Frozen Pizza Made Real

It's been a long time since I posted... we had a bad gardening season last year, a pregnancy and then a spring birth. With our newest addition about 8 weeks old and getting ready to be baptized, we are finally starting to look at the garden and our kitchen as somewhere fun to go again.

We love pizza in this house. It is the comfort food of choice. Frozen pizza is uber-convenient but tasteless. Fresh uncooked pizza from the local establishment is great but heavy and pricey. Fresh, homemade pizza is wonderful but time consuming. Ultimately, in deference to cheap, quick and tasty we usually default to "Movie Store Pizza" more commonly known as Little Ceasar's (it shares a parking lot with Family Video). Cheap, quick and tasty, however is not health friendly and maybe not even as cheap as homemade done right.

In our search for a solution, we came up with a simple answer - make ahead and freeze home made pizza. To get it right, we stole from a variety of sources that have provided us with a very tasty and reasonably healthy option.

Process:

1. Make dough
2. Line a sheet tray or pizza pan with parchment paper or cooking spray (NOT WAX paper - it will burn)
3. "Seal the dough" by baking it at 500 degrees for 5 minutes.
4. Allow dough to cool
5. Make sauce (or buy your favorite jar/can)
6. Spray the dough with an olive oil based cooking spray or butter or something similar
7. "Dress" the pizza with home made sauce, cheese and toppings.
8. Cover with plastic wrap and freeze on pans/trays overnight.
9. Remove from trays; discard parchment paper
10. Set on something firm (like cardboard) and wrap in plastic wrap several times.
11. Store for up to 3-6 mos.

Because it is a bit of a production, we found recipes that would yield 8 pizzas. Take a look:

Favorite pizza dough - Jamie Oliver
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pizza-recipes/pizza-dough

Favorite pizza sauce recipe - from a blog called Annie's Eats
http://annies-eats.com/2009/07/23/pizza-sauce/

To bake the pizza, we put the frozen pizza in a cold oven. Turned on the heat to 400 and baked the pizza for 22-26 minutes until golden brown and crisp on the edges.

Deliciously easy!