Homemade pizza

Over the past few months we have grown increasingly wary of processed foods.  Not only are many of these products higher in all those things we are trying to avoid, such as calories, fats, and sodium, but many of them also come with extra packaging (hard on the landfills and, until we know more about BPA, possilby harder on your health), relatively high price tags, and a greater exposure to unwanted additives.  One of our personal goals for this winter is to significantly cut down on the amount of processed foods that we consume.  Tonight's foray into homemade food territory found us making pizza...from the crust up. 

Having never made bread of any kind without the help of our handy little machine I wasn't sure how this experiment would go over, but I'd have to say it was an extremely successful outcome!  I did a little recipe research first and, after some mixing and matching, came up with the following:

3 cups whole wheat flour, one .25 ounce package yeast, 1 cup warm water, 2 tbsp shortening, 1 tbsp garlic powder, 1 tbsp basil

Mix ingredients in large bowl until dough forms, cover with towel and let sit for 30 minutes

Knead dough several times (easypizzacrusts.com said 6-8), then roll to the desired shape, size, and thickness

I then spread the dough on our pizza stone, formed the outer crust, and let my miniature helper assist with the toppings.  It baked for 25 minutes, and we should have let it sit for five before we cut it, but we were too eager.  Yum!  This is definitely a keeper, and we'll give it five stars because not only was it easy, it was really goood!

Here's where I have a confession to make, though, because for all our attempts at avoiding processed foods we used a pre-prepared pizza sauce (in our defence, however, it was an organic sauce from Muir Glen, who is known for their BPA free processing and canning), our olives came in a can (if anyone can tell me where to find black olives in any other way please let me know), the mushrooms came in a plastic container (again, I have yet to see mushrooms sold unfettered), and we used pre-shredded cheeses (albeit organic, but of course they'd been processed and packaged).  The more we try, the more we realize how much we have left to do.  At least the pizza was good.

Comments

[mom]

I had not visited here before, I just found it. The pictures on top are great (I should not be surprised) and the rest is wonderful too.

Good work !

[Leah]

Glad the pizza experiment turned out well. As far as the olives go, I know that Busch's in Ann Arbor (the one at Main & Ann Arbor-Saline Rd) has an olive bar, where you can buy a whole slew of different types of olives, and I believe it's by-the-pound. I'm not a fan of olives, so I've never paid too much attention, but I walk by it every week when I'm shopping....