Mushrooms, arugula, red onion and mozzarella come together with [gasp!] ready made dough for this Mostly Wild Mushroom Pizza, about as fast as delivery. Recipe below.

Let me start with a confession. This is the first pizza I’ve ever made. We love pizza, and Marion occasionally makes it, always a treat. But mostly when we want pizza, we order out. That’s because when we think of having it, it’s often either [a.] close enough to dinner that we don’t have the time or patience to make pizza dough or [b.] a weeknight and we’ve been at work all day, which means see [a.].

So when I was invited to test a ready-to-bake thin crust pizza dough, Pillsbury® Thin Crust Pizza Crust, I jumped at the chance. It’s not that I’m afraid of making pizza dough [okay, well maybe I am just a little]; it’s more that I hate to plan ahead. And even though pizza dough is decidedly unfinicky and nonfragile, unlike many bread doughs, there’s also a bit of the pain-in-the-ass factor at play here, at least for me.

But if someone else were to make the dough and I was free to concentrate on the toppings, I would be intrigued. And I was. I was even further intrigued by the fact that this was thin crust dough. Despite Chicago’s reputation as a deep dish town, there’s an ever-growing contingent that prefers thin crust. Count me in that group.

Okay, so I had some dough to play with, courtesy of Pillsbury. [Full disclosure time: They sent me the pizza crust dough for free, and that’s how I’m reviewing this product, for free.] Now I had to figure out what I wanted to do with it. First, I nosed around Deb’s excellent Smitten Kitchen archives. Deb loooves pizza and shares great ideas for making it on her blog from time to time. I’ll include links to some great tips she has in the Kitchen Notes below. You’ll find more about how the pizza dough performed there too.

Next I hit the library. I came away with a few books on pizza, including one by noted Italian chef Wolfgang Puck. But the one I gravitated to and learned the most from was a practical little volume, stuffed with recipes, helpful tips and gorgeous photographs, called Pizza! It’s by two London-based food writers, Pippa Cuthbert [by way of New Zealand] and Lindsay Cameron Wilson [by way of Canada]. They talk about equipment, give recipes for various doughs [and yes, I will make my own at some point] and devote an entire chapter to classic pizza recipes. And then they take off in many directions, just as pizza itself has done.

Reading through numerous recipes in Pizza!, I came up with lots of ideas to try. More important, I got a good sense of basic techniques for working with topping ingredients and the encouragement to experiment. Continue reading “Homemade pizza, quick enough for a weeknight” →