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Surely there is no take away food as versatile and acceptable as pizza. With just one word, and a phone call, you can feed a hungry horde and everyone can get something that suits them. From the meat lovers to the vegetarian, to those that hate anchovies and those that have really bad taste – there is a topping that suits. 

It’s just a really convenient catering option for those informal moments – no need for cutlery, just grab a slice and a napkin then get ready to watch the game. And it’s still good, if not better, the next day.

You don’t even need to leave the house to get your food (which we can all agree is an awesome idea, right?). 

A few weeks ago, on the Friday ‘Master Class’ on MasterChef they showed how to make a basic pizza dough. This was the basis of the recipe I used to make mine. I planned to make 3 kinds of pizza for 9 people – Ham & Pineapple, BBQ Meat Lovers, and then a mix of ingredients as suggested by my cousin. But firstly, the dough: 

Ingredients 

• 400ml lukewarm water
• 14g fresh yeast or 1 x 7g sachet of dried yeast (I used dried)
• 15g caster sugar
• 700g flour, plus extra for dusting
• 30g table salt
• 60ml extra virgin olive oil
• 50ml milk

Start with the yeast and a few table spoons of water in a bowl. Mix it up with your fingers until you have a nice paste formed, and then add in the caster sugar and the rest of the water and mix it all up. You’ll have a mixture that looks something like unsafe drinking water.  

In a different bowl, sift in some flour and add the salt. You could use a mixer with a dough hook here as the MC recipe suggests. I decided to do it by hand though to make it feel more authentic. Or because I really could not be bothered trying to find a mixer and dough hook. Seriously – there needs to be a word for when you are too lazy to choose the easy option (my wife suggested ‘stupidity’).

Add in the yeast mixture and begin combining all the ingredients. When the dough has just formed, add in your milk and olive oil. You’ll have, like the picture below, something that looks and feels disgusting.

It is a good idea to dust your hands with flour before starting this part too, as here is where it got trickier for me when trying to mix and knead the dough by hand. The dough will be elastic and sticky at the same time, and you’ll be tempted to add more and more flour to make it closer to what you expect the dough to feel like. What you should do is just keep working the dough – in the bowl, and then later out on a bench that has been dusted with flour. Keep folding it over, grinding the dough into the bench and into itself over and over again. Eventually you’ll see all the ingredients come together and firm up into a very elastic play-doh. It won’t stick to your hands any longer, and you’ve just about finished the hard labour part of the pizza. Remember – if in doubt, work the dough some more.

The recipe calls for 120g chunks of dough to be used per pizza base. I didn’t have a set of scales on hand, so I just split the dough into 5 pieces. Not exactly the same size, but it really doesn’t matter too much as the irregularities don’t affect the taste of the end product and can add some character.

The dough takes a siesta

You now need to leave your dough to ‘prove’ or rise. I’m told this lets the yeast breathe and produce carbon dioxide with creates the aerated, fluffy dough needed. Whatever – the dough balls get bigger, that’s all you need to know. Find a warm dry place and let the dough rest for at least 45 minutes.

After 2 minutes

After 30 minutes

After 80 minutes

While it is resting, you can begin prepping your toppings. Chop up everything you need and pre-cook any ingredients you think might need it. We cooked some bacon and polish sausage in the pan first just to make sure they were cooked through when the pizza was baked.

When you are ready, start stretching the dough out over your dusted trays. I used a normal pizza tray and a pizza stone to see what difference they would make. I started with the largest dough ball, and was very surprised how small a base it made when I tried to stretch it into a circle with my fingers. After a while, I relented and got the rolling-pin out. Don’t be worried about that at all; the end result was still a good base and certainly wasn’t paper-thin or anything like that. They won’t puff up as much as the ones I did by hand, but that again may be a personal choice for some.

Having the base circular really doesn’t matter either. If we only had square trays, then we would have made square pizzas.

The ham and pineapple pizza kind of speaks for itself toping wise. For the sauce, I just used tomato sauce with some added herbs, which horrified some members of our office. Feel free to make your own; that’s what is so great about pizza. Whatever you like, throw it on there! Just don’t over load it otherwise your dough will not cook properly.

The BBQ Meat lovers contained ham, bacon, polish sausage, chicken, mushroom, onion and of course BBQ sauce, plus a few herbs and spices I found in the cupboard. We used mozzarella cheese to cover the tops.

The final type, the Cousin’s Creation, had spinach leaves, red onion, mushrooms, chicken, bacon, garlic, cherry tomatoes and mozzarella cheese. The base was just brushed with olive oil.

Throw them in the oven and just keep an eye on them for when they are cooked. The outside edges of the base should turn a nice brown colour, and that will let you know when they are ready – as this picture clearly doesn’t show.

Yes, the first few we pulled from the oven a little too early. By the 4th or 5th pizza (of decreasing sizes) we started to get the hang of it. We were so worried about letting them burn that we didn’t leave them in long enough – but only slightly. Maybe a minute extra would have been enough.

In the end though, we had some pretty tasty pizza that suited the horde. For someone who has never made dough or pasta by hand before, I had a real sense of achievement and pride in the final dough that I had been wrestling with for the previous 15 minutes. It looked like I thought it should, felt authentic and smelt like I had hoped. When we realised the dough didn’t make bases as large as we expected, I made a second batch. We ended up storing about half of the second batch in the freezer for use another time.

It is amazingly simple, and the mistakes we made would be just as simple to correct the next time around.