Aye Chef - Cooking with style

Most of us know what Pizza is, how it looks like and some of its different varieties, distinguished by the different toppings, sauce or even mixing spices into the dough. Today I decided to make one myself. The result was beyond what I expected, it came out delicious and even my wife liked it as she usually criticize my cooking.

Ingredients (makes 2 medium pizzas):

Dough
500g white bread flour (shtibel #2)
15g active(not dry) yeast
280ml tepid water
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon Herb de Provence
ground black pepper


Sauce
400g crushed tomatoes
2 teaspoons tomato paste
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tablespoon oregano, freshly minced
salt
pepper
150g mozzarella cheese, crumbled

First we make the dough.
Sift the flour into a large bowl, add salt and spices, mix well. Create well in the center.
In another bowl, combine water and yeast, crumbling the latter and mixing until yeast dissolves. Mix in olive oil as well.
Combine liquid with the flour and fold until dough is solid enough to start working.
On a lightly floured surface, knead until the dough is strong and elastic, approximately 10 minutes. Return to bowl, cover with nylon and leave for 1 hour or until its size doubled.

On a lightly floured surface, punch the dough several times to release trapped air, cut in half and make a nice 1cm round pizza base out of each half. The technique is to make a ball, then starting in the middle, pull slightly from each side, going on the perimeter until its right. If you made the dough well, it will not break, even if you swing it in midair as you probably seen in pizzerias or on TV. After both of our pizza bases are ready, put them, each, on their own oven rack and leave for 15 minutes.

In the meantime we will make the sauce, but this is also a good time to start preheating your oven, as it should take about 30 minutes before you can actually bake the pizzas. Set to maximum setting (in my oven it's 300 degrees Celsius).

For the sauce, sift the tomatoes, straining liquid and put them into a food processor, together with the paste, oil and garlic. Grind everything to a puree, correct flavor with salt and pepper.

Now let's combine everything together and make some delicious pizza :-)
Put sauce on top of your pizza bases, then mozzarella crumbs. While this is the basic Neapolitana, you can of course add whatever you want, like mushrooms, onion, tuna fish, pepperoni, etc...

Bake in oven for 8-10 minutes.