The long awaited Pizza post

Its been a few months since I tried making pizza but let me write this lest I forget how I did it.

After my pizza failures, i tried making it 3 more times, talk about persistence, right? After my no-knead pizza failure, I began looking for another pizza crust recipe and found this by Heny Sison: http://www.yummy.ph/recipe/Pizza-Dough.  Seems easy enough.  

I used the bottom of a large clay pot to serve as my pizza stone since I didn't have one and I read somewhere that you can use clay tiles instead.  What I forgot to do, though, is preheat the pizza stone before topping the pizza with the sauce and dried meats.  Huge mistake!  Even after baking the pizza for 20 minutes, the middle part was really soggy that it fell apart when served.  Yikes!  I knew I had to repeat this the following week, I just can't let it defeat me, right? 


So, on with pizza 3 and 4. From previous pizza attempts I made the following adjustments:


1. Preheated the oven at 425- 450F.  (The recipe didn't set a time)
2. Preheated the pizza stone in the oven for 10 minutes before baking the crust on it.
3. Sprinkled some flour on the pizza stone if the crust is kinda moist.  This prevents the crust from sticking.
4. Parbaked the crust for 5 minutes in a preheated oven before smothering it with sauce and toppings.
5. Baked the pizza with the toppings for another 10 to 12 minutes.  Do not overbake.  
6. Spread some butter or oil to the crust before spreading the pizza sauce.  It makes the crust less prone to sogginess.
7. Used a different flour. For some reason, this pizza flour seems to work. Found it in a supermarket but I'm sure our usual all purpose flour will work too.

And here it is, after 4 tries, my thin crust pizza! 

I used the same tomato paste-based pizza sauce as in my earlier post, topped it with sliced bell peppers, mozzarella, basil leaves, canned mushrooms and sliced salame picante.  I made another pizza with the same toppings except I replaced the salame with slivers of bottled spanish sardine, a more healthy version but nonetheless flavorful.  Can't wait to try that one again.