Homemade Pizza - 3 Ways

An easy thing to make for dinner is homemade pizza. It cooks quickly, you don't have to have a ton of ingredients, and you can buy pizza dough at the store. It's also an easy way to get rid of some pantry jars of stuff to put on your pizza, such as olives, artichoke hearts, anchovies!?, pizza sauce/tomato sauce, whatever you want.

A local grocery store, carries frozen and fresh pizza dough, so we occasionally grab one, freeze it, and then defrost it the day before I want to make it. At first, I was trying to top the dough on a cookie sheet, and then trying to move it over to a pizza stone preheating in the oven. It's impossible. You can flour it, put olive oil on it, but it doesn't matter. It always seems to be too heavy to move easily without just stretching out the dough. So I've learned to just get over it, and cook it on the cookie sheet. I cook these at 500 degrees, for 10-15 minutes.

This was before it went in the oven. Here are the ingredients in order I added them: olive oil, tomato sauce, red pepper flakes, dried oregano, salt, parmesan cheese, fresh mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, and half artichoke hearts. 

As you can see, the basil got kind of fried, so I recommend adding it in the last few minutes of cooking time, or just adding it after it comes out of the oven. This first style was very good, simple and classic.

Here's my 2nd way, ingredients were: olive oil, half pizza sauce, half garlic ranch sauce (bought from the store), red pepper flakes, dried oregano, parmesan, red onions, fresh mozzarella cheese, half artichoke hearts and fresh basil. As you can see, this is right around when our basil plant started dying, so there weren't many leaves to pick for this pizza.

For the 3rd way, I decided to split the dough into 2 pizzas. This one was, olive oil, pizza sauce, red pepper flakes, dried oregano, parmesan cheese, monterey jack cheese, red onions, tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese.

The 2nd half of the dough was all the same, just the garlic ranch sauce instead of pizza sauce. 

I really liked the ones with the garlic ranch sauce. I found it with the pizza dough and the store had some fresh packages of pizza ingredients, like pepperoni, pizza sauce, and the ranch sauce. I highly recommend trying to make pizza at home. It's so easy, and it turns out delicious!