Home Made Pizza

I love Sundays. Not only is the day ultra relaxing, but by having a late breakfast, there's more time to prepare an elaborate lunch. This week I made Pizza, and home-made Pizza is so much better and reasonable than Pizza purchased from outside. Not only is it fresh & hot out of the oven, but it can be completely customized.

Pizza Dough
Quantity ..Makes 3 Large Pizza's; We had two for lunch and froze the third one for dinner time.

Ingredients:

• 1 kg flour (maida)
• One packet of instant yeast
• 2 eggs
• Oil  - 2 tbsp
• Salt - 2 tsp
• Sugar - 2 tsp
• Warm Milk 1 1/2 cup
• Luke -warm water - 1/2 cup

Method: 
Mix yeast with flour and then mix the salt and sugar. Make a well in the center of the flour and add eggs and oil. Start by mixing the dough by adding 1 cup of milk and then add half a cup more. Mix and knead the dough lightly.Add 1/2 cup of water little by little till the dough comes together and can be shaped in the form of a ball. Make sure that you don't knead the dough too much. Form the dough into a round and apply oil around the entire dough and then put it into a warm place to rise for at least 1 1/2 hour. After one hour, just flatten or knead the dough once and leave to rest again for about 1/2 hour to 1 hour.

In the meanwhile, prepare the fillings as follows:

Filling - Ingredients
Onions - 2 (chopped into small pieces)
Capsicum - 2 (chopped into small pieces)
Tomatoes - 2 (chopped) (Alternatively, the tomatoes can be sliced thinly and put on top of the pizza at the end after which they become dried, however, i don't like dried tomatoes hence I prefer to put chopped tomatoes)
Garlic Mushrooms - Instead of using plain mushrooms, I prefer making garlic mushrooms. For garlic mushrooms just take one can of buttom mushrooms, slice them thinly. Then heat about 2 tbsp oil in a pan, add 2 tsp of garlic paste, saute the garlic paste for a minute then add the mushrooms. Season with a tsp of salt and 2 tsp of crushed red chilli flakes. Saute for about 5 minutes.
Olives (Green and Black) - 3 tbsp of each type of olives
Chicken - I used K&N's chicken chunks (about 100 grams) cut into small pieces
Cheese - 225 gms Mozzarella (Sliced) and 225 grams Cheddar Cheese (Grated) 

Assembling & Baking the Pizza:
Pre-heat oven to 200 Degree's Centigrade.The dough should have risen up and be quite soft. Knead it for like half a minute. Then put about a table spoon of oil on my tray, take a ball of dough and start sort of pushing it into the trays with my fingers. The dough is quite elastic so it will stretch a bit back into place. When it does that, i just let it rest for a minute while i start on the next tray and then come back and start pushing it into the corners.Once the dough has been placed in the trays, then let it rest for about 15 minutes before starting to top with the fillings.

My way of doing it is to first start with the sauce. Depending on the amount of time available, I either make my own sauce; use a combo of ketchup and chilli garlic ketchup; or use store-bought pizza. In order to make my own sauce, I take about about 2 tsp of garlic, saute 1 tsp of garlic in it, add 1 cup of tomato puree, then season with salt, chilli powder/red chilli flakes, Italian herbs, worchestire sauce & Italian herbs.

This time I had a bottle of store - bought pizza sauce which I needed to finish so I mixed about 2 tbsp of pizza sauce with 1 tbsp of Hot & Spicy ketchup for the base. Then I added 1/2 tsp of salt, 1 tsp of white pepper and 1 tsp of basil.

Then add a little bit of cheese, then add onions, capsicum, tomatoes, mushrooms and chicken. Then add grated cheddar cheese and slices of mozzarella cheese. After that finally top with the green and black olives so that they add a bit of color.

Then bake in the oven for about 35-45 minutes till the dough is light golden and the cheese is also melted and slightly brown on top. I prefer a crisper crust and top hence i bake it for a few minutes longer.