It might be a bit silly, but I wanted to share our pizza with the good folks in the GOG forum community. I've been wanting to "give back" to the community for a while, and this is one of the few ways I've come up with to do so.

Making pizza "from scratch" is a long and involved process of varying stages. I'm going to share the stages with you all and then share the completed product (fresh baked PIZZA!) All of our ingredients are organic with no additives whatsoever.

Step #1:

Make cheese.

My girlfriend does this step exclusively. We use a "quick mozzarella" recipe that uses organic vegetable rennet ("pure" cheese making uses no rennet, most cheeses you find today in a store use animal or vegetable rennet.)

We buy 2 gallons of local grass-fed raw milk. The milk sits out until it is room temperature. Then it is dumped into a large pot and gets warmed very slowly to 90 degrees whilst stirring to keep the heat even. This starts the separation of the curds from the whey. (attachs. #1-4)

Once at 90 degrees and the curds have a good firmness to them, they get cut (with a very long super-sharp knife.) Next, the whey gets poured off and then is further separated from the curds by slow warming that removes more and more of the whey. She separates them into 2 balls for easy handling. (attachs. #5-7)

Once the whey is removed, the remaining curds get squeezed into two cheeseballs. The cheeseballs cool and then are wrapped in cheesecloth and put in the refrigerator for ~24 hours to harden. It's then shredded and put in the freezer for future use on PIZZA! (attachs. #8-10)

Step #2:

Make sauce.

I grow the tomatoes in my (again, completely organic) garden. I usually grow more than 10 varieties and they all contribute to the sauce. There are red, orange, and yellow tomatoes which give the sauce a lovely color. I freeze them by the gallon and make sauce throughout the year. This batch is about 3 gallons of tomatoes.

Tomatoes, garlic, onions, salt, and a little olive oil all get blended together.
Sometimes the batches have herbs, onions, and peppers that we also grew ourselves, but not this batch (and this batch has 0 peppers.) We've never gotten to growing our own garlic, yet. It then gets cooked down.

(attachs. #11-13)

Step #3:

Make dough.

We use a sourdough starter to make the dough. This is an alternate way of making bread without the use of store-bought yeast. It is much healthier and cheaper. Wild yeasts from the air combine with water and flour in a glass jar over time until it starts to ferment. Once fermenting we take a cup of the starter and add it to the dough recipe. We mix herbs into the dough as well. Let it rise, form it into pizza dough, let rise again, put it on the peel (the wooden paddle thing used to slide dough into the oven.)

(attachs. #1-8)

Step #4:

Prepare and combine ingredients.

Finally ready to ! Spread on sauce. Drop on the shredded cheese. Delicately place each tiny piece of bacon (forgot cooking of the bacon pics! It is NY state pasture-raised pork, though, maybe I'll edit some in at another point.) Throw on some jalapeno bits. Slide into oven. Bake ~7 minutes.

(attachs. #9-12)

Step #5:

Slice and share. Pick a piece that looks good to you. There's enough to go around!

(attachs. #13-16)

Thanks again good people of the community for being good people of the community! Have some pizza!

TADA!

can we do it WITHOUT the cheese * i can see people do that


( * i am expected to ask that )

I compliment you for this idea, but a lot of us will neither have the time or patience to do this, especially when it comes to homemade dough. That's a whole lot of effort for something that'll be devoured in no time.

Also I'm skeptical about your claim of homemade dough being healthier vs store-bought. Take grocery chains like Trader Joe's, for example. They pretty much only sell their own product lines and forego most of all the extra crap that can usually be found in other mass-produced food items, and their prices are generally around the same and in quite a few cases cheaper than your average grocery store.

Home made dough / bread is always better then shop bought, no doubt about it. Mass produced bread will always have preservatives and flavour enhancers etc.
Bakery bread may not, depends how good your bakery is.
Can't comment on Trader Joe's in particular as we don't have them over here.


Nice idea drealmer7, I make wood fired pizza for a living so I know how good homemade pizza is :)
Never made my own mozzarella before but I've always been interested to give it a try. Favourited the thread to give it a go at some point though :)

The thing is, this requires planning for dinner at least a day in advance. Much of the time, I'm not sure what I'll be eating for dinner an hour in advance.

Also, I didn't know that milk ate grass. Learn something new every day.

Here you go.

Thanks! I certainly wouldn't expect most people to have the time, patience, or even ability to do these things, but hopefully it inspires some people to try, and it felt good sharing my self! It's taken a lot of time and learning as well as living a certain life-style to be able to do all of this. The dough is actually the easiest step! We bake all of our own baked-goods (pretzels, bagels, burger/hotdog rolls, donuts, cookies, naan, pita, sandwich bread, EVERYthing) and so constantly have a "starter" ready to make whatever dough we want.

Trader Joe's is a lot of image and less substance than it purports to be. They do have good products, and have improved a lot. But a lot of their stuff is re-packaged ALDA groceries and factory left-overs and that is why it is cheaper. They also have some pretty shady practices and don't divulge their food sources to even their own employees. However, I would still say they offer more better stuff than a lot of standard grocery stores, but don't be fooled by their packaging as a lot of it is junk as well.

As far as dough from the store goes, depending on where you are located, you will be hard-pressed to find organic yeast being used in any bread product (products can be labelled organic even if they have non-organic yeast in them, as well as other non-food additives that are allowed in certified organic foods. All bread needs is yeast, water. flour, salt, nothing else.) This is a major issue for bread for me. I find practically ZERO acceptable (to me, and my lifestyle) bread in any store, even organic-focused stores.

Thanks for your comment!

I am impressed! It does look great, drealmer7

Oof! that hurts! You can have a piece from this pizza instead!

Congrats on that superb pizza, drealmer7, it looks so good! :)_

Looks awesome drealmer7, might be something to try with the kids this summer when they have a lot of free time (and we get some new batches of tomatoes.) Except for maybe the cheese, that seems a little too active time consuming, but the local grocer makes their own.

Favorite thread checked, because I would like to try that cheese one of these days. Gotta figure out where to get raw milk since there has been a bit of a fuss about it the last few years and there was talk of outlawing its sale. Or maybe I'm confusing it with something else. Anyway, homemade cheese sounds great.