Veggie Pizza with farm fresh mushrooms, Tuscan kale, onions, red bell peppers, and fresh ricotta and mozzarella cheeses. Garnished with sea salt, red pepper flakes, and a drizzle of olive oil.

Over the holiday a couple weeks back, we decided to stay put and not go anywhere. It was very low key, which gave me time to cook. One night I made the mussels, which I discuss in a previous post, and on another night we had homemade pizza. When I say homemade pizza, I mean homemade pizza. I made everything from mozzarella and ricotta cheese to the dough for the crust to literally grinding and seasoning meat to make Italian sausage. It was a whole production that took the better part of the day (off and on). I know most people probably don’t want to spend that amount of time in the kitchen but it really was an off and on sort of day, casually doing one thing and then another later and so on until the components were ready for the actual pizza making. Personally I think this can end up being a family sort of activity where you can get kids involved in each facet of the process or allow them at the end to put the pizza together using ingredients of their choice.

I used the red sauce that I posted about a few days back and simply reduced that down further until it was very thick (pizza sauce needs to be much thicker than a tomato sauce that you would use for pasta or something like that). I used a dough recipe from a recipe from Mark Bittman which I found by simply goggling pizza dough recipes. I thought it sounded good so that’s the one I landed on this time around. The mozzarella cheese recipe I used was from a cookbook entitled Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll (which is a great beginner’s guide to making fresh and aged cheeses). I posted a recipe for the ricotta a while back and it’s very easy. I purchased a pork shoulder from Barth’s market and ground it using a medium grind. If you don’t have a meat grinder or meat grinder attachment for your stand mixer, you can certainly use ground pork instead. The ground meat was seasoned using only a few ingredients and I didn’t bother putting in cases…simply sautéed some small patties until they were almost cooked through and then finished the small sausage patties in the oven on the pizzas. From there, I chopped some fresh veggies such as mushrooms, onions, peppers, and garlic and chopped some herbs such as parsley and basil. We then had the components necessary to create a number of different pizzas. We ended up making a couple with sausage and a couple of vegetarian, which was great.

All of this sounds like a lot of work and it certainly isn’t the easiest of meals to make…but it’s pizza night and it can be fun if you have the right mind set. So decide on the ingredients you’d like to have as toppings, make the dough and sauce. If you don’t feel like making cheese, buy some fresh mozzarella and ricotta if you’d like and go from there. It can be as easy or as complex as you’d care to make it. Once you have the ingredients ready to assemble, the pizza making can go rather quickly…ten to twenty minutes per pizza depending on the size of the pizza and the temperature of the oven or grill you are using. Oh I almost forgot…if you have a pizza stone, you obviously need to use it. If you don’t but you think you might make this more than once it’s certainly worth the investment as you can usually purchase one for around $20. The recipes for the various components and the final pizzas follow after the jump…enjoy pizza night with your family. I think you will find that it’s a fun and enjoyably delicious experience. Continue reading →