Pizza!

So I've been wanting to tackle pizza - I tried it once many, many years ago and it failed badly.  I got myself a pizza stone (King Arthur was running a nice sale!), found a recipe, and got to it.

My recipe was the Heart Healthy Honey of a Pizza recipe from The Original King Arthur Flour Cookbook with a few modifications.  It called for half whole wheat flour, but I didn't have that so I used all unbleached white.  Though I will pick up some of their wheat flour for next time - I'm sure that would be nice.

 First I put warm water, yeast, and the honey in a bowl and let that start working.

Then I added about a cup of the flour and the salt.

A spoon wasn't mixing it well enough for me, so I grabbed my little whisk.

Then I moved on to the dough whisk to pull the rest of the flour into the dough.

Here's the dough just pulled together and kneaded a bit.

I let it rest a few minutes and it smoothed out some.

I turned it into a lightly oiled bowl.  You can let this rise for two hours someplace warm-ish, but I decide to put it in the fridge for all day (about six hours).  This is supposed to develop the flavors more.

Here it is after about five hours.  I let it come to room temperature while I heated my oven and made my pesto.

I heard on a cooking show or I read in a cookbook somewhere about how to make a home oven sorta behave like a pizzaria pizza oven.  Those get up to like 700º or 800º and most home ovens can't match that, so it's hard to get a nice crust on them.  So here's what I did:  I put the rack in the oven on the second rung from the top.  I pre-heated the oven at 500º for about an hour.  Then I prepped my pizzas.  I put them on the stone and turned the heat down to 450º...so they had heat from below and above.  The strategy worked very nicely!  (corn meal on the spatula made the moving part easier, too.)

15 minutes later - viola!

The crusts came out beautifully!  Crispy on the bottom, just like they should be.

This was my first real pizza attempt, so I wasn't sure how to deal with the dough...I set it up for a thick crust, which my husband and I both like, but these were arguably a little too thick.  I'll handle the dough a little differently next time to get the crust a bit thinner.

By the way, the topping tonight was home-made pesto and mozzarella cheese torn into bits.

I was using a cake lifter, which was ok for little pizzas, but I think if I make a larger one I'm going to need an actual pizza peel.