I think for 2014, I am going to update the blog only when I cook something new-- like tonight for instance!
I got a pizza stone as a Christmas present and I have been wanting to give it a try. We tried making pizzas sometime last year, but the crust was too doughy. I figured the pizza stone would solve this problem and I was right... the crust came out much better when using the pizza stone.
However, there were other problems. I had a really hard time spreading the pizza dough. I bought pre-made, fresh pizza dough from Whole Foods. The dough kept wanting to shrink back to its original size. And it was sticking to the cutting mat I was spreading it on. I sprinkled some flour onto the mat and that seemed to help prevent the dough from sticking to the mat as much. I finally got the pizza into a sort of elliptical shape. The dough was nothing close to a uniform thickness. I was starting to think this was not going to turn out well.
Earlier, I made fresh pesto with basil, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, and fresh grated parmesean cheese. The pesto was really good. I spread it out on the top of my "pizza" and then sprinkled mozarella over the pizza and topped it off with artichoke hearts (from a can).
Then I had a heck of a time getting it off the mat again. I don't think there is a word which describes the shape of my pizza once I got it off the mat.
The instructions for the pizza stone said to heat the stone in the oven to 500 deg F and then remove it and spread the pizza dough on the stone. Trying to spread pizza dough on a 500 deg stone seems not safe to me, so I didn't do that. After getting my pizza off the mat, I opened the oven and sat the pizza on the stone.
About 10 minutes later, the pizza looked like it was done, so I tried to remove it from the stone, but it was stuck! I worked at it with a spatula and eventually pulled off something which loosely resembled a giant pesto artichoke pizza pretzel.
Well, the flavor of the pesto and artichoke hearts along with a well cooked crust was actually pretty good. The pizza looked sad but the taste was happy. I think I need some kind of paddle to move my pizza from the counter top to the pizza stone and then to lift it off the pizza stone and perhaps some oil on the work surface where I am working the dough might help. I will do some more research on this before I attempt to make pizza again. I am sure that there are probably hundreds of videos on you tube about how to make pizza... ok I just checked. I found 768,000 videos which matched "how to make pizza"
