Day 39-- An un-recipe for homemade margarita pizza

This entry is a step-by-step process of fucking up a homemade margarita pizza via the Margarita Pizza recipe in What to Cook and How to Cook It.

Prologue:

I am a pizza addict.  I eat a slice of cheese pizza at least once a week, at my worst, 4 times a week.  So when I saw the homemade pizza recipe in What to Cook and How to Cook It I knew exactly what I wanted to make for dinner.  Let me tell you this: the best and only good part of this recipe was the thought of it while driving to the grocery store.  It was all downhill to shit from there.

Homemade Margarita Pizza

Step 1.) Ingredients:

WAY TOO EXPENSIVE.  The cheese alone cost me $11, the pepperoni about $3, the unneeded tomatoes about $2.50, and luckily I have a basil plant otherwise that would have added another $2.50.  So, before you've even started cooking you need to buy $19 worth of perishable items. 

Not worth it. And let's hope you already own flour [more on that in a sec] ($4) and tomato sauce ($1.50) and spices.  All in all, this dish cost me roughly $25 to make a crappy pizza

But it is here that the most egregious mistake was made.  The recipe called for bread flour.  I had no idea what that meant and Von's sure as fuck didn't carry it.  So I bought all-purpose flour.  Apparently there is a huge difference in the proteins of bread flour which interact better with the yeast to become more elastic and grow better = a better pizza 

After some fact checking, the only store in the San Diego area that carries bread flour is Williams-Sonoma ($12), and their bread flour is purposely designed for bread machines so I'm not even sure that would work. 

Directions:  

This recipe called for the dough to rest 10 minutes before kneading, and an hour to rise, plus almost 15 minutes to flatten it out to a pie shape.  If it tasted good, maybe this time would be worth it.  IT WAS NOT WORTH MY TIME.

Review:

Just awful.  Okay, the cheese and basil and pepperoni were tasty, but the dough killed the whole thing.  The crust was as flat and tasteless as a hospital cracker.  Utterly terrible.  Once again, use bread flour.

Actually, don't make it at all.  For $25 and an hour and a half of your time you can go out to a spiffy pizza restaurant and have not only an excellent night, but an excellent dinner as well.