Pizza pizza pizza

Well, here it is! Pizza.
A while back, I received a request for a homemade pizza entry from my friend, Ryan from In Search of the Perfect Pie, a lovely pizza blog.  I decided to go easy on this one, and make something fairly simple. This is why I chose to use pre-made pizza dough (from Trader Joe's). Let it be known that certain people may not like whole wheat crust, I, however, have nothing against whole wheat anything! So, I used Trader Joe's whole wheat pre-made pizza dough. If you don't like whole wheat pizza crust, feel free to use the white variety.
I definitely plan on making my own pizza dough in the future for y'all, just haven't had the time yet. 
Hope you enjoy:

Kind-of-Caprese-Pizza

Caprese typically consists of mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I had all of these ingredients and added onions and sundried tomatoes (ooohhh!)  

You'll need:
flour to sprinkle work surface
One package of Trader Joe's [whole wheat] pizza dough
2 tomatoes
1 small red onion/shallot
2-4 oz. of mozzarella cheese (depends on how cheesey you like it)
About 3 tbs fresh basil (5 or 6 big leaves)
3-4 sun dried tomatoes, cut into strips
olive oil
2 tbs corn meal
garlic salt
pepper

First thing's first: take the dough out of the refrigerator, sprinkle your clean work area with flour, and form a neat little ball of dough. Let it hang out there and come to room temperature for at least 20 minutes.
While that's hanging out, you can do some of your other prep work. Preheat the oven to 450º (500º is even better if your oven will go that high) and chop the tomatoes as thin as possible. Do the same to the red onion. Cut the mozzarella into slices (I used low moisture mozzarella for this, but you could use the fresh kind that's stored in the tubs of water or maybe even shredded) and rip the basil into pieces.

Once the dough has done its time, either hand stretch (I'm terrible at this) or use a rolling pin to make it into a circle/blob shape that is roughly 12 inches in diameter. Try to keep the thickness fairly consistent if you can. Mine ended up being around 13 inches with a wide variety of thicknesses... but oh well. Now, if you have a pizza stone, by all means, use it. Otherwise, you can do what I did: take a large baking sheet and line it with parchment paper. Sprinkle some cornmeal onto the parchment paper (trust me, you want the parchment paper and corn meal. The last time I tried this without the paper or cornmeal, the pizza literally stuck itself to the baking sheet. No fun.) Sprinkle a tad more cornmeal onto the rolled out dough, and flop it (cornmeal-side-down) onto the lined baking sheet. Next, drizzle the dough with olive oil, add salt and pepper, and lay down the tomatoes in one rough layer (a little overlapping is okay). Salt and pepper again!

Add the tomatoes, onion, cheese, sundried tomatoes, and basil on top of the dough like so:

Now you're ready to stick this baby into the oven! Put it in there for 15-20 minutes or until the cheese is nice and bubbly-golden brown and amazing. Horray! Easy, fast, amazing, pizza!

 

yuuummmmm. This recipe is really simple, and I'm sure there are variations of this floating around somewhere... these flavors are such a classic combination that is sure to please. Give it a try!


Foodie foodie!