Flat out delicious

America's favorite food is Pizza and it's unfortunately not a great homemade standard.  Why?  becuase of the specialized equipment needed for a great crust.  You can buy bread and make use it as a crust for pizza but it's not the same because the recooking can over dry the bread and not cook the toppings enough to give you a just from the pizza oven bubbly brown yumminess.  So we will first attack the crust.

If you've been reading this blog, you've read about my adventures with no knead bread.  Well for those of us who don't have the time or desire to abuse our dough here's a no knead pizza dough.
3.5 cups of flour
1 1/3rd cups of water
2/3rds tsp of salt
2/3rds tsp of sugar
2 tbsp of yeast (or 2 packets)

Here we are going for a faster rise than with our bread dough so we use sugar to jumpstart the yeast here. So dump all the dry ingredients in a bowl and stir, add the water and stir.  You want this to totally combine and be just slightly tacky to the touch.  Cover with a damp towel and let rise for 2 hours at room temperature (or in the fridge for a day.  This is enough for 2 pizzas.

Now for the special hardware.  Pizzas are cooked on stones in very hot ovens but our home ovens have racks and just don't get as hot.  Our ovens also average the temperature like a home AC unit.  If you set to 75 and the house is 80 the ac will chill the place to about 73-74 and then let it rise to about 76-77 before kicking in again.  Your stove does the same thing but has a wider temp range.  For our pizza we need even heat so the top and bottom cook at the same time.  We need a trip to the hardware store.  So measure your bottom oven rack. Now go to the hardware store....

What you want is unglazed terra cotta tiles.  You can buy a pizza stone but they are pricy, unglazed terra cotta is cheap and you just need enough to fill the space that you measured before.  If you need to cut tiles for a good fit, make sure the cut ends go against the oven walls.  Now place a double or triple layer of foil on the bottom rack of your oven and then place the tiles on top of it.  If you can get a piece to cover the whole (or most of it) rack then great otherwise you will need to butt the tiles against each other.  The foil will catch any stray flour or cornmeal bits and keep your oven clean.  Temperature should be 400 - 500 depending on your oven and how thick you like your crust (thinner crust hotter oven). 

So why do we do this?  Ceramics are a poor insulator, they absorb heat slowly and release it in the same way, slowly.  So we've created a floor for the pizza which will even out the heating of our oven giving us even heat for cooking the crust evenly and melting the top consistently.  Because these stones heat more slowly than the rest of the oven the pre-heat time will be longer so prepare for that, also give the oven an extra 10 minutes after the beep to be sure they are ready.

Lastly you can leave these stones in the oven permanently and it will not harm a thing so you don't need to constantly take them out and put them back in.