Mimi's Pizza

One of my favorite Friday or Saturday night dinners that Mimi would make was pizza. Most families usually ordered pizza on the weekends from somewhere, we did a lot, but Mimi made hers. The dough was home made, the other ingredients were store bought obviously, but that crust. Makes all the difference.

Pizza Dough

Here is the recipe for Pizza dough! It's soooo easy! 

Pizza Dough

Dissolve 1 pkg of yeast into 1/4 cup of warm water

Add to: 1 C of warm water

             2 T oil (any light oil-canola, vegetable, probably not olive oil unless it is light)

             2 T sugar

             1 t salt

Add: 1 beaten egg

Mix in: 3 C of flour (you can use wheat or regular all purpose here, or mix!) You might need a bit more flour, to make it less sticky. Just add a little bit at a time until you get a nice dough. 

Let rise double- about 30 min- 1 hour

This makes 2 pizzas since I am using the same pizza oven my mimi used. 

Mimi's Pizza Oven

So, this dough recipes make 2 pizzas that fit in this pan, but I think it would work for most pans. I am going to guess that it is a standard pizza pan size. Just experiment. You might need the whole batch of dough for one larger pizza. 

Spray your pan thoroughly with non-stick spray. Coat your hands as well, and then take your dough and spread it starting from the middle of the dough outwards. It will come back to you, don't stretch it, just keep working it until it gets to the edges. Mimi always told me to be patient with it and just keep working it out until it stayed at the edge. It won't be perfect. That is the beauty of home made scratch pizzas. They aren't exactly round. :) 

spread out dough

Once you have your dough spread out nicely it is time to top! This is where you can be creative. My mimi generally put ground italian sausage, hamburger or just cheese on there. My hubby loves pepperoni, so I put turkey pepperoni on ours. I have even done plain cheesy bread and cinnamon bread out of this dough. It is versatile. I love green peppers and onion on my pizza so I'm sure in the future we'll have to try that. For now, I did a rather traditional topping. Sausage, pepperoni and cheese. 

I bought pre-cooked and pre-crumbled sausage because it was on sale and saved me time. I bought turkey pepperoni to save calories, 70% less fat that regular pepperoni, and then I bought two pizza blend shredded cheese blends. One of them had mozzarella and cheddar and the other had a blend of white cheeses like mozzarella, parmesan, and romano. Yum! Last, Mimi always used Prego spaghetti sauce for the pizza sauce. I think regular pizza sauces were too sweet in her mind, and she loves a lot of sauce. I don't care for as much sauce, so I buy the small jar of Prego, but you can buy a small jar of regular pizza sauce or one of those squeeze bottles as well. 

Assemble! Sauce first, a bit of cheese, then meat, more cheese and of course then I just plug in the pizza oven and let it cook for about 15-20 mins. I would guess and suggest that you set your regular oven to about 375 and let cook for 15 mins, checking often. Let the crust get slightly brown on the bottom and all the cheese melty. Done! 

delicious! 

I hope you enjoy this recipe and try it out! The possibilities are endless! Like I said, I've made cheesy bread and cinnamon bread with this recipe as well! Have fun! Thanks Mimi for the memories and the yummmmmmy pizza! 

This pizza costs around $4.00. I never use all the ingredients for 1 pizza, so you could easily get 2 pizzas for about $8.00! 

Much better, healthier and cheaper than carry out!! 

Enjoy!