New York cheese pizza

Dave surprised me one day with the book The Elements of Pizza, by Ken Forkish. It's full of pizza-making techniques and a variety of dough and pizza recipes. I've made pizza with store-bought dough, but I've never made a pizza completely from scratch. For my first one, I decided to go with something simple: a single dough ball for a New York cheese pizza. I used 00 flour and baked it on a pizza stone, but I couldn't get my oven past 525 degrees and I don't have a pizza peel or an instant read thermometer (to check the temperature of the water and the dough for proper yeast encouragement).

YUM!

Most of the dough recipes yield three balls of dough and take more than a day, but this one you can start in the morning and have pizza for dinner. You have to give the yeast time to work so most of the time that this recipe takes is waiting for the yeast to do its thing. It's actually quite quick if you just count the time you're actively doing something.

SO GOOD!

Kneading the dough was kind of fun and easier than I expected. When it was time to stretch it and shape it into a pizza, it did look more like a pizza than an amoeba...but it had a slight accident going into the oven so the shape changed a bit then. Haha.

DELICIOUS!

Okay, so how did it taste? HOLY CRAP. It was so good. So, so good. The dough was amazing, and this was the "quick" dough in the book, not one of the doughs the author considers the "better" doughs (that take longer). It wasn't just the dough- the pizza was delicious. Dave said it was better than the pizza from our usual pizza place.

It's time to get a pizza peel. I'll be making my own pizza more often.