Pizza Stone

Although we've started making bread in our dutch oven, I still yearned for a bread stone since it would be more versatile method of baking.  The problem is that they're usually ridiculously over-priced and we haven't been able to find any quarry stones at the local hardware stones to use.  However, we luckily stumbled upon a pizza stone at Wegmans for only fifteen bucks, so we finally took the bait.

For its inaugural run, we decided to make pizza.  We've never made truly home-made pizza before so we were pretty excited.  I found an easy pizza dough recipe.  We whipped up a quick sauce from scratch and cut up some toppings (my wife prefers supreme pizza, so we prepared some italian sausage, pepperoni, red onions, mushrooms, and cheese).  After letting the dough rise twice, we started rolling it out which ended up being a little harder than I expected.  I think the dough was a little too wet  to handle and it was hard to stretch the dough out and get it as thin as we wanted.  We spread the sauce on and put the toppings on (under the cheese, which I like) and it looked good to go.

At first everything looked good...

Unfortunately, I guess we didn't think the process all the way through.  We didn't have an easy way to transfer the pizza onto the hot pizza stone in the oven.  The dough was too sticky and flexible to pick up easily and we didn't have a large paddle.  The results were pretty ugly.  We eventually had to fold it over to get it onto a large cutting board and then toss and unroll it back onto the pizza stone (maybe we should have just settled for a calzone).  We baked it for about 20 minutes at 450 degrees Fahrenheit but even that was a little too long and the pizza came out over cooked.  Despite all that, it turned out okay.  The crust ended up being a little too thick and chewy, but the bottom was definitely crispy from the pizza stone.  I think the next time we'll definitely aim for a thinner crust and maybe more healthy toppings... 

The final product, not too shabby...