I Finally Outdid Myself

Am I crazy, making ten pizzas in an afternoon when only one person was coming over for dinner? Well, yes and no. Ten pizzas is slight overkill, but I've got it down to a science.

For instance, making your own dough is a no-no, unless you plan on devoting an entire day to it (it's not hard to do, but it's time-consuming, not to mention messy).

I get mine ready made from the pizza place at Atwater market. For $4.50, you get enough dough to make four large (14") pizzas or six small (12") pizzas. It's great dough, with lots of air inside to give you that puffy wood-fired crust look.

So the key here is to do all the prep the day beforehand. I bought three different kinds of salami (they sell them whole in paper in various flavours these days in most supermarkets), Tuscany ham, kalamata olives, 6-year-old cheddar, Jarlsberg and Mozzarella di Bufala and added the usual suspects: red onion, red pepper, goat cheese, and to my intense joy/regret, two $6 heads of Ail de Provence (garlic from Provence, France. Watch it, it's the most powerful garlic on the planet and will make your whole refrigerator smell like a garlic buffet).

The next day, you bring out the dough to get it to room temp and you clear the battlefield. You preheat the oven at 550º for an hour with the pizza stone within. I recently bought an oven thermometer, the kind that has a wire that goes into the oven with a digital readout outside, and was disappointed to see that the oven never went any hotter than 489º no matter how long I preheated it, and when I started cooking, frequently fell below 350º. That meant that the stone didn't get hot enough to give a char before the top was ready, but no matter -- these pizzas are designed to be frozen and then frypan-reheated, so I wasn't too worried about it.

Anyway, then you make your chart with ingredients for each pizza so you don't forget a step on one of them, in the order of ingredients (oil, sauce -- I made a homemade one with San Marzanos -- cheese, garlic, onions, peppers meats, more cheese, mushrooms, olives etc.) and then divide your dough into balls for each pizza, wrapping them all in plastic wrap so they don't dry out, then roll 'em out one at a time, putting the toppings on, shoving them into the oven for 8 minutes or so on broil, turning once halfway, then peeling them out and putting them on cooling racks.

That's it. One by one. Believe it or not, it only took about two hours to make ten pizzas, and nary a misstep.

Cleanup's a bit of a pain, but no sweat. Then you just cut all the pizzas you want to freeze in half and put them in plastic containers between wax paper and they'll stay good for at least three months. Reheat them in a nonstick skillet and they'll taste like they just came out of the oven.

Voilà. Pizza for three months. Next time you're all invited, if you all bring a bottle of wine each.