Home-topped, with dough by Pastaworks

They should have taken a picture of me tossing the dough over the oven. The centrifugal force really does help even out the dough. It's not just for entertainment (except the time I almost dropped it). I learned to make pizza (and calzones) when I was a line cook at Cafe Bernardo in Sacramento. I learned on a great flat iron oven, but they never let us toss the dough. We rolled it, with a rolling pin; how sad. But they did teach me about my favorite toppings - caramelized onions, mozzarella, fresh spinach, fresh tomatoes, and kalamata olives. This is now the standard pie in Kristen's kitchen. It's the pie that mom ALWAYS requests when she comes to town.

Mom comes. I make pizza.

I love to make my own dough, but Pastaworks recently moved into the neighborhood and I'd heard they make a mean dough you can by raw & frozen. So on our way to a beach house for the weekend, we picked up two frozen balls of dough! While my mom and I quilted the afternoon away, we let the dough defrost in the window sill (yes, we were blessed with SUN at the Oregon coast!).

One pie got red sauce, the other got basil pesto. Mom always prefers the pesto. But the eight of us demolished the 2 pies. This was some damn good pizza. Evan and MaryAlecia brought arugula, which was the perfect frest topping on the hot pizza pie!

The crust: hip hip horay for the Pastaworks dough. It was way thicker than I'd ever make, but you could cut one ball in half for a thinner result. We used one ball per pizza. The dough was plush, with sufficient salt and oil. Tasty. It gets 5 stars from me for frozen dough!

The pans: the tomato pie got the pizza stone and the pesto got a cookie sheet. No one raved about the pizza stone, and I particularly dislike it. The dough gets too crispy. I knocked my finger on the bottom -- kinda like cardboard. I prefer the good old, standard-issue cookie sheet, dusted with cornmeal. Evan, THE PIZZA GIGALO (check us out, photo to the right) pointed out that the stone might give a more even cook, but I just don't know. Maybe in theory it would, but theory doesn't matter if I like the pizza in the cookie pan better. And, when it comes to the perfectly-cooked, homemade pizza dough, the hotter the oven, the better. Our rental oven went up to 500! Nice.