The pizza dough was ready after being in the fridge for a few days so my tasks this week were to come up with sauce recipes and get the toppings and make the pizzas! My absolute favorite sauce is pesto but the usual recipe calls for pine nuts but they are very expensive so I thought I'd try walnuts instead. We lived in Italy when I was growing up and I thought my mom would have a good recipe on hand so I Skyped with her and she gave me the recipe she uses (which calls for pine nuts) so I checked online and decided to try one from a blog, Once Upon a Chef.
I used fresh basil
And walnuts and garlic
To make a paste
And added olive oil to make the sauce
My boys are not fans of pesto however, so I knew I was going to need to create a traditional pizza sauce for them. Surprisingly, my teenage son has been helping me out a lot in the kitchen lately so I asked him if he'd like to help me to make the pizza sauce and he was all for it. He looked up a few recipes and chose one from allrecipes.com . We talked about the fact that you can read reviews from people who have tried the recipe before and this can help you to decide if you want to modify the recipe or try it at all. I really value these comments because it saves me time and money often -learning from other people's mistakes. We had all of the ingredients for the sauce so we got to work.
Lots of spices!
The sauce needed to sit for a while to blend all of the flavors.
In the meantime we rolled out the pizza dough.....
Back to my pizza- I also LOVE oven-roasted tomatoes on a pizza so I decided to cut up some cherry tomatoes and add garlic and balsamic vinegar and roast them. Dee.Lish.
Then it was time to put it all together..
And into the oven they go!
We baked each pizza for ten minutes on 500 degrees F. The meat pizza was on a pizza stone and the pesto pizza was on a baking pan. I was curious to see how different the crusts would turn out using the two different baking methods.
And here we are 10 minutes later!
These pizzas were delicious but we still have some work to do.
Problems:
My younger son did not like the traditional sauce very much. He thought it was too spicy and sweet. The crust for my pizza was not as crispy as I would have liked so I decided to send a facebook message to a friend of mine in Okinawa who made homemade pizzas all the time. I asked her what her secret was to a crispy pizza crust. Preheating the pizza stone at 500 degrees for about 30 minutes before putting the crust on the pizza was her answer! I never even thought of that and never read that in any of the blogs I consulted. My boys prefer a thick crust but they did say they would like it if were a little crispier. I wish I had contacted her sooner!
My collaborations throughout this process were very helpful. I was able to read reviews of recipes to help me to decide how I wanted to proceed. I appreciated my Mom's advice on a pesto recipe but knew I wanted to try something just a little different. I would have loved to have had my Okinawan friend readily available to ask about her pizza crust secret recipe but the time change is a problem so I had to wait until she was available to get her advice.
Collaboration, even for a fun and simple project like this, is so important to me because I know that the advice I get from others ( and some trial and error on my own ) will bring me closer to making that perfect pizza one day.
The fact that my son so enthusiastically agreed to be my mentee is another bonus in this process. He loves pizza more than life itself so I know he's going to be eager to help and offer his encouragement and constructive criticism throughout this learning experience.
So, the next challenge in this process is to create the perfect pizza crust. A delicious challenge it is!
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