Dinnercraft helps bring your (and our) protracted adolescence to an end. Our authors cover topics ranging from cooking and eating, to home and garden, to crafting and DiY, and all the rest of the things you find yourself caring about these days.
NY-Style White Pizza
If you come from a pizza-snobby place, like New York or New Haven, and have since moved away, chances are one of the following has happened:
- You have given up on eating pizza, preferring instead to cherish your memories
- You have found yourself eating an appalling amount of Domino’s
- You eat a lot of frozen pizza, and feel bad about yourself for eating what amounts to a big cracker with some goo on it.
Since we left New York, we explored each of these options, before finally settling comfortably into the first category. We have recently begun exploring a new option, and would like to develop the idea, in this article.
In particular, we were missing the NYC-Style White Pizza, which, while it is available in a lot of places, is never quite right. We wanted to take a stab at making it, ourselves. When making pizza from scratch, the first order of business (and the trickiest) is getting the crust right. Articles about achieving the perfect pizza crust abound. We still haven’t gotten it quite right, but our version is close.
Ingredients:
- .25 oz. pkt. active dry yeast
- 1/4 tsp. granulated sugar
- 3/4 cup warm water
- 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 1 tsp. olive oil
- A big bag of cheap shredded mozzarella
- A container of ricotta cheese
- Oregano (to taste)
Combine first three ingredients in a bowl; let stand for 8 minutes to allow yeast to activate. Add flour and salt, and knead for a few minutes on a floured surface. The dough should not be sticky…add more flour as needed, until the dough becomes easy to work with. If possible, let dough rise in refrigerator overnight. Otherwise, allow to rise at room temperature for at least an hour.
Lightly oil a baking sheet or pizza pan with 1/2 the olive oil, and flatten the dough into a 12-inch circle, working from the inside, out. Turn your oven as high as it will go (probably somewhere around 500 degrees). Rub the crust with the other 1/2 teaspoon of olive oil, and cover in mozarella cheese. Dollop with as much (or as little) ricotta cheese as you like, and, in order to avoid eating only white things, sprinkle with dried oregano. Bake until cheese starts to brown, about 8-10 minutes, depending on your oven.
Want the real deal? I can teach you how to build a brick pizza/bread oven if you can obtain two deliveries of brick and mortar. My fingers are numb just thinking about it.