So we began our quest for perfection by making our own dough. We found a recipe on allrecipes.com called Jay's Signature Pizza Crust. It takes a little longer because of the yeast but rose beautifully and had a good flavor. To ad a touch of flavor we melted 3 tbls of butter and added garlic salt and rubbed in into the entire crust - next time I will use less butter and only do the edges of the crust.
While waiting on the dough to rise (which takes approximately an hour) we chopped up our veggies and grated the cheese for our pizza. We decided on a combination pizza and using a food chopper, finely chopped up onions, green pepper and mushrooms. We also added olives, pepperoni, mozzarella and parmesan cheese.
Rolling out the dough proved to be a bigger task than originally expected but was not impossible, it just took a little finesse (and some half-hearted attempts at tossing it in the air). We used a round 16" pizza crisper pan and the crust was deep dish style. We easily could have done two smaller pizza's with the same amount of dough. We liked that the bottom of the crust was very crisp but the rest of the crust was very airy.
We baked the pizza at 425 for about 15 minutes. We ran into some minor technical difficulties because the oven was about 1" too small for the pan we used. As a result the sides nearest the oven were burned pretty severely. Unfortunately, this burned piece was the first one Spencer tried, hence his so-so assessment as seen below.
Spencers first impression, though not final opinion.
On a scale of 1-5 here is our assessment:
Crust - 3.4
Overall Pizza Flavor - 3.7
So clearly we have still have some work to do :-)
