Pizza is a great meal that’s suitable on any occasion. Whether you have an office party, a movie night or simply invited some friends over, a slice of pizza is always a yummy treat and a mood booster. Pizza is also easy to make once you practice for a bit. If you want to learn how to excel at making your own pizza, here are some tips to help you out.
How to Bake Pizza?
Texture
If you make your own pizza dough, you should pay attention to its texture. It should not be sticky and if it is, add more flour to tackle this issue. A good dough should feel a little bit moist. After you prepare the dough, you need to let it ‘rest’ for at least 10 minutes. Afterwards, you can start rolling it.
Temperature
If you want to avoid any air bubbles from forming into your pizza, you should take a fork and make holes in the part of the dough where you will lay the ingredients. Great pizza is baked at high temperatures. The oven can be set at temperatures as high as 250 degrees to bake pizza.
Preheat the Oven
In order to bake the tasty dish, you need a pizza stone that has to be laid on the second-lowest rack of the oven. Before you bake the pizza, the oven needs to be preheated, with the pizza stone inside. To obtain a good and crunchy pizza, you should preheat the oven for at least 3 quarters of an hour.
Pizza Pan
Additionally, you will also need a quality deep dish pizza pan which will prevent the dough from sticking and help you obtain a crunchy crust. If you want to lay the pizza in the oven very easily, you should also get a pizza peel.
Crispy Pizza
If you are not in a rush and want to obtain a crispy pizza, you can bake only the naked crust for a couple of minutes. Another tip to get a good, crunchy crust is to use olive oil to cover its edges. You can do this very quickly using a pastry brush. This will also give the crust a nice, golden look and make it feel less dry.
Flour the peel
Before you lay the pizza on the peel, in order to transfer it in the oven, make sure there’s a thin layer of flour on the peel’s surface. You should also move the peel a little bit to see if the dough sticks because it shouldn’t. And if it does, just add more flour until it doesn’t.
When Is the Pizza Ready?
Cooking Time
The baking time varies based on your oven’s capacity and how much you heat it. As a general rule, you should check the pizza after 5-6 minutes. You might see that only some portions of the pizza are starting to look baked. In this case, you have to pull it out and rotate it using the peel, so that you can bake it uniformly.
Olive Oil
If you want to insist on having a crunchy and delicious crust, once you pull out the pizza to turn it, you can also add more olive oil on its edge. The cheese layer on top of the pizza will let you know when it is ready. This ingredient should have a medium/dark brown when the pizza is ready to be taken out from the oven.
Remove the pizza
To remove the pizza, you will use the same pizza peel and perform this action slowly. Needless to add that the tasty dish should cool for a couple of minutes before you can eat it. Slicing the pizza is sometimes difficult, especially if your palate is already craving. To ease your work, you can use a pizza wheel which is the most efficient tool for this job. I bought ours on sale from Amazon and had it delivered the next day.
Why you need to learn to cook pizza
Pizza is not a meal you just eat to soothe your hunger. It is ‘the’ meal when it comes to friends or family gatherings and the most common food you are likely to find at a party. For these reasons and its terrific taste and versatility, you should learn how to cook your own pizza.
