 AI can't make this pizza. But you can. It's simple, you're essential, and it costs under three bucks. Welcome back to Cheap The Pizza! Yes, finally! This is for you, my pizza-newbie friend. (Or maybe for you, you forever-curious experienced pizzamaker.) All this madness began because there are people who insist eating out is cheaper than cooking at home. To that, I say, “Poppycock, codswallop and claptrap!” I say you can make a pizza with an ingredients cost of under three bucks—and I’ll show you how. In the "Cheap The Pizza" intro two weeks ago, I described the ignition point: my ire was piqued by the ridiculousness of some claims around eating-out economics. Last week in How To Part I, we talked about the recipe for the dough. Today, we’re going to tweak that recipe, make a sauce, and bake a pizza. But first, we’re going to ask the age-old question: Why are we even doing this? This is about so much more than just making a great pizza for under three bucks. I know people who are literally afraid to cook. Make a pizza? Forget that! It freaks them out. That’s so sad. Making pizza is an adventure—and an easy one. Take it from a guy who has literally climbed mountains and sailed across oceans: pizza is an attainable adventure. You can do it with minimal preparation and investment. It doesn’t even require years of training or special boots. This pizza exercise is an exploration. It has to be. You can’t help it. We’re exploring pizza. We're traveling through an unfamiliar area to learn about it. For the beginner, it’s an unknown. Yes, you’ve eaten plenty of pizza, and that’s easy, and pizza tastes great. But the idea of making pizza seems much more difficult than eating it. That’s because it is. And since it’s an unknown, fear comes knocking around. We’re afraid of failure on some level. Even if you recognize it, you can’t help it. Here’s the ironic good news: follow the steps, and making a good pizza is pretty simple. Making a bad pizza is pretty difficult. Every time you throw some yeast into a pile of wet, salted flour, you know what happens? Magic. The magic is so easy, you can’t even prevent it. You have to make an effort to screw up that part of it. That’s because it’s microbiology, a natural science. The rules are unwritten and sacrosanct. Fermentation happens. Pizza dough keeps rising. Babies keep being born. When you give yeast to flour and water, you suddenly have a new friend. The friendship will be brief, but you will remember. And you will continue to take advantage of that friendship. Give yeast to flour and water, put it away, and you will make pizza dough with so little effort you almost feel guilty. But then… Then comes the shaping of the pizza. OMG! Maybe you can’t make that pizza round! So what. You’re not being graded on this for your PhD dissertation. (I hope.) Roundness or lack thereof won’t prevent you from graduating simply because it’s on your permanent record down at the Pizza Hall Of Shame. You’re not trying to win a beauty contest with this pizza. In fact, for this effort, put away the phone. No photos! Instagram doesn’t exist! So what if your pizza looks less like the moon and more like an amoeba? That amoeba is gonna make you proud. That pizza is also gonna give you a natural high. Tomatoes, cheese and bread, oh my! It won’t be perfect. Pizza never is. We're even showing you photos of ugly pizzas made badly just to demonstrate how real and reachable this is. Nonetheless, we usually pursue something that might be mistake for pizza perfection here. And it's not about acquiring that facade. It's about the pursuit and the practice. If we seem to pursue perfection, it's in the knowledge that perfection is unattainable. And we also do it because pizza is a buzz. Maybe just a little one, but a buzz nonetheless. It always is. This is the biochemical reality of the dopamine trifecta: tomatoes, cheese and bread baked well trigger the feel-good chemicals in our brains and makes us happy. But (and this is a good one) so does the act of making pizza. Dopamine is the body’s good-mood gift to us. Eating pizza is a dopamine trigger--and so is the act of making pizza. Because of dopamine, you feel great simply because you made a pizza yourself. Making it for other people just enhances the buzz. At very simple levels, this is all about motivation, pleasure, and reward. It’s as sexy as anything can get without leaving your own kitchen. Making a pizza feels good. Eating pizza feels good. Feeding your friends with your homemade pizza feels good. Yes, pizza has Italian roots. But in a way, it’s a celebration of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. It's very much about finding beauty in things that are transitory and humble. With the wabi-sabi of pizza, we’re embracing natural forces (the microbiological interplay of yeast, water, flour and salt), the passage of time (the long, slow hours of fermentation and the fleeting minutes of baking), the beauty of imperfections (so many shapes and textures even in just one pizza), and natural variations (char, bubbles, colors and crunch). Hello, pizza wabi-sabi. Pizza is transformation. Pizza is simple to make. And pizza simply transforms the maker. (That’s you.) So let’s get this show started. We have a little bit of work ahead of us. Warts & All, Inc. remind you: we're going to be showing you some ugly, unvarnished photography of the process and some Pizzas Done Wrong to make you feel like, "Hey--this is something I can screw up, too and still feel good about it!" ABOUT THAT DOUGH TWEAK Ever since I launched into this madness two weeks ago, I’ve been making pizza almost daily. I formulated a no-knead dough based on my standard pizza recipe, and it worked well. But I’ve now made it work even better. I realized that, even at such a miniscule quantity as 1/4 of a teaspoon (one gram) of yeast, there was just too much yeast for the relatively small quantity of flour involved. So I’ve doubled the flour, water and salt. The yeast has stayed the same. I’ve also adjusted the rising time. The result is a better tasting pizza—even if you’re too impatient to wait for a 48-hour cold proof. (I still encourage two to three days in the fridge. You’ll be glad you did it.) So last week’s recipe works. But this week’s attenuation of that recipe works better. I recommend using the new formulation. The updated recipe is available in the (edited) original blog post, as well as here on a dedicated page. I will also be creating a downloadable PDF of this whole process. If you’d like a notification of when that’s available, sign up here for the mailing list. If you’re already on the list, you will get the notification. The revised recipe now makes 4 dough balls for 12-inch pizzas, or 8 dough balls for 8-inch pizzas. (Yes, you will probably be freezing some dough balls. There are also instructions on how to measure a 1/8 teaspoon if you want to halve the recipe. Just for the record, I did another pizza “all wrong,” as befits the Warts & All approach to this project. Again, it’s all about proving that you can do it wrong and it can be ugly and it’s still a viable product. I made this pizza using the revised dough recipe, and here’s my list of transgressions:
 ABOVE: This is the pizza done wrong to the point were I wanted to see how long it would take to burn it in the new oven. Not long, apparently. Now I need to tweak my baking times accordingly. (But people on social went wild for this pizza. Even my wife thought it was pretty good. Go figure.) My best and harshest critic is my wife. Her palate is quite good. She calls me on mistakes by just being quiet and not saying anything. She took a bite of this pizza with the scorched black cornicione and said, “Hey, this is pretty good!” I said, “Walmart Great Value sauce.” “Really? Well, I guess it does have that kind of flavor of commercial sauce. It doesn’t have that bright flavor ‘pop’ of the expensive tomatoes. But still…” I also posted the above photos on social as “Another pizza done wrong.” I had people loving how it looked, applauding the char, and a chef in Miami telling me to box it up and send it to him. A sculptor in NYC, too. For the record, there was a third pizza done wrong. Sort of. This one, after the initial 18-hour room-temp rise, I did allow the dough to cold ferment for another 24 hours. I made mistakes on purpose and behaved like a contrarian. I put the sauce on top of the cheese. I jerked the peel around while launching. I turned the broiler on then off a couple of times during baking. What we got was this:  ABOVE: I did so much wrong on this pizza. The shape is only the beginning. Yet it tasted great. It made me realize just how good this pizza dough recipe is when you do a cold fermentation.  ABOVE: The crumb (the soft inside part of the crust where the bubbles are) was great and open and airy. You can also see the fold where I purposely handled the raw pizza badly on launching.  ABOVE: Pizza geeks like to call the bottom of the pizza the undercarriage. This undercarriage was great. Crunchy and yummy. You can also see where I purposely hesitated and wrinkled up the dough (which also contributed to the amoeba-like shape). That’s one ugly pizza. It was also a really great tasting crust—even better than yesterday’s. (The cheap jarred sauce did not shine in this application. Sauce on top is supposed to be a celebration of the tomato. Within this sauce, there was no tomato worthy of celebration. But the pizza still tasted pretty good.) Pizza is stronger than your destructive skills as a novice. You can do this. And just by the way, my standard recipe for a kneaded pizza dough (which is almost identical to the one here) will always make a better tasting pizza than the no-knead. But it also demands more of you. The standard recipe can take as much as 30 minutes of active time over a period of 120 minutes or more. The no-knead recipe here takes about 5 minutes of active time. Then, you just walk away from it for 18 hours. After that, you can make pizza right away. It also makes a better pizza if you decide to bake in two days. After 48 hours of cold proofing the dough, if you find you’re not going to make pizza, you can freeze the dough for use later. While these two recipes are different things, yet they each produce a tasty pizza for less than three bucks each. And for the newbie, especially one challenged by the idea of cooking (ironically, one of the few things that truly makes us human), the no-knead dough is an easier entry point. MAKING SAUCE & PIZZA This is where the real fun begins. Here’s everything that’s going to happen on your date with pizza destiny. Your taskes, should you decide to accept them, are as follows:
Each of those things sounds pretty simple, right? There's no magic happening there. The hard work was already done by the yeast, who've all spent many hours inside the dough, eating sugar and belching carbon dioxide. Next up: 1.) Ingredients and tools required 2.) A breakdown of the above steps with details 3.) Recipe and instructions for the sauce 4.) How to bake the pizza. Tools you require As we discussed in the first installment, these are the special tools you need to make the pizza:
The basic kitchen tools you want on hand include:
Again, if you didn’t read installment one, click here to do so. You need that information. You might also want to read the introductory post, right here. (Sorry, but you stumbled into the middle of things here. Just trying to provide context.) You’re going to be baking these pizzas on an upside-down cast iron skillet, as it’s the most cost-effective entry point for baking great pizza. You require the thermal mass, and it’s all explained there. Ingredients you require
* Most pre-shredded cheeses are coated with an anti-caking agent that prevents the cheese from melting properly. A note about ovens and baking times No two ovens behave exactly the same way. I’ve made pizza in cheap, contractor-grade ranges (which can be harsh), in high-end luxury products like Wolf and Electrolux (which have very stable heat and bake quickly and evenly), in a 50-year old Wedgewood stove (hottest home oven I’ve ever had, with a 650 degrees top temp), and in mid-range ovens like my own, which was most recently an old GE Profile (but was replaced with a new GE Profile halfway through this process). Every single one of those ovens behaved differently. Accordingly, the baking instructions provided herein are a guide. They will need to be adjusted based on the experience you’re having with your oven. Example: my old oven baked a 12-inch cheese pizza in about six minutes with the broiler set to high at the beginning of the bake. The new oven is more aggressive. I have to wait until four minutes before turning on the broiler. Tempering The Dough Two hours before you want to make pizza, take your bagged dough from the refrigerator. Leave it on the counter and allow it to come to room temp. This makes it stretchable. If you try to stretch cold dough, it shrinks back. You will become frustrated and cry. Making The Sauce NOTE: You can make the sauce ahead of time if you like. But if you do that, be sure to remove it from the fridge at the same time as the pizza dough. It, too must come to room temp. Cold sauce is not your friend. Good tomatoes are key here. I recommend using the best tomatoes you can justify buying. I typically use an imported Italian tomato, or any good domestic product that I know. (The high price of good tomatoes is part of my under-three-bucks pizza paradigm.) You can use whole tomatoes, diced tomatoes or crushed tomatoes. Whole and diced you can break up with your hands, or you can pulse them gingerly with an immersion blender. A potato masher also works. Crushed tomatoes are faster and easier. I’ve been asked why powdered garlic and onion instead of fresh. The reason is they deliver a stronger punch. Also, this exercise is in part about simplicity. (see also: crushed tomatoes.) The dried basil is also about simplicity and budget. Fresh basil tastes great, but its benefits in this sauce are negligible. Pizza Sauce Recipe Time: about 6 minutes active, 15 minutes inactive Yield: enough sauce for about 6 x 12-inch pizzas Ingredients 28-ounce can of good crushed tomatoes 1 tbsp olive oil 1/2 tsp onion powder 1/2 tsp garlic powder 1 tsp dried basil 1/4 tsp black pepper (optional) Pinch of two of cayenne pepper (optional) Dash of white pepper 1/2 tsp salt or to taste Instructions Open the can and empty the tomatoes into a saucepan. If the tomatoes are not already crushed, crush them using your hand, a potato masher, or by gently pulsing an immersion blender. (A food mill works, too. But I doubt any of us own one.) Turn on heat to low. Add the olive oil, onion powder, garlic powder, basil, the peppers and salt. Stir and allow to simmer over low heat for 15 minutes. (Simmering longer will result in a thicker, bolder sauce.) Taste and adjust seasonings as necessary. The sauce should taste good enough that you would enjoy sitting in a corner alone and eating a bowl of it. Let cool. Depending on how much you reduce the tomatoes and how heavily you sauce a 12-inch pizza, this recipe makes enough sauce for about six pizzas this size. If I’m making only two 12-inch pizzas, I portion the remaining sauce and keep it in the freezer for the next pizzas. Grating and shredding the cheeses Using the biggest holes on a box grater, grate the mozzarella. For a 12-inch pizza, you want about half a cup of shredded cheese. Using the medium holes on the box grater, shred enough pecorino Romano for about two tablespoons of shredded cheese. 90 minutes after removing the pizza from the fridge… It’s time to turn on the oven, which will probably take about 30 minutes to heat. Position the oven rack in the middle or just below the middle of the oven. (Each oven is different, so you’ll have to use your good judgment.) Place the skillet upside down on the middle rack. Measure the distance between the upside-down skillet's bottom (which is now on top) and the bottom of the electric broiler element. There should be 6 to 8 inches of distance between the electric broiler element up top and the baking surface of the upside-down skillet. If you have a gas broiler, add two more inches. Make sure there’s 8 to 10 inches of distance between the baking surface and the broiler flame.  ABOVE: 15-inch skillet inside my oven. Looking at this photo, I'm embarrassed to notice the rust coming up on the sides. I've been making pizzas for you for every day for over two weeks, and I've let things slide. Today: maintenance! Understand that as you make pizzas, you may find that you want to reposition the rack higher or lower. You'll be dialing it in over time until you get the top and bottom cooking at the rates you want. (A lot of newer pro ovens let pizzamakers dial in the top and bottom heat for different kinds of pizza.) If you don’t have a broiler, no problem. You’ll still get a great pizza. It will take a little longer, and it will have less char on top. That’s fine. And if you have no broiler, you might also want to place the rack higher in the oven. Experiment. (Some people place the rack at the bottom, which has never worked for my ovens.) IMPORTANT: Make sure there’s enough room to close the oven door without breaking the window in the door. Make sure the skillet isn’t sticking out beyond the safety of the oven rack edge. I know people who’ve had to replace oven door windows. It’s not hard to do. But it costs money and it’s annoying. Be safe. Turn on the oven. Set the oven to bake at 550F degrees. In my experience, that is the top temperature of most home ovens. Some go higher, or so I’ve been told. I’ve used others that reach only 525F. That’s fine. Some apparently go to only 500F. No problem. It just means you’re baking a little longer.  ABOVE: An organized workstation, even for such a simple project, makes life much easier and helps ensure success. And the more pizzas you're making, the more important this is. Set up your workstation. You want to have all of your ingredients ready to go and lined up. A place for everything and everything in its place. This helps guarantee success. If you don’t do this, you will hate what results. (Small bowls for prep are handy for this.) When the oven comes to temperature… I let the oven heat a little bit longer—about 15 minutes when I'm using the skillet. In the ovens I’ve used, I’ve found that the skillet will get hotter than the temperature setting. I’m happy to use that extra heat. NOTE: If you graduate to using steel, it takes longer to heat the steel because it’s thicker and more dense. Once my oven reaches 550 degrees, I heat my 3/8-inch steel for an additional 45 minutes. A thick, cordierite baking stone takes even longer (and doesn’t get as hot). MAKING YOUR PIZZA Ingredients One dough ball 1/4 to 1/2 cup of pizza sauce 1/2 cup of grated mozzarella cheese 2tbsp shredded pecorino Romano cheese Dried oregano Flour for dusting the work surface Semolina or cornmeal for dusting the peel/cutting board Stretching the dough By now, your dough has reached an easily stretchable consistency. It may also have developed a big bubble or two. Go ahead and pop those bubbles. Have I said NEVER use a rolling pin? Never use a rolling pin. It pushes all the air out of the dough and result in a dense crust. The only pizza dough that should be rolled out using a pin is tavern-style pizza, which is a very thin-crust pizza that is essentially fried in a well-oiled pan, and Roman-style thin-crust pizza, which has a very crackery crust. Dust your work surface with a small handful of flour. Dust your peel (or cutting board) with a generous pinch of semolina or cornmeal. Remove the dough ball from the bag and place it onto the floured surface. Flatten the dough into a thick disc. Once you’ve flattened the dough, use the palms of your hands to simultaneously turn it and stretch it outward until it’s about 6 inches in diameter. Now we’re going to use the “steering wheel method” to finish stretching the dough. This is not fancy. Some will argue it’s wrong. I will argue that it’s very easy and it gets the job done. Holding the dough like a steering wheel, we let the dough stretch itself using its own weight.  ABOVE: The early stage of the "steering-wheel" method of stretching pizza dough. Gripping the top edge of the dough with both hands, pick it up and gently rotate it. The dough will begin stretching downward. Pay attention to how it’s stretching. You don’t want it to get too thin. If you need to lower it so the bottom edge of the steering wheel rests on the work surface, that’s fine. This is all about control. Just be careful. This dough is very wet and easily sticks to itself. As you rotate the dough with your fingers, pinch the rim as well. You want to let as much of the bulk of the dough to stretch as possible. When baking, the rim is going to puff up and become “the handle.” (That’s aa technical term. The Italians call it the cornicione.) The edge doesn’t need to be big and fat and puffy. I prefer to put more substance into the crust rather than the handle. As you do this several times, you’ll develop your own technique.  ABOVE: when making a pizza this small, it's possible to let the dough help you stretch it. While you turn the dough around, let its own weight work on your behalf.  ABOVE: You might have to stretch the rim a little bit to make the pizza big enough. A lot of the mass collects around the edge and it needs some persuasion.)  ABOVE: Put the stretched dough down on the work surface and rearrange it so its round-ish. Oops. Did you tear a hole in the dough? No big deal. Just put the dough flat on the work surface. Gather the dough around the opening and pinch the hole back together. You might need to give it a little twist to keep it closed. Once you’ve stretched your dough, place it back on your work surface. Adjust its roundness if you want to. All you have to do is push and prod the dough until it’s round. If you’re satisfied with the size and shape, slide the dough from the work surface onto your peel. Go ahead and reorganize its roundness there.  ABOVE: Ugly little pizza has been sauced adequately. Sauce the pizza Using a large, metal spoon, spread the sauce around the pizza. Depending on how thick your sauce is, you’ll use anywhere from the quarter of a cup to most of the half a cup. Especially if the sauce is very wet, use less of it. You don’t need to make it opaque. Good pizza is often an exercise in restraint.  ABOVE: Ugly pizza sprinkled with mozzarella cheese. Maybe too much of it. Remember, we're kinda doing this wrong and taking bad photos. Sprinkle the mozzarella Spread the cheese around the pizza. Get it to the edge of the sauce. Make sure the distribution is even. We all like a composed pizza, with uniform coverage.  ABOVE: Ugly pizza now sprinkled with pecorino Romano cheese. Sprinkle the Romano Spread it evenly around the pizza, again uniformly and out to the edge of the sauce. Give the peel a little horizontal shake This is a good to idea to assure yourself the pizza is able to slide. Go to the oven and open the door. Position the front edge of the peel at the back edge of the baking surface. Holding it at a gentle angle, almost parallel, gently slide the pizza off the peel and onto the skillet. If you can do it smoothly with one swift motion, that’s great. But if you need to give it gentle shakes off the peel as you withdraw it from under the pizza, that’s fine. Just don’t get too exaggerated with it. You don’t want to shake off the cheese or wrinkle up the pizza dough.  ABOVE: The raw pizza placed successfully on the skillet seems like a feat in itself the first time you do it. Pour yourself a celebratory cocktail! Or mocktail. Or just pat yourself on the back with the peel. Whatever works. Congrats! Close the oven door and start a 4-minute timer. Once the timer is going, turn the oven to high broil. I suggest this based on my experience with most ovens. Some ovens, like my new one, will start broiling very hot very quickly. Keep an eye on the pizza. If it’s charring too much on the top, switch the oven back to bake 550. Turn on the oven light. Everybody likes to watch. Inside, you can see the dough puff up as the moisture inside it boils. You can watch the cheese bubble and melt. You can see the sauce begin to bubble. Watching a pizza transform is a pretty good show.  ABOVE: Watching a pizza bake through the oven door is fun for all ages! When the timer goes off at 4 minutes, rotate the pizza 180 degrees. Open the oven door, slip the peel beneath the pizza. (If necessary, you can use a spatula to persuade the pizza onto the peel.) Rotate the pizza halfway around. This is to promote even baking. Close the oven door and reset the 4-minute timer. If you had to turn off the broiler, go ahead and turn it back on. Be sure to keep an eye on its progress. I’ve accidentally scorched some pizzas by not paying attention. Sometimes, 8 minutes is a great baking time. Sometimes, 6 minutes is plenty. It depends on your oven and your pizza. When the pizza looks done, remove it from the oven. Move the pizza to the wire cooling rack. The rack prevents moisture from collecting beneath the pizza and keeps the bottom crisp. (If you don't have a rack, it's OK. It took me years before I ever used a cooling rack and my pizzas were still pretty good.) Sprinkle the pizza with dried oregano. This gives the pizza a little herbal pop jazz hands, and often reminds people of New York-style pizza. Are you going to bake another pizza? If so, set the oven from broil back to bake so it can recover heat. Let the pizza set for a minute or two. Once it has cooled a bit and firmed up a little, cut the pizza using a pizza cutter or a chef’s knife. Cutting it into eight cute slices is the easiest geometry exercise. Six slices yields a bigger slice, but it requires better skills at geometric judgment.  ABOVE: The pizza done kinda the wrong way still looks pretty good, and it tastes great. You can do this.
Eat and enjoy! Congratulations! You’ve just made your first under-three-dollar pizza. These instructions will be compiled into a downloadable PDF so you can keep them handy and print them out if you want. When that happens, I'll be sending a notice to the mailing list. If you're not yet on the mailing list, you can sign up here. ------- A lot of big-time professional artisan pizza makers once made their first pizza in a home oven just like yours. You can do it, too. My weird little award-winning book is one way to make it so. The book is about how to get from zero to pizza using the oven you already have. Besides learning to make great pizza, there’s not much else you can do with it. In fact, you can’t even use it to level a table leg if you buy the Kindle edition (which is less expensive than the print editions and has links to instructional videos and printable kitchen worksheets). To learn more about Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have, click here.
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AuthorBlaine Parker is the award-winning author of the bestselling, unusual and amusing how-to pizza book, Free The Pizza. Also known as The Pizza Geek and "Hey, Pizza Man!", Blaine is fanatical about the idea that true, pro-quality pizza can be made at home. His home. Your home. Anyone's home. After 20 years of honing his craft and making pizza in standard consumer ovens across the nation, he's sharing what he's learned with home cooks like you. Are you ready to pizza? Archives
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