Homemade Pizza

 Hello there! How are you on this Sunday? If you read my last fortnightly catch up post, or saw the photo on my facebook page, then you'll know that for date S Tom and I made pizza from scratch. I absolutely love pizza, but recently I've found that after eating a 'packet pizza' I'll get a really bad stomach ache. I've found that I'm completely fine with a fresh one so it must be something that they put into the pizza to preserve it in store. Homemade pizzas are super easy to make and you do not need a bread machine to make the dough! I thought I would share the recipe with you, so you can have a go at making your own fresh pizzas. 

Ingredients for the base:

300g strong white bread flour

300ml lukewarm water

pinch of salt

1tbsp caster sugar

1 packet of yeast (about 7g)

 Put the yeast into the lukewarm water and stir. 

 Put the flour and salt into a mixing bowl, and make a well in the middle. 

 Pour the yeast mixture into the well in bowl of flour.

 Using a knife, begin to stir the flour into the yeast mixture, and as it starts to come together get your hands in and form it all into a dough.

 Now for the workout! Knead the dough for 10 minutes (and with bread the rougher you are the better!) and then place the dough into a clean bowl and cover with clingfilm. Leave this for an hour to rise.

  Once the hour is up, you will find that the dough has risen a lot! This dough makes four pizzas, so cut your dough into quarters. I put the two unused quarters into the freezer, ready to be used for next time! 

 With the dough that you are using, you need to roll these out either into a circle/square or whatever shape your baking tray is! The thickness is up to you, but as both Tom and I prefer thin bases we rolled it out to about 3-4mm. At this point I would preheat the oven to 230C.

 You now need to decorate your pizza! How you do this and what you use is completely up to you, which is one of the reasons why I love making homemade pizza! For the tomato base we used tomato purée, but you could use chopped tomatoes or even make your own sauce. As this was a date night Tom made my pizza, and I made his. We both had a mix of grated cheddar cheese and slices of mozzarella with prosciutto ham. The only real difference with mine was that I had mushrooms on it!

 What I always found about pizzas from the supermarket, was that the toppings were either thinly spread, or all together in one blob.  With homemade pizzas you have a free choice of whatever and how many toppings you would like!

 Place in the oven for 10 minutes and then they'll be ready to eat!

 Both Tom and I really enjoyed making these pizzas, and we'll definitely be doing it more often as it's so easy! The only time consuming bit is waiting for the dough to rise, but it's worth it for the fresh over the supermarket pizza.
 As always if you have a go at making this then please tweet me @jesslouisekeen! I hope you enjoy making your own fresh pizzas!

Love Jess xxx