Pizza recipe. Part 2: the sauce and toppings

Now, about the toppings. Toppings can be different and they can vary from person to person. You can put anything you like on pizza dough, and I think it still be delicious.

Pizza sauce

One of the main things in topping is the sauce _ the pizza sauce. There are some methods for making the sauce. Personally, I don’t really bother to cook the sauce and I just use some ketchup or tomato sauce. There is a whole lot simplified life here nowadays and there’s even some spice mixtures especially for pizza sauce. So, I usually use it to mix in the ketchup or tomato sauce. Well, the main thing in the sauce is tomato and, of course, some oregano. It gives pizza some special taste and smell that no one can resist.

So, if you want to make pizza sauce with tomatoes, you should peel the tomatoes, make it like a puree in a blender or with a mixer. If you have some canned tomatoes, that’s good too, because it will already be peeled and you will just have to turn it into a puree. And once you have turned it into puree you need to cook it for some time. You can take a pan or a saucepan (pan will be alright too as you don’t have to make much sauce that won’t fit into a pan. A medium-sized pan can be quite good for this purpose, but it’s up to you _  you can use a saucepan, too), pour some olive oil. Now stop for a second. You can add some garlic, fresh chopped oregano leaves to the oiled pan and cook for a couple of minutes, then add some red chili flakes, if you want your pizza sauce to be a little bit spicy. If you don’t want garlic and chili and fresh oregano in your sauce, it’s your decision and in that case, you should skip this part and just pour that tomato puree into the pan and stir once in a while. You should season the sauce, though. You’ll need to add some salt, little bit of sugar and maybe some black pepper, too. If you ask me, that’s not enough and I usually like to stir in some paprika, mayoran and basil, too. They give the sauce some incredible taste and smell, I think. Now, there’s a dispute about how long you should cook the pizza sauce: some say you shouldn’t cook it at all and that it should be raw and will just cook with the pizza in the oven, some say you should cook it a little, and some like to simmer it for hours. Well, I think, it’s enough to cook for about a half an hour, or something like 45 minutes. There’s a guy on Internet, who shared us a secret his grandmother used to do _ she would stir just a pinch of baking soda in the pizza sauce just in the end of cooking it. I don’t know if this baking soda does anything, but they said it makes the sauce little less acid and stuff like that. Well, just a pinch of baking soda won’t do anything harmful, so, why not stir it in too, yes?!

Now, a little bit about that part that garlic and chili and oregano “haters” skipped! As I’ve mentioned, oregano is inevitable in your pizza. Well, it is for me and I can’t really imagine a pizza without oregano in it. In addition, you should use both fresh and dried oregano in your pizza, so that it will make a great flavor. And while one may think, that there isn’t  a difference between fresh and dried herbs _ you, my friend, are totally wrong! There’s a great difference between them and that’s why we should use both types of oregano in our pizzas!

Now, that we have discussed this pizza sauce prepared from fresh tomatoes or canned ones, you should check this ingredients out, as it is really reasonable and efficient to have a list of ingredients and just have a glance at them.

Ingredients for pizza sauce (made from tomatoes or canned tomatoes):

1. 3 tbs extra-virgin olive oil
2. 4 cloves minced garlic
3. 2 tbs chopped fresh oregano
4. ¼ tsp red chili flakes, or to taste
5. ¼ tsp dried oregano, or to taste
6. 1 can (28 oz or approximately 800 ml) peeled tomatoes
7. Salt to taste
8. Black pepper to taste (optional)
9. Paprika to taste (optional)
10. Basil to taste (optional)
11. Mayoran to taste (optional)
12. ½ tsp sugar
13. A very small pinch of baking soda

And remember, that there shouldn’t be much sauce on your pizza!It should be just enough _ not less, not much, because it will not taste good. And I don’t know about you, but  if the pizza sauce is not good, I can’t enjoy my pizza. Its dough can be overcooked and the toppings _ I mean, mushrooms, or meat or whatever there will be put on the pizza _ can be not very tasty, but that I can stand. What I can’t do is eat pizza with a bad sauce in it, because it makes the whole pizza not even slightly tasty.

Toppings

And now about the toppings! I’m sure everyone knows pizza Pepperoni. It tastes good, yeah? Personally, I love pizza Pepperoni. Well, I don’t really love pizzas with poor toppings and with just pizza sauce and cheese, or with sauce, cheese and bells or something, if you want to know the truth. But Pepperoni is the exclusive for me. I think it’s because of this pepperoni taste and flavor _ it tastes very delicious even without the pizza dough and stuff. But mostly, I order pizzas with lots of toppings on them at the restaurants or cafes. However, when I make pizza, I usually make it with pepperoni, because it’s easier and it tastes good and I just really like making pizza Pepperoni.

For the topping, you have to have some mozzarella cheese. Or you can use some other types of cheese if you like, because everyone likes different types of cheese and you can just pick your favourite and top you pizza with it, it will be totally fine, but remember, that not every cheese gets all chewy and stuff when heated and not every one of them has a great taste after heating. You can use 8 oz Mozzarella cheese _ that’s about 230 grams, or even more, depends on your taste.

When preparing pizza, you can either sprinkle some flour on your counter or a table, take the ball of dough and put it in the flour and then roll the dough out to a circle. You can either use your hands or a rolling pin, but usually I use my hands and it’s not very hard to reach it’s desired shape.  Then using a pizza peel, you can place the  rolled out pizza dough onto the pizza stone and start topping. If you don’t have a pizza stone, don’t worry, you can use an oven pan or pizza pan or something, it doesn’t really matter. Well, of course it matters for your pizza to be great, but what I’m saying is, that if you don’t have a pizza stone or a special pizza pan, you shouldn’t get upset and start worrying about it.

And if you don’t have a pizza peel, you can just oil your pan and roll it out there using your hands, or a small rolling pin, too. Then you can start topping your pizza.

Now, when you are topping your pizza, the first thing you do is to spread your pizza sauce on your rolled out pizza dough. A little reminder: don’t use too much or too little sauce! (because, I’ve already told you, that this will make your pizza taste like crap and even you won’t want to eat it!).

Then, after the sauce comes the cheese. At least, that’s what I do next. Some like their cheese to be on the very top of their pizzas. That’s really only up to you! And, of course, you shred your Mozzarella cheese or whichever cheese you are using. I usually put pepperoni slices above the shredded cheese and it looks pretty beautiful. Then you can put there some bell pepperslices, or even some pitted black olives sliced into about 3 millimeters wide pieces _ these really give pizza some good taste. Generally, I don’t like eating olives. I have tried many times, but I don’t know, I just can’t really make myself like these olives, can I?!

Anyway, one thing that you should not put on your pizza is the tomato, if you ask me. I have a bad experience with putting tomatoes on my pizzas. Well, I don’t mean the whole tomatoes, obviously. I used to cut them into thin slices and put them on top of my pizza, but, you know, they are very juicy and they made my pizza very juicy too, and it couldn’t dry out and it was all juicy like a soup in the middle and I hated that. I think, everyone would hate that. So I just didn’t eat the middle. Or I tried to cook it for some time and then everything else would go crazy _ they would get overcooked and it was terrible. So trust me, don’t use tomatoes as toppings! Or if you use them, put just three pieces or something like that and take them away just a few minutes later. Or you could just put them on top of your pizza when it’s finished cooking or when you are serving your pizza.

The topping ideas are various. You can use some mushrooms, bacon, cooked chicken fillet slices, beef, cooked spinach, sliced sausages and many other things. Whatever you like!

From my personal experience, it’s very essential to control the time of cooking. Sometimes just 20 minutes is enough _ with rotating the pan once half way through. It also depends on the size of your pizza. I think 20 minutes is just right for something like a 10 inch sized pizza. If it’s larger than that, it may need 30 minutes to be done. In any way, you should check the colour of the sauce on your pizza and, I think, that’s how you will really know whether it is ready or not.

So, here’s my pizza. Hope you’ll enjoy making it, as I really love it. And the process is nice and the pizza is delicious, too. As for the dough, it’s very simple to prepare. I used to prepare a dough, that was really time-consuming and tiring and since I discovered preparation of this kind of dough, it’s been really easy to make pizzas. 

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