Pizza!

Pizza is my favorite food.  I know that it’s not good for me.  I know all that yummy goodness comes with tons of calories.  Regardless, pizza is my favorite food. Since I moved away from my hometown 5 years ago, I’ve missed the crispiness and goeyness of the pizza that I was raised eating.  There have been other pizzas but none of them were what I had come to crave.  I’ve searched nearby but I still haven’t found that flavor…so I am resolved to create it at home and the experiments begin.
First attempt, I used a Pilsbury premade pizza dough.  The dough rose beautifully as it baked but it remained doughy in the center.  Research through Food Network showed me that I’d not preheated my stone enough to get a crispy crust.  While it had goeyness I had perhaps added too much cheese which added to the greasiness and therefore the doughy center.  Upon taste-test my husband and I both noted that the crust was too sweet. 
That was a few months ago….
Take two, I found a pizza dough recipe in my bread-maker recipe book.  Hmmm, the Bread Maker assures all the proper mixing and rising times so it seems fool-proof which is my kind of recipe.  Yesterday I rediscovered my bread maker.  My bread maker is one of those kitchen gadgets that I love but don’t use very often.  I use it non-stop for a few days and then I put it away for a few months.  I am thinking it needs to reside on my counter full time so I don’t keep forgetting all the yum that it can provide.  But I digress.  The dough that resulted from the recipe had the right flavor but was enough to make a full sized extra large pizzeria pizza which I can’t accommodate on my pizza stone so I cut it into 4 portions and wrapped the other 3 for later use. 
My one portion was able to be rolled to a 10” size.  I preheated the oven and stone to 400 degrees as I worked with the dough so preheat time was about 20 minutes or so.  I prepped the crust on parchment paper to aide in the move to the pizza stone when the pizza was topped and ready for baking.   The pizza came out crisp and with the right flavor.  Some of the grease came through the crust and/or the parchment paper.  The crust itself was a little tough and chewy and it rose quite a bit in the oven so it doesn’t have quite the same consistency as the pizza back home but it definitely comes closer.  To handle the greasiness I resolved to add some more flour to the process of getting the dough to the pizza shape.  The toughness also was most likely due to my rolling the pizza dough rather than stretching it. 
Take three…So today the pizza stone was moved to the lowest rack and preheated with the oven for at least 30 minutes.  I used the same dough from the bread maker which I had wrapped the remaining portions and put into the refrigerator.  The dough had risen more in the fridge which was kind of awesome.  I laid out my parchment paper and added flour then my dough.  I put more flour on the dough and made sure the dough was covered in flour taking away the stickiness of the dough.  Then I stretched the dough (thanks Kitchen Boss for the pointers).  I added toppings and after 15 minutes in the oven I had pizza. Crust rose in the oven (need to find a way to keep it thinner).  Flavor of the crust was right, crispiness was good, no grease leakage which was awesome.  Bottom of the crust was thick in flour so I need to use less of that.  But we are getting closer. Sorry about half being gone, I got so involved in taste test that I forgot about documentation.   The best thing about making the pizza from scratch and at home is that I’m not getting the acid indigestion that I sometimes get from pizza eaten out.
I still have 2 more balls of dough to experiment with and I’m looking forward to zeroing in on the right combo. 
Now, if I could figure out the creamy center of the Cream Filled Long John doughnuts I enjoyed at home but that may take more time.