Pizza

Everybody loves pizza. As far as fast food goes, pizza is probably the most nutritious, especially when made at home using healthy ingredients like low-fat cheese, fresh vegetables, homemade tomato sauce, and whole-wheat flour for crust. Italians are proud of the ways they make pizza, and the experience for making pizzas can be somewhat overwhelming. Working at California Pizza Kitchen gave me a chance to learn how to make pizza dough and pizza sauces. A basic pizza is Classic Pizza Margherita, but pizza is a versatile food that allows for much creativity, such as experimenting with dough ingredients and different toppings. By using a bread machine to make the pizza dough, and then choosing the toppings, there are endless varieties of making pizzas.

Basic pizza dough
1 cup water
2 tbs olive oil
1 tsp salt
2tsp sugar
3 cups bread flour
2 tsp active dry yeast

Directions:
In a bread pan, place all the ingredients listed above in the order presented or follow the bread machine's instructions. Choose the pizza dough function, and press start. At the end of the kneading and rising cycle, remove the dough. Punch down on the dough with your fist and let rest for 10 minutes before shaping. Even though dough can be used immediately, the flavor will taste better if dough can rest in the refrigerator a few more hours or over night. Two hours before pizza is ready to assemble, remove dough from the refrigerator. Pizza dough will freeze well too.