Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I had a bad craving for pizza. More specifically, pepperoni pizza. My mother had just recently sent me a recipe to try out for pizza crust, and this seemed like the perfect moment to do so. To the question of, “Were we to make homemade pizza for dinner, what should we put on it? Besides pepperoni.” I got the response: “Pineapple.” And, we ended up with carmelized onion, coppa, pepperoni, fresh mozzarella and pepperoni.
The recipe we used for the crust was from Cooks Illustrated which advocates using a laminated dough. What is a laminated dough, you ask? It’s a dough you’ve rolled out, spread with softened butter, folded up to form a sort of pocket for the butter, rolled out again, folded over again, etc. There is some in and out of the fridge involved, but essentially you end up with a dough that has several layers of dough and butter. Layers of dough and fat makes flaky crust. I repeat: layers of dough and fat makes flaky crust. This is the same exact technique used in making croissants, for example.
So, laminated dough. Cooking method? Super hot oven and a baking stone. The dough came out nice and crispy. It reminded me of the dough used for Chicago style deep dish, since it had the flaky layers from the butter.
This definitely satisfied my craving for pizza; if you make pizza at home, serve it with a nice green salad and a glass of red wine. I promise you won’t miss take out.
You’re so right. I made pizza at home a few weeks ago (with Pillsbury pizza dough though) but it tasted very different from the pizza parlor’s in a good way. It was better! Since then we plan to make more whenever we crave.