I have always loved making homemade pizza. Pizza is probably my favorite food. You can prepare it in so many ways: thin crust, thicker crust, Chicago style. You can top it with anything. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of sauce options. There are hundreds of cheese combinations. You can add herbs and spices to the dough, sauce, or cheese. It’s really an endlessly variable food, and I love that about it.

Today I’m following my super basic Homemade Pizza Dough recipe. Even if you’re not much of a baker this recipe is simple and easy to follow. You literally just need flour, salt, water, yeast, and olive oil, and some way of mixing the dough. I used my Kitchen Aid stand mixer to prep the dough, but you can use a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon if you prefer; I believe in you, dear reader, and your ability to make this dough.

I’m feeding three people tonight. If I was using my normal oven, I’d bake the pies at 500 degrees on a pizza pan. However, I plan to bake in my gas-fired pizza oven tonight, and that oven accepts pies of about 10 inches. From experience I know that the Homemade Pizza Dough recipe makes three of those pies. After completing the dough, I weighed it out into equal-size portions, which works out to about 11 ounces of dough per pie.

After weighing out the dough it’s time to rise it. In general, the longer you rise bread, the better it is, up to about 24 hours. If you’re going to do a prolonged rise, more than say 5-6 hours, leave your dough in the fridge; otherwise, countertop is fine. In this case, I made the dough at 3pm and targeted a baking time of about 6, so the dough will stay on the countertop.

Preheat

I’m lucky enough to have a Blackstone gas-fired pizza oven, which was a lovely gift from my wife. I love baking pizza in this oven, and the results have been consistently good since I learned how to properly use it. The single most important piece of advice for using a pizza oven is to preheat it for at least 20-30 minutes. You want the baking stone in the oven to be good and hot, at least 400 degrees, in order to get the bottom of the crust cooked properly. I encourage you to get an inexpensive infrared temperature gun to check the stone temp. I can tell you from experience that if you fail to preheat the stone adequately your pizza will have a mushy bottom, and nobody likes that.

In addition to having the stone heated adequately, it’s important to set the oven temperature appropriately. I like to keep an oven temp of about 550 degrees. I’ve found that with a stone temp of about 400 and an oven temp of about 550, a 10-inch pizza will bake in about four and a half minutes in this specific pizza oven.

Prep

After getting the pizza oven preheated, I started making the pizzas. To transport the pizza from my kitchen inside to the pizza oven outside, I have a metal pizza peel. To keep the dough from sticking to the countertop or to the pizza stone, I sprinkle a generous amount of cornmeal on the countertop. I stretch the dough and then plop it into the cornmeal, stretching and pulling it to the right size before topping it.

We use Mid’s pizza sauce (not sponsored, this is a genuine recommendation) on our pizzas. We’ve taste-tested a number of brands and Mid’s is (1) delicious and (2) made without a bunch of random chemicals and additives. For cheese, we use whatever mozzarella we have on hand and some Cabot cheddar (also not sponsored, just recommended for deliciousness) on top. But you can do whatever you want: try some barbecue sauce and red onions, or some buffalo sauce, or pesto. Go nuts! Assemble for yourself the pizza of your dreams.

Peel & Bake

Once the pizza is topped and ready to cook, it has to go on the peel. The trick with the pizza peel is to be aggressive and fast. Line the lip of the peel up against the edge of the dough and, using your shoulder, fire the peel under the dough. It should slide right onto the peel if you’ve used enough cornmeal. Use the same motion in reverse to load the pizza onto the pizza stone.

Close the door to the pizza oven and wait. It’s best not to leave the pizza unattended, but also don’t bother it. Check on it at about 2 minutes and about 4 minutes, and it probably will be ready to come out at about 4 minutes 30 seconds. Use the peel again to grab the dough from the stone, and transfer it to a cutting board before slicing and serving.

My pizza tonight came out rather well:

Tonight’s pizza was topped with mushrooms, pepperoni, onions, jalapenos, and bell peppers. The sauce was loaded with some red pepper flakes I bought at a market in Montreal, which have a little more spice to them than the flakes I can find in the grocers here in America. The crust was nicely baked and the bottom of the pie was cooked perfectly.

Best of all? I know exactly what’s in this pizza. I made it myself! There are no additives (beyond whatever mysterious horrors are in the pepperoni) and no preservatives or chemical. There are no emulsifiers or stabilizers or dyes. It’s flour, water, salt, yeast, oil, tomato sauce, and cheese. It’s simple, it’s filling, it’s delicious, and I’m quite satisfied. Pizza night wins again.