Pizza!

(this is not the prettiest pizza I've ever made)

We looove homemade pizza.  Seriously, we eat it at least once a week.  If I don't make pizza for a while, Tom starts to go into withdrawal.  A lot of times it's an uncreative pizza like pepperoni or something, but it's almost always with homemade pizza dough.

I've tried a few different pizza dough recipes and this one from the Pioneer Woman's cookbook is my favorite thus far.  What I like about it is that it's very stretchy.  It's easy to stretch the dough out to a 12-16" circle without ripping holes in it like some other dough recipes I've tried.  This is probably because of the good amount of olive oil in the recipe.

I've tried this recipe with white flour, wheat flour, half white half wheat, and with white whole wheat flour (King Arthur Flour makes this, it's not as heavy and grainy as regular wheat flour but still has some of the whole grain value).  I've found that to keep it pliable and stretchy, it's best to use all white flour, or half white and half whole wheat white flour.

I also like using King Arthur Flour's pizza seasoning.  It's a blend of spices that adds a lot of flavor either to the dough or sauce you're using.  I always add about a teaspoon of this to dough when I make it.

Now...toppings.  Again, a lot of times we end up doing pretty normal toppings on our pizzas.  But here's some pizzas we've made in the past or ones that are on my list to try:

• Chicken sausage and ricotta: Precooked chicken sausages are great on pizza.  That with dollops of ricotta is one of our favorite pizzas.
• BBQ chicken pizza: spread BBQ sauce instead of pizza sauce, add some caramelized onions, pieces of cooked chicken or chicken sausage, and mix cheddar and mozzarella cheese to top it.  
• Buffalo chicken pizza (what's pictured here): mix buffalo sauce with blue cheese dressing (I used ranch because we were out of blue cheese), top with chicken and a mix of cheddar and mozzarella cheese.  You could also add some crumbles of blue cheese and some scallions.  
• Or you could go sauceless and try a baked potato pizza.  Cook some potatoes, chop into small pieces, scatter on pizza dough with bacon bits, scallions, cheddar cheese and whatever else you like on baked potatoes.

Ok, enough blabber, you probably just want the dough recipe.

Pizza Dough

From The Pioneer Woman

Makes 2 crusts (wrap the extra in saran wrap then in a plastic bag and freeze it for later)

1 tsp yeast (active dry or instant...either is fine)

1 1/4 cups warm water 

4 cups all purpose flour (or half white/half wheat)

1 tsp Kosher salt

1/3 cup olive oil

1. Sprinkle yeast over warm water and let sit for a minute.  Attach dough hook to your mixer.  You can also mix this by hand with a wood spoon, it'll just take a little more manpower.

2. Mix flour and salt in bowl of mixer.  Slowly drizzle in the olive oil until combined.  Then stir the bowl/cup with the water and yeast and slowly add to the flour with the mixer on low.  Mix until combined and the dough forms a ball.  If the dough looks very sticky, add a bit more flour.

3. Coat a bowl with a thin layer of oil, add the dough back in, and cover lightly either with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel.  Put in a warm spot in your kitchen and let the dough rise for about an hour.  

4. Once the dough has risen, preheat your oven to 400 degrees.  Split the ball in half and wrap up half to save for later or to make a second pizza.  Stretch the dough out to a 12-16" circle (or rectangle or whatever shape floats your boat).  We have a pizza pan that's metal with lots of small holes in the bottom.  It's worked pretty well for us, but you can also use a regular sheet pan, or a pizza stone.

5.  Add your toppings and put in the hot oven.  Baking time depends on how you like your pizza.  If you like it doughy, you'll cook it for 10-12 minutes.  If you like it crisper, you'll go for about 15.  Once the pizza's done, let it cool for a few minutes before cutting it.

Buttermilk Biscuits

I'll admit that I am a fan of the Pillsbury-type pop n' roll biscuits.  If you're southern, don't hate me for saying that.  I don't have a family recipe for buttermilk biscuits and up until a year or so ago I'd never tried making them from scratch.  My first attempt was a total fail.  Big lead biscuits that no one wanted to eat.  But I had some buttermilk in the fridge leftover from something else, so I decided to give it another shot.

I have one of the big America's Test Kitchen family cookbooks. This is my go to book for almost everything.  It's never let me down and this recipe was no exception.  But for biscuits, the key to success is not so much the recipe but the technique.  The butter and the buttermilk have to be cold and you can't can't can't overmix or overknead the dough. That's been my mistake before is overkneading.  I see crumbly bits of flour in the bowl and to me, it doesn't look ready to bake yet.  But it is!  Leave it crumbly!


Buttermilk Biscuits
Adapted from the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook

1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup cake flour (or 7/8 cup of all purpose flour plus 2 tbsp cornstarch)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 stick butter, cold, cut into 1/4 inch cubes
3/4 cup cold buttermilk


1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

2. Add both flours, baking powder, sugar, baking soda, and salt in the bowl of a mixer with a paddle attachment.

3. Add cubes of butter on top of the flour mixture and mix until combined.  The butter should be in pea-sized pieces.

4. Add buttermilk and mix only until the dough forms a sticky ball.  There will still be some bits of flour in the bottom of the bowl, but that's ok!

5. Turn the dough out onto a floured counter.  Form the dough into a rough ball, then press either with your hands or a rolling pin, lightly, to make a 1 inch thick circle.

6. Use a biscuit cutter or round cookie cutter and press out as many biscuits as you can and place on an ungreased cookie sheet.  Gather remaining dough and press together, do not knead it, just smoosh it all together with your hands.  Repeat until you've used up as much of the dough as you can, you don't want to waste any!

7. Bake 10-12 minutes until golden brown.  And brush the tops with melted butter...you know you want to.