Good morning folks!

I hope everyone is rested and reasonably over your Saturday night induced hangovers because we’ve got the Academy Awards going tonight and if the past few years have indicated anything it’s that we can get pretty stupid drunk and insane when posting on the Oscars live blog.

I’m anticipating nothing less for this evening.

Trying to come up with a food idea for your Oscar party?

Pizza would work.

Planning on drinking in your underwear?

Pizza would work.

Planning on staying in bed and ordering in?

Pizza would work.

This time though? We’re going to make it from scratch instead. Don’t worry, you can handle this.

The only thing I’m going to kibitz on is the cheese. Some of you may remember that we’ve made our own cheese before so if you feel like it then knock yourself right the Hell out. I’m going to use a fresh package of whole milk mozzarella this time.

We WILL be making our own dough, sauce and even…

Homemade Italian sausage this time so don’t be giving me any crap about not doing the cheese.

I’m thinking that more than just a few of you were wondering when I would get around to making pizza on Sunday Gravy. Well the wait for this shit is OVER. We’re getting after it today!

I know, I know. Everybody fucking loves pizza. There are so many potential topping combinations and crust styles and sauce and cheese styles that the possibilities are damn near endless.

Lemme throw some pizza stats at you real quick:

Pounds of pepperoni consumed every year from pizza	252 million pounds
Annual pizza sale revenue	$32 billion
Slices of pizza that are eaten each second	350 slices
Total number of pizzerias in the U.S.	70,000
Percent of independent pizzerias that make up all pizzerias	65%
Average number of slices of pieces of pizza eaten by a person every year	46 slices
Total number of pizza’s sold in the U.S. each year	3 billion
Total number of pizza’s sold worldwide each year	5 billion
Percent of all pizzerias that offer delivery	83%
Percent of Americans who prefer thin crust pizza	61%
Total number of pizzerias in the state of New York alone	9,000
Percent of Americans who eat at least one piece of pizza per month	93 %

Data via

That’s fucking amazing and yet completely unsurprising.

I know we’ve all got a favorite pie and pizza place so feel free to share yours down in the comments.

I’ve made pizza at home in the past but it’s been quite awhile. Back when I was still married and the kids were younger we would make it every few months because it was always tasty and the girls got to help out in the kitchen which they enjoyed. I just haven’t done it in the last, oh 20 years or so.

Let’s fix that shit.

This post is filled with recipes and photos so it’s time to stop fucking around and get busy.

Before getting started, you may see a reference where I refer to a pizza as a pie. That’s because a pizza is a pie. It’s fuckin’ dough with some shit on it. It’s a fuckin’ pie.

As you were.

 

Last weekend the Sunday Gravy test kitchen was in full swing. We started on Saturday with the brother DJ Taj doing his pizza and I finished my pies on Sunday. I did need to start on one ingredient on Saturday since it had to rest and refrigerate for at least 12 hours. This beauty was started on Saturday.

Homemade Italian Sausage!

Original recipe minus a couple of tweaks via Allrecipes.com.

2 pounds of ground pork

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1 teaspoon of salt

2 teaspoons of freshly ground black pepper

2 1/2 teaspoons of dried parsley

2 teaspoons of garlic powder

2 teaspoons of onion powder

2 teaspoons of dried basil

1 teaspoon of paprika

2 teaspoons of crushed red pepper flake

1/2 teaspoon of toasted ground fennel seeds *

1/8 teaspoon of brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon of oregano

1/4 teaspoon of thyme.

Combine the ground pork and the vinegar in a large bowl and then add the rest of the ingredients. Like so:

* A quick note on the fennel. I used whole fennel seeds toasted and ground in my spice grinder (of course) to help bring the fennel essence to the sausage party. Fennel is a key ingredient in Italian sausage so I wanted to elevate the flavor.

shown: toasting fennel seeds.

Mix together the sausage until everything is combined. Make sure it is well mixed so you don’t have little pockets of spice waiting to be sprung on an unsuspecting victim.

When mixed, you are going to place in a bowl covered with some plastic wrap and leave in the refrigerator for at least 12 hours. Here you will notice that I saved about 1/2 pound of the sausage for the pizza and I froze the other 1 1/2 pounds for later use. Probably in some badass motherfucking meatballs.

If freezing, wrap the sausage in plastic wrap tightly, then wrap THAT in aluminum foil. This can be saved in your freezer for about 3 months.

This was the last of my work on that Saturday. It was DJ Taj’s turn to do his damn thing with the pizza on Saturday night.

Yes we had homemade pizza on consecutive days.

I remain unapologetic.

Taj did his own thing on Saturday so I won’t be giving recipes for his but I did document the proceedings with photos.

To start, DJ Taj cooked a pizza sauce for about 2 hours. Spoiler alert! My sauce is an uncooked sauce.

I do know that he used a can of tomato sauce, about a tablespoon of tomato paste, some fresh onion and garlic along with the standard basil and oregano and salt and pepper. His sauce included a couple of fresh tomatoes as well.

Next he started on the dough. The bro was pleasantly surprised to find out that I had a bread hook attachment for my bad motherfucking Mixmaster 5000!

I call it the “Hyoookkk!!” As a shout-out to Chuck Pahlaniuk, and it makes quick work with a ball of dough.

ACTION SHOT!

Again I don’t have his recipe since I think he used a different source than I did.

He took his rolled and even tossed pizza dough, ladled the sauce over and then added some fresh whole milk mozzarella and some basil. Here is the cheese pizza he made pre-cook.

Now here is the pizza cooked.

His next pizza was a house favorite pepperoni and mushrooms. He sauteed the mushrooms in a nice Napa Valley cabernet. Here is the pie pre-cooked.

Notice the cornmeal? I’ll get to that.

Here is the pizza cooked.

Let’s get to the critique.

First you may notice that the uncooked versus cooked pepperoni/mushroom pie changed shape during the cooking process. We were working with a brand new pizza stone. The stone had been preheated to 475 for over an hour which was as called for. The one thing we were unprepared for was how to get the uncooked pizza onto the rocket fucking hot pizza stone.

No we did not have a pizza paddle (peel).

I may have to order one of these bastards from Amazon next time.

The cornmeal you see in the uncooked pizza photo was to help act as ball bearings to get the pizza off the sheet and onto the stone.

It wasn’t entirely successful.

I love my brother and all and I’m not bashing him on his efforts, in fact I got to watch, take photos and observe so I had a big advantage when I made my pies the following day.

I also promised to share all of the successes and challenges encountered when doing these posts and I will have a couple of notes for my own improvement when I get to my pizzas.

His overall doneness of the pizzas was spot on. One pretty major issue was when he made his dough he used tap water and dumped it in with the flour and yeast without checking the temperature. It should be 110 degrees exactly. I think the yeast got cooked before the dough had a chance to proof. Meaning the dough never had a good rise and the end result was an unleavened and chewy dough. I actually obsessed over this over the course of Saturday night and I wanted to make sure I could correct the issues for the following day.

End result? With a fully proofed dough this would have been goddamn delicious.

On Sunday it was my turn.

Let’s get at it.

Pizza sauce:

(1) 15 oz can of tomato sauce

(1) 6 oz can of tomato paste

1 tablespoon of dried oregano

1/2 tablespoon of dried basil

1 1/2 teaspoons of granulated garlic

1 tablespoon of paprika

1 tablespoon of crushed red pepper flake (optional)

Add everything into a bowl and combine to mix. Again this is an uncooked or raw sauce.

Cover this bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use. This batch made enough sauce for about (3) 14″ pies. I froze the leftover sauce for later use.

Pizza dough:

4 cups of flour. I used all purpose but some folks use bread flour.

1 envelope of dried yeast. Each envelop is about 2 1/4 teaspoons.

1 teaspoon of sugar

2 teaspoons of salt

2 tablespoons of olive oil plus a couple of more teaspoons to be used later.

1 1/2 cups of water at exactly 110 degrees. I went all mad fucking scientist on this to make sure the temperature was correct. I heated the water for a few seconds in the microwave, checked the temp with my kitchen thermometer (it was too hot) and let it cool to exactly 110 degrees and then added it to the rest of the ingredients.

Put everything in the bowl of your badass mixer – you can mix by hand if you have to- use the hook attachment and mix until the dough forms a ball. If the dough is too sticky add some additional flour 1 tablespoon at a time. When the dough has mixed into a ball remove from the bowl and place on a lightly floured surface to knead. Knead for a couple of minutes until you have formed a nice smooth ball of dough. Place into a large bowl that has been greased with the remaining olive oil.  You should have something like this.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place in a warm area to let rise for about an hour. You want it to just about double in size. I put the bowl in the kitchen where I had an oven going at 350 degrees.

This shit proofed like a motherfucker and I had to move it into a bigger bowl.

Take the sausage and the pizza sauce out of the refrigerator, pre-heat your oven to about 475 and let’s get busy.

Use a rolling pin or if you have mad fucking pizza tossing skills, toss your dough until it has been stretched out to fit a 14″ pizza pan. I do NOT have mad fucking pizza tossing skills. I used a rolling pin. Place the stretched dough onto your pizza pan.

No, I am not using the pizza stone until I get a pizza paddle goddammit. The pan you see is my old standby pizza pan with some perforations that I coated lightly with oil.

Get a ladle and add your sauce.

Use the bottom of the ladle to spread the sauce out to the edge of the pizza dough. Leave about a 1/2″ edge unsauced. Trust me.

Next I sprinkle on some shreds of some freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Next let’s go ahead and add our fresh sliced whole milk mozzarella. I checked with my cheese monger and they did NOT have buffalo mozzarella, the bastards. Follow the cheese with some Genoa salami cut into quarters.

I prefer Genoa to pepperoni due to it’s having a lower grease content and about the same flavor levels. Plus it doesn’t give me near the heartburn that pepperoni does. I still will eat the FUCK out of pepperoni but given the choice I used salami instead. Salami is awesome on a fucking pie by the way.

Finally add the sausage.

Having never made homemade Italian sausage I was unsure if the pizza would have enough cooking time to cook the sausage properly so I crumbled the raw sausage into chunks and precooked for about 5 minutes or until the sausage was no longer pink. Pro tip! After pre-heating, drain the sausage in a colander. This is a tip I learned after NOT draining this particular batch.

Cover with a few more shreds of fresh Parmagiano and place in the pre-heated 475 degree oven for about 9 minutes. The pizza will cook for a total of 15-20 minutes but we want to rotate the pizza and also make sure that a spatula can lift the pizza off of the pan. Lift the pizza with the spatula, spin it about a 180 turn, place back on the pan and finish for another 6-7 minutes or until the pizza is done.

Just out of the oven.

That’s a steamy motherfucker right there. Yeah I probably could have cooked this for a couple of more minutes but the suspense over the crust was fucking killing me. Place the cooked pizza on a cutting board and slice. Yep, I’m going to need to buy a pizza cutter too.

Look at this shit again though.

The crust and the sauce were fucking perfect! The crust had a perfect rise and crunchiness to it. One thing I realized in my over zealous topping of the pizza, the pizza will produce moisture while cooking and it will collect on the top of the pie. remember the pizza pan has perforated holes in it?

Yep that made a big goddamn mess.

This may be the first time in history that someone lost a pair of socks by NOT draining his sausage.

I also made another pizza with chunks of pineapple and some just cooked applewood smoked bacon. Here it is pre-cook.

Two data points on this pizza. Please take note of the sauce spillage on the right side of the pie. I over-sauced this one and it did become a minor factor. Also once again, the moisture thing. Next time I will drain the pineapple bits first. Also also again, this could have cooked for a couple of minutes longer.

Here’s a blurry slice.

If you haven’t tried this combination for a pizza I can’t recommend it highly enough. And it’s BACON bacon not Canadian bacon. No offense to our Canadian friends intended, it’s just that the smoky crispy bacon, the pineapple and the tomato sauce does some goddamn magic together.

So! We did it!

Yes, there was trial and error. That just fucking happens. Despite my effort to have you believe otherwise, there are challenges to be encountered in the culinary sciences.

Don’t let my lessons learned or challenges encountered sway you from trying this out or from seeing the end results. Both of these pies were incredibly fucking delicious. Crispy crunchy, yeasty crust, silky tomatoey sauce. Fresh melted milky mozzarella and the savory sausage.

That sausage by the way is a motherfucking rock star recipe. It’s also easy as fuck to make and should be tried.

Let’s try these recipes, remember the lessons learned and start making some homemade pizza. Honestly I was proud as fuck with the results. Tastier than many pizzeria pies I’ve had in the past.

Be fearless in the kitchen.

Go out there and kick some ass!

Peace!