I can't cook at all. I have become more adventurous in the past couple of years, eating foods for the first time such as "a whole fish with a head on it" and, more recently, "a watermelon", but I'd still advise the rest of you against eating anything I have prepared, because as far as I'm concerned, it's enough to just warm it up until it's edible and leave it at that, which is hardly the Michelin chef way.
I had a doctor's appointment today, so I booked the whole day off work, and decided to tackle one of my most adventurous missions in the culinary world: I was going to make my own pizza. I bake bread sometimes, so I assumed making dough would be similar, and I've watched the man in Domino's make a pizza and it didn't look too hard when he did it, so I bought anything I didn't already have (in some cases twice; apparently the tomato sauce is passata and tomato puree wouldn't do it) and got to work.
Making the dough is hard because every website with instructions tells you how to make four or five pizza bases at once, when I only needed one. So I hope you like totally guessing at how much flour, salt, sugar, water and yeast you need. But that's all you need. If you bake bread like I do, you have all this stuff already, and if you hate kitchens even more than I do, you'll still have everything except yeast, which supermarkets usually have in one of the aisles you never walk down. So it's really easy to make a pizza base. You can do it!
(Websites do tend to conceal that you're meant to let the dough rise. They say it takes five minutes to make pizza dough, then one of the steps is "leave the dough to rise for two hours." I went to my doctor's appointment and it had inflated enormously when I got home, but then it deflated immediately when I picked it up, so perhaps you really could do it in five minutes and I was just letting it expand for no reason).
I do recommend you buy a pizza tray for your oven. I don't know if you can do it without one (I was afraid I would make the world's nicest-looking pizza, then it would just collapse and drop all the toppings on the floor as soon as I tried to lift it into the oven). In addition to having somewhere to put your pizza, the tray is also round, meaning you can shape the pizza base into a more normal pizza shape. Otherwise, it really won't be round. Don't even think about trying that spinning trick they do on TV. You're not Gordon Ramsay. And let's face it: even professionally-made pizzas often aren't perfectly round.
Some more hardships I encountered: how much of each topping do I need? You can buy pepperoni slices, but again, you get enough for about ten pizzas. I know what my cooking is like. I might not live past the first one. In terms on onions, you need a quarter of one onion. Not half an onion; it sounds fine but you wind up eating most of it while cooking because it's far too much to cover a pizza. Chillies are up to you. Put the tomato sauce on the pizza base, move it around with the back of a ladle like the man in Domino's did, then add your other toppings. Then add cheese.
This is where it gets hard if you're a terrible chef like me. What type of cheese do they put on pizzas? The supermarket had like 50 different types of cheese, and I do not sit at home recreationally eating cheese on its own, so I was in trouble. They had mozzarella, but that's a special one that gets included as a topping in addition to the regular cheese, so it can't be that one. I had to make a call. Not a phone call to any of the dozens of people I know who could immediately help with this quandary; this was my pizza and they weren't going to kill its unique soul with their "expertise". I made a judgment call. I bought parmesan.
With hindsight, I think this was wrong. The pizza tasted weird. All my other toppings tasted awesome, however, so it sounds like I very nearly did it all correctly. It didn't matter that my pizza base was not of uniform thickness; it came out thin and crispy and not burnt, but it did feel flimsy and not as filling as a professional pizza. But if you're less of a hefty glutton than I am, it would probably be perfect. Overall, when an online recipe for pizza dough says "this makes four pizzas", maybe use 1/3 of that to be safe.
All in all, it was nice enough that I would willingly attempt this again at some point. Possibly even soon, since I now have a fridge full of passata and coriander and chillies and pepperoni slices that I have no use for except if I make a couple more identical pizzas.
Obviously, this wouldn't be a food post without a photo of the honestly quite tasty crime scene, so here you go. That's parmesan on top of the pepperoni; I can't remember what layers pizza toppings go in, but grated parmesan doesn't really work as a top layer:
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