Introduction

To repeat my results, you will need some toys. Aluminum pizza pans are available for about USD 5 in a restaurant supply store (or web site). Unglazed ceramic tile, or pizza stones, sufficient to cover the bottom shelf of your oven, will run about USD 30. Pizza boards, on which the assembly process and carriage to the oven, are about USD 15 each. A pizza spatula suitable for moving the finished product from the oven to an aluminum pizza pan will set you back about USD 20. These are one-time costs. Start small.

Pizza has two subassemblies: sauce and dough. In final assembly you'll combine the subassemblies along with opportunistic "toppings", then bake. Every stage of the process is harsher and more intense than in similar cooking activities -- higher heat, more garlic, and so on. A little light meditation, or a double espresso, is a good way to get started. Pizza making is not for the faint of heart.

Small matters:

• This recipe can be halved or doubled with no scaling problems.
• I use King Arthur flour. Everything else is generic.
• While economics was the initial driver, the quality of the pizza is so much higher than what I get from restaurants that I've pretty much given up eating pizza-not-from-my-own-kitchen at home.

Sauce

1. mix it all together, no cooking required, set it aside for later. any leftover can be used in place of tomato sauce or tomato paste in any other recipe.

Dough

1. microwave the water until it's the temperature of a bath for a newborn (test with your elbow), mix in yeast, let it sit for a few minutes while:
2. mix remaining dry stuff together in a bigger bowl than you'd expect to need, then make a divot in the middle and pour the wet stuff in. mix with flat rubber scraper and your very clean hands. expect to add a tbsp of water or flour. should be slightly tacky, consistency like brand new playdough. don't be shy, you can't hurt it, there's no fear of overmixing bread dough.
3. make a smooth ball out of it, coat/rub with some olive oil, put in mixing bowl, covered air tight, under a heat lamp or on top of an oven that has a pilot light -- just a tad above "room temperature" is best. say 75F or so. leave it alone for an hour, by which time it should about triple in size.
4. flour your very clean very flat work surface, pull the dough out, flour the top of it, and pound the hell out of it. get all the air out. fold it over and throw more flour above and below it -- don't let it stick to your hands or to the work surface. then return to bowl, re-cover, air tight. either wait up to another hour (then punch it down again), or proceed:
5. when you're ready to make pizza, or freeze the dough for later use, chop the dough into quarters for shared pizzas or sixths for individual pizzas, and wrap the pieces separately under so that you can get to them easily. a damp towel suffices to cover the bowl at this stage. you can zip-loc and freeze extra quarters to save on this part of the prep time in the future.

Pizza

1. pre-heat oven to 500F with pizza stones or unglazed ceramic tile on bottom shelf. remove all other racks.
2. take one of your chunks and flatten it to about 1/4 inch. for best results, use your palms and not a rolling pin. lots of flour all over the place at this stage to keep anything from sticking to anything. coat a wooden pizza board with corn meal ("tiny little ball bearings") and try to get your flat dough onto it without pulling any holes. at this stage you may be tempted to re-ball and re-flatten, and you may learn a thing or two about using more flour or more water earlier in the process.
3. four or five tbsps of pizza sauce, spread with the convex bottom of the tablespoon itself, is enough to cover a normal shared pizza, and that's about a quarter of the sauce, so it ends up perfectly. bring it all the way to the edges, minus a quarter inch margin.
4. it takes about a pound of shredded mozarella to cover a shared pizza. bring it all the way to the edges. you'll have a pound or so left over for next time, or for quesadilla night, or for scrambled eggs / omelettes.
5. put the rest of your stuff on. lots of fresh chopped garlic and red onions go with almost everything, except pepperoni. and, for pepperoni, do several layers, with a thin coat of mozarella glue in between each layer. anything you chop for pizza should be chopped into smaller chunks than you expected. sausage can be acorn sized, veggies should be pea sized.
6. a couple ounces of "mexican" cheese on top browns nicely and adds some interesting non-string-cheese like flavour to it. black pepper that's put on before cooking does especially nice things to mushrooms, peppers, & meat.
7. slide pizza onto hot pizza stones. if you used a LOT of corn meal, it will slide off pretty well. tip it enough to move the dough but not so much that your ingredients tumble off.
8. after 5 to 7 minutes, rotate pizza 90 to 180 degrees. and remember that it's very hard to burn this stuff, and that you'll be cooking it longer than you expected.
9. when the marginal crust is dark brown and your ingredients are dried out, pull the pizza out and put it on an aluminum pizza pan to harden up for a few minutes before slicing it.
10. it takes a pizza stone about two minutes with the oven door closed to recover its thermal mass. and, opening the door to check on pizza costs you at least a minute of oven recovery time, so don't do it often.

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