Tunnicliffe's A Sketchbook of Birds when I saw it in a window display at Spivey's a few days ago.



I also ordered Suzanne Dunaway's No Need to Knead from Chequamegon Books in Wisconsin yesterday. This was not an impulse purchase. I found Dunaway's book at the public library and have been going nuts baking bread recipes from it. They're nothing short of wonderful. Only a few copies are available on Abebooks.com -- a sure sign of limited supply. But Elly, munching a slice of Rosemary Filoncino, dipped in rosemary olive oil (both recipes from No Need to Knead), agreed the book is well worth $65. We have had the pleasure to correspond with Ms. Dunaway, who is as charming as her book suggests, and have learned that a reprint from 10 Speed Press may be a possibility. Here is a picture of the filoncino loaves, baked in a baguette pan added to our cooking arsenal after I read about them in Ms. Dunaway's book.



I also had the good fortune to come across the March/April edition of Greenability magazine (Living well, by living green in Kansas City) yesterday. It is actually published by a neighbor of ours. This is an outstanding local resource for eco-friendly lifestyles. Elly and I are now subscribers.

Snow Day

The weather forecast called for maybe an inch of snow. Instead, we got a good six inches on Saturday, which was a great way to end out the month of February. Nothing is more fun and relaxing than to spend a snowy day in the kitchen, reading, cooking, watching birds, and, now, thanks to the new addition to our family, watching Basie play in the snow.




Basie loves snow, which isn't a big surprise. He loves to play in the backyard, loves cold weather, and loves to explore. He is 11 weeks old now and growing fast.


My two new journals -- the green one is for birdwatching and the tan one is my kitchen journal. Among other things, this is great for remembering what cookbook a particularly good recipe came from.


Elly was busy making a Cauliflower Cheese Pie from Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook. We substitute a regular pie crust for the grated potato crust called for in the original recipe. This is awesome with white cheddar cheese, BTW.


I've been on something of a baking binge since trying a Ciabatta recipe in the March/April 2009 Cooks Illustrated which turned out marvelously. Then I came across Suzanne Dunaway's No Need to Knead cookbook at the library. This is one cookbook that seriously needs a second edition. It was published in 1999 and is not readily available on the used book market. It is one of the best cookbooks I have found, even including original watercolor illustrations by Dunaway. I made Apricot Focaccia following her recipe exactly and the result was divine. Easy too. It is suprising what great bread you can make without kneading. Seriously. If you are interested in baking at all and can find a copy of Dunaway's book at your local library, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Some more birds. I can't seem to stop snapping pictures of birds in our backyard. Believe me this is a tiny sample of my total image haul. :-)


Lots of activity at the niger feeder. Goldfinches give larger birds like Grackles a very wide birth, but they aren't afraid to mix it up with birds their own size like house finches and juncos.



The quintessential snow birds in our backyard are cardials and dark-eyed juncos. These are a couple of nice junco pictures. They stay with us from October through April, traveling north into Canada to breed and next in the spring and summer.


Bluejays simply can't resist peanuts in the shell, even if they have to do a little snow removal to uncover them.


Starlings are widely reviled by birders because they are an invasive species and force out many lovely native birds. Well, at least in urban areas. I have to confess that I enjoy watching the. They are handsome, fiesty, and often hilarious.

Here are a couple more pictures of Basie, for his many blog-stalking fans...


Playing in the snow can wear a puppy out!