Pizza at home

I wanted to start making bread about 18 months ago, but it seemed
pretty complicated. I found this pizza recipe on the inter-tubes
and seemed like a great way to start "baking" without feeling too
risky. Besides: home-made pizza in under an hour!

Quick-rise pizza dough
40 min prep time, 12 min cook time

1 package quick yeast
1 cup hot tap water
2 TB vegetable oil
1 TB honey
2.5 cups flour

* Mix yeast, water, oil and honey together
* Let set 5 min, yeast should begin to froth
* Add flour, stir in completely. You may need to flour your hands and
knead for a minute.
* Set dough to rise, 15-20 min
* During rise, prepare all ingredients for quick deployment
* Pre-heat oven to 450° while making pizzas (see below)
* Flour hands and rolling surfaces
* Split dough into 2 balls
* By hand or with roller, roll out two 10" rounds - thinner if you like
* Place rounds on baking sheet (see below)
* Top with ingredients (quickly, so the sauce doesn't make the dough too wet)
* Bake 12-15 minutes, until crust is golden and cheese is melted

Instead of cooking on a cold baking sheet, you could go the
fancy restaurant route. Say you've got a pizza stone pre-heating
in the oven (you should give the stone a full 30 min to get up
towards 450°, even if the oven reaches the correct temperature
faster), you can make the pizza and slide it onto the stone for
baking. It takes some practice to get these steps down, but
consider:

* Sprinkle baking sheet or pizza peel with corn meal
* Place 1 pizza round on corn meal
* Top the pizza with ingredients (quickly, so the sauce doesn't make
the dough too wet)
* Shove the pizza round into the oven and yank the sheet/peel out
from underneath so that the pizza slides off onto the center of
the baking stone. One quick, continuous motion to "flick" the pizza
off your delivery surface.
* Bake 10-12 minutes, until crust is golden and cheese is melted
(should bake a little faster with the hot stone)
* Prepare 2nd pizza towards the end of the 1st's baking cycle, repeat 

 

pizza stone, a tablet that you put in your oven to use as the baking surface for your bread/pizza/cookies/stuff. It gives a crispier crust than cooking on a cold baking sheet:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=pizza+stone&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8