Pepperoni, Mushroom, and Olive Pizza

Making your own fresh pizza and not eating frozen is one of the joys of life. To create the dough, I use Cheri’s Favorite Pizza Dough Recipe. You can read the background story here, but her secret is to add semolina flour to the dough.  I use the dough setting on my bread machine to create the dough rather than a food processor and I use all the dough to create one 14-inch pizza (rather than 2 medium pizzas as called for in the original recipe) since I like my crusts thicker than thin. The recipe says that you can make the dough in 5 minutes, but using my bread machine takes at least 45-60 minutes.

I use a Cuisinart 14-inch non-stick pizza pan to hold the pizza. Even though I have a convection oven, I use the oven mode (no convection) set at the highest temperature (in my case 555⁰F) and with the rack set at the lowest point so that the pizza is as close to the lower heating element as possible to get a crispy crust for 10-15 minutes. I found that if I use the convection setting, the toppings burn before the crust gets done. Depending upon your oven characteristics, your results might differ.

You can, of course, add any toppings that your heart desires. This pizza happens to use pepperoni, mushrooms, and Kalamata olives. For sauce I use a bottled tomato sauce from Trader Joe’s that I like – Trader Giotto’s Puttanesca Sauce – which contains anchovy and anchovy paste, among other ingredients. The cheese is a pre-packaged six cheese Italian blend (of course, your favorite cheeses can be used). Finally, I added the basil on top of the pizza at the last moment, since I forgot to place some down on the pizza after the sauce. This resulted in some rather sad looking dehydrated basil on top of the pizza (next time I won’t forget).

Enjoy!

Pizza Dough Ingredients (from Cheri’s Favorite Pizza Dough Recipe)

1½ cups Very Warm Water

2 tsp. Sugar

16 ozs. (about 2¾  cups) Bread Flour

3½ ounces (½ cup) Semolina Flour (Bob’s Red Mill brand; see notes)

1 tsp. salt

2 tsp. Yeast (I use bread machine rapid-rise yeast for making bread)

Olive Oil to coat the pizza pan

Pizza Ingredients

4-6 Tbs. Trader Giotto’s Puttanesca Sauce

1-2 stalks Green Onions cut into ¼ inch pieces (optional)

¼ -½ cup Basil Leaves

2-4 ozs. Six Cheese Italian Blend (or any cheeses of your choice)

Pepperoni Slices to cover and arrange on the pizza

6-8 Mushrooms, sliced

8-12 Pitted Kalamata Olives

1 Tbs. Pepper Flakes (optional)

Pizza Dough Preparation (Bread Machine)

1. Follow the bread machine instructions for making dough. In my case, add in this order, the warm water, sugar, bread flour, semolina flour, salt and yeast to the bread machine.
2. Set the bread machine to dough mode and start. For my bread machine, the dough cycle takes 45 minutes using rapid-rise yeast.
3. Check to make sure the dough is not too wet or dry. Add more bread flour (if too wet) or water (if too dry) to the bread machine to adjust the dough consistency.
4. Lightly coat the pizza pan with Olive Oil.
5. At the end of the dough making cycle, take the dough out of the bread machine and place the dough onto the pizza pan.
6. Evenly spread the dough to cover the entire pan. You can toss the dough in the air, if you’re good at this (I’m not), or you can use a floured rolling pin to spread the dough in the pizza pan.

Pizza Assembly and Cooking Instructions

1. Place the rack on the lowest setting, closest to the lowest heating element. Pre-heat the oven (in my case, oven- and not convection mode) to the highest temperature (in my case 555⁰F).
2. Spread the tomato (Puttanesca) sauce on the pizza dough.
3. Put the green onion pieces onto the pizza (optional).
4. Put the basil leaves and then the cheese onto the pizza.
5. Put the pepperoni pieces, mushrooms, and olives onto the pizza.
6. Add the pepper flakes to the pizza (optional).
7. Place the pizza onto the lowest rack when the oven reaches its highest temperature.
8. Bake the pizza for 10 minutes and then remove the pizza from the oven. Drain any liquid accumulated on the top of the pizza. Be very careful since the pizza pan and any liquid is very hot.
9. Put the pizza back into the oven and bake for another 5 minutes or until the crust is browned but not burned.
10. Remove the pizza from the oven and allow to rest for 5 minutes before cutting and serving.

Notes

1. The semolina flour in the dough gives the pizza its texture and flavor. Bob’s Red Mill brand seems to be the easiest to find.
2. I’ve tried using a pizza stone to get a crisp crust, but that didn’t result in a crisp crust (at least in my oven). I’ve read about people lining their ovens with bricks, which requires a long heat up time to get to temperature and seems to give that magic crisp crust, but that seems like a lot of work if you only make a pizza every so often. What works in my oven is the Cuisinart non-stick pizza pan, with its holes, and that gives a crisp pizza crust in my oven when I place the pan on the lowest rack in the oven closest to the heating element using the highest temperature setting.