Homemade Pizza

My latest and greatest weapon in the fight to find something cheap and good to eat: homemade pizza. A few months ago I found a tip online that changed homemade pizza for both me and my friends forever: bake the dough first.

Its not easy to get your oven to the temp that a pizza oven gets to, and because of that whenever anyone I knew made homemade pizza it was always soggy and soft in the middle. Not undercooked necessarily, but the dough would get soaked by the sauce and toppings before it crisped. The outside of the pizza was fine, but the inside was eaten last.

Then I read a frugal cooking blog that recommended baking the crust alone for 5 minutes or so and THEN put sauce, cheese and toppings on. All I can say is, its a raging success! Not only that, but it solved something else I had been thinking about: frozen pizzas.

I really wanted to have frozen pizzas in my freezer, but you have to have enough space in your freezer to lay the pizza flat on a cookie sheet, with nothing else on it until it hardens. Then you can wrap it up and stack it with everything else. I have a small freezer, so that just wasn't an option.

But with pre-baking the crusts, I can make dough or buy it at the store, roll it out, and bake it. Then stack the crusts in a ziploc bag and stick them right in the freezer. Its not a complete pizza, but its close. All the hard parts are done.

I keep a jar of sauce in the fridge and some shredded mozzarella in the fridge or freezer. Then I just heat the oven, take out a crust, put sauce on and cheese on (and any toppings around) and bake. So easy, and way WAY better than delivery or frozen pizzas are.

Its also super cheap. I make the dough in my bread maker (or buy it for a buck if I'm not prepared.) I make the sauce myself too, using canned tomato sauce as a base. I saute some garlic and onion, pour the tomato sauce in, add spices (I like oregano and fresh basil, and maybe some salt since the sauce is low sodium), and then pour it into a jar and put it in the fridge. Easy peasy. I figure each pizza costs $1 if I buy the dough and some toppings, or as low as $0.40 if its just cheese and I make the dough myself. Nice.

NOTE: staples like tomato sauce are CHEAP at warehouse stores. The only problem is, you have to have a plan for the sauce, because its a LOT