Until probably a few years ago, I had never made a homemade pizza.  It seemed terribly difficult but really, I just never thought much about it.

Now that I have made lots and lots of pizzas, I wish I could convey to everyone how easy it is to make a homemade pizza.  Through the years I’ve tried a lot of pizza crust recipes and while all of them were great, this is my current favorite.

For my sauce, I simply dump a quart of my home canned tomatoes into a pot, add a little brown sugar, a little garlic, use my stick blender to grind up all the tomatoes. Then I add a little oregano, Italian herbs, fennel . . whatever spices you like. I simmer it on high til it’s as thick as I want it to be.  So easy!

I think that the pizza pan has as much to do with a successful pizza as does the recipe.  When I first began making pizza, I used a regular solid bottom pizza pan.  It worked fine.

Then I graduated to a pizza peel and a pizza stone.  That worked but . . I lived in MO and I had two ovens.  I keep the pizza stone in the wall oven because I mostly used my regular “under the stove” oven.  We moved here and I have one oven and a tiny little kitchen.  Storing the peel was an issue.  There’s no way I can leave the stone in the oven.  Too often I have something on both racks in my oven.  The stone is heavy and fragile and I didn’t like having to let it cool in the oven after using it, then taking it out and putting it away.

Not long ago, when I should have been knitting or sewing, I was researching pizza pans.  I came across this one.  Anything that has 200+ reviews, and 190 of them are 5 star ratings, that’s coming home with me.  I’m telling you  . . I LOVE this pan!  It was pre-seasoned and it does not stick one bit!  When I oil it, I oil it heavily.  There’s not oil puddling but it’s definitely not dry.  This makes the crust kind of crunchy on the bottom, almost like a toasted cheese sandwich.

Start with the crust.

I bake it for 8 minutes at 450º, just as the instructions recommend.

After it’s baked those 8 minutes, I let it cool for a few minutes, the put the sauce on it.

Then the other topping ingredients are added.

Then it bakes til the cheese is melted and the pepperoni and Canadian bacon are hot.

That, my friends, is a perfect pizza made in a perfect pizza pan!

I have no idea how much it costs to make a homemade pizza.  The crust basically takes 2-1/2 cups of flour, a tiny bit of yeast, some sourdough.  The sauce comes from a jar of home grown, home canned tomatoes.  The cheese was one bag of Great Value (Wal-Mart) mozzarella, I used half a bag of Canadian bacon and half a bag of turkey pepperoni so there’s enough of each of those for another large pizza.  I can tell you that it costs a fraction of buying a pizza and unless you have a good pizza establishment near you, it’s a whole lot better than most pizzas you can buy already made.