Stand back! I'm a pizza professional! (Made the stuff for a living for a year in college at an award-winning small shop).
Actually, all the hints and recipes that came before look great. No quibbles.
We did a deep-dish pie, and the only ingredient we didn't make ourselves was the raw dough. Any decent white or wheat bread dough will do. Sadly, they don't sell it in the supermarkets here, but any way you want to make dough is good. Breadmaker is fine.
One of our secrets was pre-cooking the dough for ten minutes. That prevented it getting soggy on the bottom, which is especially important with veggie pizzas (they're watery).
In a 9" pan that you wipe out but never wash (actually, I like to use an iron skillet -- it does a fabulous job) press the raw dough into the sides until it covers the bottom and has a slight lip. It really helps if the dough is room temperature (but not warm or it gets kind of liquid).
Cook this dough by itself for ten minutes at 450 (gas mark
. It'll just slightly start to brown. Press it down in the middle, if it poofed up. You can then go on to make pizza, or put it aside for as long as you like. We would cook all our dough in the morning and refrigerate it for the evening shift.
Our sauce recipe was unremarkable. It was like spaghetti sauce, but maybe a little thicker. These days -- when making pizza is a bit more spontaneous -- I'll just cut up a nice big tomato and cook it with spices for half an hour before I want to make pizza. I like mine with lots of black pepper.
Our second secret was cooking the ingredients UNDER the cheese. So it was pre-cooked dough, a thin layer of sauce (too much, and your topping slide around), toppings and then a solid layer of half and half mozarella and cheddar.
Cook this in the same gasmark 8 oven for another ten minutes (more or less, depending on whether you like the cheese browned.
To get it out of the pan and onto the cutting board, my last professional tip: slide the knife under the pie and then move then pan out from under the pizza.
This was in the early 1980s, so we made some of the first pies with exotic ingredients. It sounds pretty ordinary now, but the idea of carrots or walnuts on pizza was extraordinary then. Raisins taste okay, but swell up like ticks (ulch). I was night manager, so I made underlings handle the anchovies. Our vegetarian specials were three inches thick and had to be drained of excess fluid before serving.
In conclusion, OH HOLY GEEZ I AM SO HUNGRY FOR PIZZA AT THIS MOMENT!!!
