Pizza Night!

Friday night is pizza night in the Dailey house.  It's also trivia night, which is why I'm just posting now.  We had easy prep because Nick made a full batch of Cooks Illustrated pizza dough earlier in the week for the bread sticks we had for Sausage Lasagna.  The only things left to do were defrost the dough in the fridge overnight, along with a food saved bag of frozen mozzarella (we buy in bulk from Costco and then divide into smaller bags for easy weekly pizza use), and make the tomato sauce!  I didn't have the small can if crushed tomatoes that I normally use, so I took a can of diced tomatoes and whirred it in the food processor.  My standard way of making pizza sauce is to saute garlic in olive oil, add the crushed tomatoes, and then spice it up with crushed red pepper and some of Penzey's delicious Italian herb blend.  I actually forgot to add salt this time, which turned out fine because it was pepperoni pizza week and that was salty enough!

I'm in charge of stretching and topping the pizza because when Nick does it, there is a lot of frustration and torn dough.  I stretch out the pizza into the desired shape, make sure our pizza peel is dusted with cornmeal, and then I transfer the dough to the peel for topping.  We had a pretty boring topping this week, just pepperoni.  Sometimes I top with veggies just for me :)

The key to our delicious pizza is a super hot oven (545 degrees), and our trusty pizza stone.  Nick uses it for bread baking and the stone tends to get a little black and crusty, so it's not really camera-ready!  Instead, I'll just show you the finished product.  Trust me, this is the best pizza you can get outside of a Neapolitan pizza joint!