Pizza is always a popular food to have at home. It’s the perfect thing to eat on a Friday night after a long week of work, on the weekend while watching something on the TV, or for guests to enjoy at a dinner party. Ordering pizza from your local delivery service can be helpful, but it’s never as good as making your own.
Unfortunately, a lot of people struggle to make pizza at home. You have a fantastic pizza dough recipe, your toppings are great, but it just doesn’t get the same taste like an authentic Italian pizza. Ironically, the same can be said for a lot of pizza delivery chains. Sure, Dominos and Pizza Hut taste nice, but they’re hardly proper pizzas!
So, how do you cook the best pizza at home? Well, there are three simple steps – but step three is the main one to pay attention to.
Step 1: Get your dough recipe
It’s really hard to make bad pizza dough at home. There are loads of different recipes out there, so pick whichever one you like the most. It’s normally a simple recipe of years, water, flour, and salt. Add some olive oil, get the ratios correct, and you will create a wonderful dough for your pizza base.
Step 2: Go easy on the toppings
A lot of homemade pizzas fail because you go a bit crazy with the toppings. You don’t need a great deal of tomato sauce, and you don’t need loads of cheese. The more layers you have, the heavier the pizza will be. This makes it harder to cook and it won’t taste as nice. Add your toppings, but don’t be too crazy!
Step 3: Cook your pizza in a pizza oven or grill
The final step is the most critical: don’t bother cooking your pizza in a conventional oven. It simply cannot get hot enough and won’t add any extra flavor to your pizza. Traditionally, pizzas are cooked in really hot wood-fired ovens, so the burning wood adds an extra dimension to the flavor. You can purchase outdoor pizza ovens from places like BBQGuys these days, and they’re a great thing to have at home. All you have to do is pop the pizza in the really hot pizza oven, and it cooks within minutes. You get the lovely charred bits on the crusts; the cheese melts perfectly; it’s delicious.
Alternatively, you can cook your pizza on a grill. This is a good option if you already have a grill outside, so you don’t want to buy a pizza oven. The beauty of a grill is that it can replicate the heat of a pizza oven very well. You will need a pizza stone for this, and you place it on the grill and close the lid with the vents as wide as possible. The idea is to get this stone as hot as possible, so you can slide your pizza onto it when it’s ready. Close the grill again, and the pizza cooks on the stone in a few minutes. Lift the lid, and you should have a very crispy base with delicious toppings.
To make the best pizza at home, it’s all about the cooking method. A pizza oven is obviously the best idea, but you can make seriously good pizza by just using your grill as well.
