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Yeah, I know, I’m nuts. Not only did I make homemade mozzarella, I had to go way off the deep end and homemake absolutely everything from scratch for the meal in which I wanted to feature that mozzarella. Some people buy their cheese at the store. Some people order pizza for delivery. I, on the other hand, made cheese, pizza sauce and pizza dough from scratch all in one day
And you know what? It wasn’t at all hard, and it was damn delicious.
I’ve made this sauce several times (I have a few bags full of it in the freezer right now!), and I’m always amazed at the great flavor you can achieve with so few and such simple ingredients. Five ingredients. Note: Get the good tomatoes, even though they cost more. It’s worth it.
As the garlic melds with the tomato paste, the kitchen starts to smell all tart and rich like a real pizzeria. It’s really quite lovely. Then you add the crushed tomatoes, bring to a boil and let it simmer for 20 minutes. As easy as that.
And the dough is equally dead simple, again five ingredients.
The dough does need to rise for an hour in which I usually go hit Netflix instant for a while. Homemade pizza is so damn hard, right?
Actually, with all the homemade, quality parts, the pizza doesn’t need anything else fancy. A simple, basic margherita pizza — sauce, cheese and basil — can truly knock your socks off.
The best part: the hot, crisp sear on the crust created when you grill the pizza dough. It’s actually a process I was scared of at one time, images of burned on messes or dough falling through the grates running through my head. But how wrong I was. The dough firms and rises up almost instantly, and if not for the pesky cold thing we call winter, I’d never bake a pizza in the oven again. That good.
Cheese. Sauce. Dough. And time, of course. I spent most of the day in the kitchen, which may not be fun for other people, but is totally fine by me. One day of work for a knock-out delicious meal that I made all by myself, from the ground up, with a little help from my Christmas presents, of course.
