Homemade Personal Pizza's

What is the best kind of fun you can have at home? Making personal pizza's at home where you can put whatever you want on it without having to pay more for additional toppings. SWEET!

Alex and I fell in love with an Emeril Lagasse recipe for pizza dough. Most important part of making pizza dough is having yeast that works. We don't bake with yeast very often so we had to do a couple of tests to make sure our yeast wasn't dead. That was some serious fun all in itself. I took pictures of the yeast exploding in the water and sugar mixture, but they didn't turn out as well as I would have liked. Can you see the explosions of yeast bubbling up?

Pizza Dough:

1 cup warm (110 F) water

one 1/4-ounce envelope active dry yeast - equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons if you are using the yeast in bulk.

1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil

3 cups bleached all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

Pour the warm water into a large bowl. Add the yeast and let stand for 3 minutes, then whisk until the yeast is dissolved. Stir 1 tablespoon of the oil into the yeast mixture.

Add 1 1/2 cups of flour and the salt, mixing by hand until it is all incorporated and the mixture is smooth. continue adding the flour, 1/4 cup at a time, working the dough after each addition,, until all the flour is incorporated but the dough is still slightly sticky. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and kneed for 3 minutes.

Oil a large mixing bowl with the remaining olive oil. Place the dough in the bowl and turn to oil all sides. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set in a warm, draft free place until the dough nearly doubles in size, 1 to 1 1/2 hours. The temperature have been cooling down around our house so I turned the oven to warm and let it hang out there for an hour.

Remove the dough from the bowl and briefly knead, separating into two equal-size disks. Place the doughon a lightly oiled baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap, and set in a warm, draft free place to rest for 15 minutes. Use as directed.

You know the funny thing about typing these recipes out after having cooked the recipe? I ALWAYS find things I neglected to do while I was cooking. What did I miss from this recipe? The salt...and I didn't let the dough rest for 15 minutes before loading it with toppings.

Alex and I got two personal pizza's each. I made a pesto margarita pizza and a three cheese sausage pizza. AWESOME! Alex made a sausage pizza and drizzled the some left over pepper soup over it. It seemed a little odd to me, but the taste was FABULOUS. Alex also made a margarita pizza, but put kalameta olives on it for salty goodness. Hmmmmm!