Pizza and Fro Yo

Making homemade pizza is a lot of fun. It's relatively easy and there are many imaginative ways to top a pizza. For our May meeting, Tricia was kind enough to make some of her delicious sourdough pizza dough for us (it's a dough like the one used at the Cheeseboard or Arizmendi).

So much of pizza making is in the prep. Vegetables need to be chopped, cheese needs to be grated and cut, hard vegetables need to be precooked, sauce needs to be made, and herbs need to be picked and chopped.

Ingrid chopping mushrooms

Vivi roasting bell peppers

Mariah and Vivi removing the charred skin from the peppers

Lily picking some herbs for her pizza

One of the most important things when making a good homemade pizza is having a pizza stone for the oven. By pre-heating the oven for half an hour at 500 degrees with the pizza stone in it, the pizza will have a crisp crust without overcooking the toppings. A pizza peel is also helpful in getting the pizza into and out of the oven. I use a fine cornmeal to keep the dough from sticking to the peel. There's nothing worse than having a pizza covered in toppings and ready to go into the oven, only to discover that one part of the dough is stuck to the peel.

Homemade pizza sauce

Before
After

This meeting everyone got creative. We split into a few different groups. Each group brainstormed until they came up with a satisfactory combination of toppings for their pizza.

There were three completely different pizzas that we made. One was a pizza with no sauce, fresh mozzarella with feta, herbs and olive oil. Another was a combination of tomato sauce, roasted peppers, caramelized onions, mozzarella, feta, and basil. The last pizza was more along the lines of a traditional margarita pizza with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, and basil. This last pizza had a little bit of a disaster when it was being moved from the pizza stone onto the pan. It broke and the cheese and sauce slid and it became a saucy-cheesy mess. It still tasted good though!

As soon as the pizza is removed from the oven, it is sprinkled with fresh herbs and the crust is brushed with and olive oil and garlic mixture.

Not only did we make pizza during this meeting, we made frozen yogurt as well. I happen to be a huge fan of the trend of "tart" frozen yogurts such as the stuff they sell at Tuttimelon here in Alameda. It's tangy and sweet at the same time. In one of my recent Sunset magazines they had a recipe on how to make a similar tart frozen yogurt. The recipe called for only two ingredients: plain nonfat yogurt and sugar. Mix them together and put them in the ice cream maker. Easy? Definitely.

The article recommended using a very high quality yogurt with no additives, so we used the nonfat Straus European style yogurt. Actually, I think it was the nonfat plain european style yogurt from Trader Joes's. (Interesting little side note: When I went to Slow Food Nation in SF last year, I talked to the guy at the Straus Creamery booth and he said that the plain European style yogurt at Trader Joe's is actually Straus yogurt. But only the plain nonfat and whole fat European style ones.)

Holding a dish of fro yo with cherry sauce

A few days before the meeting I had went out to Brentwood with my mom and my friend Ruth to pick cherries. We had two paper grocery bags almost full of cherries. So at cooking club we made a cherry sauce for the frozen yogurt (fro yo). The sauce was simply pitting the cherries and cutting them in half, and then sauteeing them over medium high heat with some sugar until the sugar caramelized a bit and the cherries released some of their juice.

Standing in front of a tree laden with cherries

The cherry sauce