I love me some homemade pizza dough. In the matter of an hour and very little work, you can have freshly baked bread for dinner, topped with whatever is on hand in the fridge that is delicious and can be adhered to bread by cheese. It is so easy, even my ramen noodle-loving husband can rock this recipe out. Seriously, could there be a more perfect lazy day meal? Making pizza from scratch has always been a part of my life. I still remember making pizza with my dad growing up, sitting up on the counter so I could reach the food, using my favorite plastic cup to roll out the dough…sure, we were using Jiffy dough mix and canned pizza sauce, but the taste didn’t matter. I just enjoyed helping my father make food. It was like playing with Play Dough and painting. And unlike the plastic food I used to play with, this stuff was actually edible. (I only tried to eat 1 of my plastic pieces of food…and it was only after I had filled it chocolate sauce and coconut. Don’t ask.) While living in Adelaide, South Australia, our favorite pizza place made a delicious artichoke, goat cheese and thyme pizza. You might remember it from this post. It was a delicious combination of salty and sweet, buttery and crisp, soft and smooth. I dream about this pizza, while my homemade pizza dough does not hold a candle to Farina’s dough, at the very least I wanted to pay homage to that delicious mix of toppings.
Clearly, it is not artichoke season here in Chicago. Heck, we’re just happy we can see the ground again! So I had rock my pizza out with some frozen artichoke hearts, but it didn’t really make a difference–they still tasted delicious and I didn’t have to wrestle with cutting up a fresh artichoke. I used an herbed goat cheese, thyme, and a little marinated mozzarella just to hold it all together. I also brushed some of the flavored oil from the mozzarella tub on the pizza dough to give it extra flavor. I like to crank my oven up as high as it will go when cooking pizza, and I also like to brush then pan that the dough goes into with olive oil, to ensure a crisp bottom crust. The result was not as thin and delicate as the pizza in Adelaide, but it was a new kind of delicious. The flavored olive oil really gave the dough an extra punch of flavor, and mozzarella was welcomed but not overwhelming addition. The goat cheese gets these brown, crunchy bits that you never knew goat cheese could get but are so damn delicious, you won’t want to share those pieces. This is a ridiculously good pizza.
One of bite of this pizza and I knew it—damn, I’m good. Here is my favorite pizza dough recipe to use, from foodtv.com . I like to substitute the 00 flour with bread flour or all-purpose flour. Both work well. Pizza dough can also be stored in the fridge for a week or in the freezer for a month if well wrapped. Enjoy! ~LTG!
