Pizza

I suppose I should post just how I make pizza, because I know my adoring masses (all 5 of you) are dying to know. First off, I use the whole wheat pizza dough recipe from Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. I always make half again as much as the recipe calls for--when I'm making bread, that equals three loaves instead of two. So I do it for pizza dough, too. Last night I put 1/3 of it in the freezer for future pizza, or to make pita. One recipe was plenty of pizza for five of us last night, plus good leftovers today.

Before preparing the pizzas, I preheat my baking stone, at 400 degrees.

Use a cookie sheet, or a pizza peel, to transfer the pizza on and off the baking stone. I prepare the sheet with coarsely ground wheat....but I have a grain mill, so it's easy for me to get different grinds of grain. Cornmeal is often suggested, but I find it's too hard, and biting down on a grain of corn isn't always pleasant. Another alternative is steel-cut oats. Oats are nice and soft and you can buy them ground to the correct coarseness.

But don't put too much on the sheet! Too much loose grain is what makes the house all smoky when you're using a baking stone. But you want enough that the pizza will be able to slide off easily.

So, after the dough is all ready to go, I pat it into small rounds--last night I think I made 9 small rounds-- and lay it on the prepared cookie sheet (I don't have a pizza peel). Put salt and pepper on the dough, then add olive oil. (I've also done this last--but last night I did it first. Seems I can remember to do it better at the beginning.) Then add whatever toppings you want. There's a nice pizza sauce recipe there with the dough recipe, but in the summertime I rarely use pizza sauce as there are so many more interesting things to put on pizza. For the fig: slice figs in half, and just lay them on. Add toasted pecans, chopped, crumbled blue cheese, and onions that you've cooked on low heat for half an hour or so. For the pizza margharita: Slice wonderful tomatoes (no supermarket varieties!), chop fresh basil, mince garlic, and slice fresh mozzarella. Put them all on the dough.

Transfer, carefully, to the baking stone. Use a metal spatula to aid getting the pizzas onto the stone. Bake until the crust is fully cooked. You can tell best from the underside--it will be all nice and mottled with dark brown.

Enjoy!