Pizza from scratch

Dear Diary,

It was pizza time today, I hadn’t made a pizza in a while so I decided to go crazy and make one all from scratch. Never one to do things by half I made a dough (first time) and a sauce for it (first time but not really that hard!) then just a nice topping.

From scratch...

The pizza dough was just a normal one from a recipe; normally I use a shop mix that I just have to add water too but decided to be fancy today. I often had a problem in the past with my pizza sticking to the tray or the baking paper, I even went through a crazy phase or using tin foil just to see if it worked (for the record it did but when it did stick it didn’t half hurt metal fillings!) I like to think that I have worked out a good technique where I slide a thin chopping board in between the pizza and the paper and it comes off quite well :D

The sauce was quite nice and had much more flavour than the tomato puree I normally use, and makes me wonder why I haven’t found this out sooner? Ended up with too much and so had to freeze half of it for a different time. I then decided to be healthy-ish (in my first few attempts I let someone else do the cheese and I’m sure we went through 2 packs of it) and just had a bit of chicken, some mozzarella and some basil leaves to give it a bit of flavour.

In the end it turned out well on top but I had a problem I’m stuck with most times where the middle of the base was a little bit soggy. Just not as cooked it seemed as the rest of it? I need to look into that and workout what I'm doing wrong for the future? I also need to learn how to make the crust thicker or maybe even try and stuff it with cheese or sauce? Or sausages!!

I think from this I need to work out how to make the base nice and crispy and try some different flavour sauces, I will look on the internet for some tips or ask my grandma, she seems to know everything about cooking and baking!

Love Lousia xxx