Pizza Party


Recipe: Pizza






One of my favourite party foods is Pizza. And what kind of pizza is the best? Home-made, of course and its so easy to make. In fact its one of the easiest party foods to prepare.

The only preparations you need to do for a pizza party is:
1) Make the dough for the base and allow it to rise for 2-3 hours
2) Make the pizza sauce. This can be made a couple of days in advance and frozen.
3) Get your favourite toppings cooked/chopped/sliced and the cheese grated. In fact, if its a party of close friends/family, you can ask each one to bring their favourite topping.
4) If making thick pan pizzas, then you will have to blind bake the pizza bases before-hand.

Assembling and baking the pizza hardly takes 20-25 minutes or so. And can be done even after the guests have arrived so that the pizza can be served piping hot. Maybe even tweaked to individual preferences. Or even individually assembled, if your guests are keen and few in number.





The below recipe for pizza dough would yeild 4 medium sized thin-crust pizza bases or 2 medium sized thick pan pizza bases.


PIZZA
Recipe Source: Mom

DOUGH FOR THE PIZZA BASE:

Ingredients:
Whole wheat flour - 2 cups
All purpose flour - 2 cups
Active Dried Yeast - 2 tsp or instant yeast 1.5 tsp
Water - 2 cups
Salt - 1 tsp
Sugar - 2 tsp
Butter or cooking oil - 4 Tbsp
Cheese - 1 handful (optional)

Method:
In half a cup of warm water, dissolve the sugar. Add the yeast to this and let it rise. It takes about 15 minutes.

Mix the 2 flours and salt. Rub in the butter to this flour mixture. Add the yeast mixture to this and mix well. Add the rest of the water and knead. If the dough is too tight, add a couple of teaspoons of water and knead thoroughly. Optionally pizza cheese can also be kneaded into the dough.

Place the dough in a well oiled vessel with a lid. There should be enough space in the vessel for the dough to rise. Let this dough sit for 2-3 hours.

PIZZA SAUCE:

Ingredients:
Tomatoes - 6 chopped
Garlic - 6 cloves crushed
Chilli powder - 2 tsp (Optional)
Cinnamon - 1/2 inch piece
Cloves - 2
Salt to taste
Water - 1/2 cup
Oregano - 2 Tbsp
Olive oil - 2 Tbsp
Sugar - 1 tsp

Method:
Put all the ingredients except olive oil into a large pot or pressure cooker and cook till the tomatoes are well cooked.

Let the mixture cool and puree it in a blender.

Heat the olive oil in a pan and add the tomato puree. Bring it to a boil and then let it simmer on a low flame. Stir occasionally till it reaches a thick porridge-like consistency.

PIZZA BASE:

Roll out the Pizza dough into the pizza pan in the desired thickness.

Pre-heat the oven to 250 degrees. For thick pan pizzas, roll out the dough to 1 cm thickness. Poke it with a fork all over and blind bake it for 15 min at 250 deg C. The pizza base is ready to be assembled now.

For thin-crust pizza, roll out the pizza dough into 2mm thickness. Place it on the pizza tray. Poke it with a fork all over and let it rest for 15-20 minutes till the dough rises. The thin-crust pizza base can be assembled with toppings now as they do not have to be blind baked.

TOPPINGS:

Around a cup of Grated Mozarella cheese or pizza cheese is one of the essential toppings along with Pizza sauce. Of course the cheese can be reduced as per individual preferences.

Around 2 cups of any of your favourite toppings

We used the following toppings in our pizza.

1) Cooked baby-corn pieces
2) Olives in brine
3) sliced sausages
4) sliced and cooked bacon
5) sliced and cooked salami
6) sliced and cooked mushrooms
7) Fresh tomato slices
8) Oregano


ASSEMBLING AND BAKING THE PIZZA:

Take the pizza base of choice and spread a thin layer of pizza sauce followed by any of the toppings of choice.

Finally spread a layer of grated mozarella cheese or pizza cheese as the topmost layer of pizza.

Pop this into a pre-heated oven and bake at maximum temperature of the oven till the cheese
on the top has melted. It took me about 25 minutes at a temperature of 250 degrees C.






VERDICT: We made this pizza for a family get-together for lunch and all of us pitched in getting the ingredients ready and assembling the pizza. We thoroughly enjoyed making and eating the pizza together.

Comments

  1. Man !! You prepared the pizza base too ? :) Nice ! This looks so yummy .. I wish I could get a piece of it ..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah Vidya, in fact its really easy to prepare the pizza base.

    ReplyDelete
  3. this looks very beautiful Appu....

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  4. Hi Sarah, Thank you for helping me gift my husband with the bestest ever b'day gift I could gift him - "A pizza with his fav choice of toppings" & in the most splendid taste....*blush blush*

    ReplyDelete
  5. Bravo Manju and what a great idea! surprise the husband with his favourite food on his bday :) So happy that the pizza came out well and that ur husband liked it :)

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  6. Thanks Juny! Next time we get together... we should go for something simple as this :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Beautiful pizzas! And the crust looks great :-)

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  8. wow, i wish i could have (at least) one piece just now :}

    ReplyDelete
  9. baking powder in the description-for what

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oops sorry about that. Baking powder is not needed actually. A fews years earlier, I used to use both baking powder and yeast for the pizza dough. But these days I only use yeast. I'll correct the recipe...

      Delete

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All the dishes posted in this blog have been cooked by me. Some of the recipes are mine and some of them adapted / borrowed in which case, the link to the original source is provided.

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