Fantastic Bake Along: Pizza Party

Tracy @ It’s a T-Sweets Day! is running another bake-along, and this month, Brenna@crochet539 and her family chose the dish…and as you may have guessed from the title, it’s pizza! What a terrific choice they made! You can check out the details of this bake along, and get the recipe for the dough here, on Tracy’s blog.

Today is Father’s Day, and although he is no longer with us, I remember that my dad used to make the most fantastic pizza when I was a kid. I’m dedicating my pizza to him, although it is definitely different than what he would have made! Now, let’s get started!

Tami @Tanglewood Knots has her secret weapon, a cast iron pizza pan. My secret weapon is my pizza stone, as you can see it is well used! The darker it gets, the more seasoned it is. I obviously haven’t used it quite enough, because it still has some spots that aren’t completely seasoned, but it’s getting there. To prepare my stone, I only used 1 teaspoon of olive oil, as opposed to the 2 tablespoons suggested in the dough recipe.

My first step was to prepare all of my ingredients. I opted to make Greek style pizza because I have made a similar one in the past. I usually make it with a partially baked, store bought crust, and using tomato sauce for the base. Since I’m changing things up with the crust, I thought I would do a few other things differently too.

Instead of using tomato sauce for the base I did the following:

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 small-medium cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon Clubhouse Greek spice.

I mixed all of the ingredients above in a small bowl and set it into the fridge until I was ready to use it.

For the remainder of the toppings, I used the following:

• 1 tomato finely sliced (with a mandolin)
• 1/4 red onion, finely sliced
• 1/2 cup cremini mushrooms, finely sliced
• 1/2 large green pepper, cut into thin strips
• 60 grams of dry salami (I used salami with prosciutto this time around)
• 25 grams of sliced black olives
• 60 grams of feta cheese, crumbled
• 45 grams of goat cheese, crumbled (well sort of)

Of course, you don’t have to be as specific with the amounts as I was, but since I’m tracking my points for Weight Watchers, it was important to me that I know how much I was using of the ingredients I needed to count.

Once my toppings were ready, I made my dough using the recipe supplied for the bake along. When it reached the stage where I divided it to roll it out  I took the second ball, put it into a freezer bag, and tossed it into the freezer. I’m feeding one, so one pizza is more than enough. I’ll let you know at some point how well the dough fares when I use it for a future pizza.

I debated partially cooking my crust before adding the toppings, but I decided to try adding them first, then baking everything together. When my dough was ready, and rolled out on my pan, I took my dish of oil, garlic and spice, dumped it on top and used a pastry brush to spread it around so that it covered the dough evenly (except for the outside crust).

Then I used a hard salami, this time I used President’s Choice Salami with Prosciutto and covered the pizza. Next I layered my veggies…very thinly sliced tomato, and rings of red onion, thin strips of green pepper, thinly sliced cremini mushrooms, and sliced black olives.

Then I layered all of my other toppings on, starting with salami, tomato, red onion, green peppers, mushrooms, olives, feta cheese, and finally the goat cheese.

I popped it into the oven for about 20 minutes, and voilà! It was as delicious as it looks!

If anyone is interested, I cut my pizza into 8 pieces, and calculated it to be 7 points per slice; 4 points for the crust, and 3 points for the topping.

Be sure to go and check out the results from the other participants!

• Tami@ Tanglewood Knots
• Kathy Reeves @Sewing Etc.
• Emma @Emma’s Craft Projects
• Brennacrocheter @crochet539
• Tracy@ It’s a T-Sweets Day!