Who doesn’t love pizza? I certainly do and so does my family, and you can make fresh homemade pizza reasonably easily. You can even make it with some home produced components included as well and it doesn’t get much better than that!
There are a number of components to what I regard as good pizza, and one of those components is pizza sauce, can’t have a good pizza without good pizza sauce, and the best pizza sauce is homemade! This is how I make ours -
Pizza sauce
I take a 2.5 litre saucepan and fill it with cut tomatoes, I just cut them in half and toss them in until they hit the rim of the saucepan. I add in maybe a quarter of a cup of water to start tings off and prevent catching, then turn on the heat. I turn the heat onto low until the tomatoes start to cook down and once there is some liquid in the bottom of the pan I turn up the heat and cook them for a few hours. I stir them every so often to make sure they are not catching on the bottom.
I cook them until the liquid level is down to 50% or less volume in the saucepan, but I keep an eye on them more frequently towards the end and drop the heat back to low so I don’t get black burnt bits in our sauce. Once the tomatoes are evaporated down I process them to remove skins and seeds. This can be done a number of ways but for a relatively small amount like this, the best way is probably to get hold of a ‘Mouli’ food mill, they are not expensive and will do the job a lot quicker and easier than a kitchen sieve and a spoon.
With the tomatoes now missing their seeds and skins, I return them to the saucepan and reheat them. I fry up a couple of large diced onions and 4 diced cloves of garlic and toss them in once they are cooked translucent. I add a teaspoon of salt (you might want more or less) and herbs like dried oregano and basil. An alternative is to use an Italian herb season mix, in which case a couple of teaspoons generally works well.
With the sauce completed but still hot, I pack it into 250ml jars (which have been previously sterilised along with their lids) and affix said lids and process for 1 hr at 100°C by boiling in a larger saucepan. Once processing is complete, I remove them from the boiling water and sit them on a tea towel to cool. Ensure that the pop-top in the lid pops down to show a vacuum has been formed or you will need to re-process, perhaps with a new lid! Or use the jar immediately.
Pizza Base
For years, when we had homemade pizza, I took the easy way out and bought some wholemeal Lebanese bread. That worked, and worked well but I found that we really wanted some real pizza crust to munch on so I started making the recipe below. The amounts are perfect for two 28cm pizzas and as luck would have it, each 250ml jar of pizza sauce is ideal for those two 28cm pizzas!
Just as an aside, when we were using Lebanese bread as a base, we would have a pizza each, but with the from-scratch pizza base using the same toppings, one pizza will do the both of us. We still make two, but put one in the fridge for later.
Anyway, the recipe is -
1.5 cups bakers’ flour (organic)
1.5 cups whole wheat flour (organic and freshly ground)
2 teaspoons yeast
1 teaspoon salt
¼ cup olive oil
1 cup warm water
Add flours, salt, yeast into a mixing bowl, measure out water and oil.
Make well in the centre and add liquids, mix until combined, I generally just use my fingers.
Knead for 10 minutes.
Replace in bowl and cover with tea towel, leave for 30 minutes to rise.
Cut in half, form each half into a ball and roll out into two rounds about 5mm-6mm thick.
Top and bake at 220°C for 15 minutes, but check regularly after 10 minutes
Generally when cooking pizza (and there is nothing quite like the smell of cooking pizza is there?) I usually don’t time it, I just keep an eye on them.
Toppings
Obviously the toppings are up to you, you will need the pizza sauce and mozzarella cheese as a minimum (and you can make your own mozzarella too, we did it here) then throw on whatever you want. We generally like a supreme style pizza with onion and capsicum (home grown when we can), mushrooms, cabanossi and Italian sausage.
This set of toppings is inspired by ‘The Bomb’, a pizza we used to buy from the ‘Hungry Horse’ pizzeria in Cabramatta (Sydney) back in the 70s.
Making your own pizza is a fun thing to do with the family, you can use fresh and organic ingredients, some of which you can even produce yourself, so give it a go and once you have you won’t settle for substandard pizza ever again!
