What is it that sets the pie from your favorite pizzeria so much apart from the one you’d typically make at home?
In my humble opinion as a self-proclaimed pizza connoisseur, which you should always take with a grain or two of salt (Maldon sea salt, ideally), the difference boils down to two things: the crust and the toppings.
Pizza Marinara, also known as pizza alla marinara, is a traditional Neapolitan-style pizza.
In its simplest form, this pizza is prepared with chunky San Marzano tomato sauce, Mediterranean sea salt flakes, extra virgin olive oil, and freshly-cracked black pepper.
When you’re craving homemade pizza but don’t want to make dough from scratch, you can save yourself the mess of mixing and kneading by buying frozen pizza dough from the store.
Should you let it rise before baking?
The labels on most frozen doughs are surprisingly vague about this. I guess most brands haven’t thought about what happens after you’ve taken their products off the freezer shelves.
One of the things I love about home cooking is that, in your own kitchen, you get to set the rules. As long as you know what you’re doing, you can take the occasional shortcut here and there—and your meals will still come out tasting great.
When it comes to pizza, that occasional shortcut for me is store-bought pizza dough. Yes, I mean the same kind you typically bring back home from the grocery store’s frozen dough section.
Talking to my friends and exchanging emails or comments with my readers on the topic, I’ve seen that one question frequently comes up.
As you read pizza recipes on the Internet and in cookbooks, you’ll notice that some of them call for a cooked tomato sauce with a long simmer time, while others tell you to use tomatoes right out of the can.
Should you cook pizza sauce or not?
My cousin was about to buy a stainless steel frying pan on sale this week, when she took a photo of it and texted me, “Do you think I can also make pizza in it?”
I love it when, every now and then, someone asks me a good cooking question. Stainless steel cookware is, after all, touted for its durability and versatility. If your pan has a metal handle and you don’t mind the burn marks, you could even use it over a campfire.
To be sure I wouldn’t mislead my cous, I double-checked the make and model of the pan online while she was eyeing it at the store. It turned out to be oven-safe as I expected.
But could she really bake pizza in it?
You were craving pizza and decided to make one yourself. You found a good recipe online and did all that the recipe said—yet your homemade pizza came out bland. If you found yourself in this situation, I’m about to help you troubleshoot what happened in this post, so that you never end up in it again.
If you’re looking for a hearty and filling meal, look no further than Detroit-style and Chicago-style pizza, two styles of deep-dish pizza that they eat in the Midwest. These two Italian-American staples are made with a thick crust, plenty of cheese, and cooked tomato sauce on the top.
Since Chicago and Detroit are only 281 miles apart, there are some similarities between their styles of pizza. But the devil is in the detail, as they so, and there are also plenty of small but important differences.
You made homemade pizza and you did everything the recipe said. Despite that, your pizza came out crusty and dense—not light and airy. This used to happen to me over and over again years ago until I finally got tired of my pizzas looking nothing like the photos in the recipes. So I set out to learn how to make pizza and troubleshoot pizza dough.
If the same thing happened to you, what went wrong?
