Budget (Home Made) Pizza

Time for a confession - I'm a definite pizza fanatic. One of my first jobs was delivering pizzas, and through that I got to learn the pizza making process. If was also a money saver. During our first years of marriage, I was working part time, and with my wife's low income position (Office Junior) our combined income was around $20k per year. Pizza's that weren't fit for customer's consumption became a staple in our house for free meals!

Since that time, things have improved (thankfully)! Whenever we've travelled, sampling local pizza has always been a priority to me - along with other foods of course. A highlight was a few years ago when I was in Chicago and got to experience Chicago-style pizza at Pizzeria Due on the North Side. It's a deep pan pizza, but can not compare to Australian deep pan pizza.

I've previously come across a recipe for a Chicago-style pizza dough, and have made it before with moderate levels of success. Today I thought that I'd give it another go. From a budget perspective, I made two pizzas for maybe around $4 using the following ingredients.Plus added water...

I deviated from the recipe a little, but basically started with activating the yeast by adding to warm water and sugar. If you do that a few minutes before combining with the flour, salt and cornflour, then you end up with a a foamy mix of water and yeast.


By gradually adding the liquid ingredients to the mix, you end up with your dough. It's still not perfectly mixed, but a few minutes of kneading the dough helps with that process. Then you simply roll into a ball and leave for an hour approximately until the dough ball is roughly double in size.
Strictly, this recipe makes one base, but for the sake of spreading the dough a little further, it is more than satisfactory if you half the dough and make two bases. They still ended up almost a centimetre (a third of an inch) thick. After splitting in half, roll the doughs out to slightly larger than the pan, as they will shrink a little. I also pinch the edges, which helps form a great crust (poke the base with a fork a bit so that it doesn't rise or bubble too much also).
Parbake the bases for around 5 minutes in a hot (220C) oven, and then you can get the toppings on. True Chicago-style pizza toppings would be easiest to describe as being and upside down pizza on a pie - it's literally like the cheese and toppings are on the base, then the sauce (which is like a napolitana sauce on the top. While the sauce is quite "wet" compared to regular pizza sauce, it really combines well with the pizza dough soaking up the moisture. If I haven't done it justice in this description - you'll have to go to Chicago to experience it yourself!

The pizzas I made today were fairly straight forward. One bacon and pineapple for the kids, and one with bacon, chicken, onion and avocado for the parents. A fantastic meal, and there's leftovers for lunch tomorrow. Plus, it was only $4, not $12-15 per pizza that we would have paid tonight in town.