Margherita Pizza

For our anniversary Kyle got me a pizza stone! It was pretty much the best gift ever. To celebrate, we made Margherita Pizza three times in one week!

Here's a look at the first one, pictured below. For the crust, we used our favorite bread dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I love the bread it makes, but I like the pizza even more! You can find instructions for the bread dough here, and instructions for baking it as pizza dough here. It takes a little bit of advance planning (at least 2 hours) if you don't already have dough in your fridge, but it's really easy. When making pizza instead of bread, you don't have to do the pre-baking resting, so if you just keep some of the dough in the fridge all the time (which we try to do) you can make pizza on a whim! We topped this pizza with sliced tomatoes, dried basil and mozzarella.  It was pretty good, but all the water from the tomatoes made the center of the crust soggy. 

We solved the problem with the next one. Same crust, but this time we used this sauce recipe from epicurious, but we subbed in fresh tomatoes. And we also had some awesome fresh mozzarella and basil. Wow. This picture really doesn't do it justice. I really need to work on my photography skills. (And also make food while the sun is still up.) It had perfectly crisp crust! This was the best pizza I've had this year, and last (except maybe Zachary's in Berkeley). Please make it, you'll be really happy you did!

We made pizza a third time for my dad and my sister Anne as they were coming through to take her to college. That time we used both the crust and sauce from the epicurious recipe. I didn't love the crust as much, but it was easier to throw together last minute (more like last hour, but hey). Also, we leaned that if you drop about a slice worth of crust and sauce onto the bottom of you oven, this happens:

Yep, that is sun streaming through the smoke that filled all of our apartment, including our bedroom where this was taken. We ordered a pizza peel that day to avoid that in the future.  

If you're using a cookie sheet instead of a pizza stone you won't have this problem since you put the pizza on the sheet before you put it into the oven. So don't worry.

I hope you get a chance to make some awesome pizza! What are your favorite pizza toppings? You can probably guess my current favorites. (Hint: look at the post title)