Homemade Pizza With Linguica & Olives

One thing that was great about living in New York was the price of pizza. I would say that the average price for a large pizza costs about 13 dollars. In Sacramento, it's at least double! Is the cost of mozzarella and tomato sauce so much more out here compared to back east? Nope, it's actually cheaper. So what gives? It's like one of those traffic mystery spots where everybody slows down at the same time and all of a sudden you're stuck for 30 minutes and have no idea why.

I suspect it's due to the difference in culture and the lack of competition that pizza is so expensive. In California a pizza costs $25 bucks... but a taco is only 50 cents so I guess it evens out. Doesn't mean that I enjoy paying out the ying yang for something that is dirt cheap to make. Why bother, you can make your own? Besides, you should see what passes for pizza out here. I've only found a handful of good pizzerias in Sacramento. If you know of a good one, please let me know

This pizza recipe is really easy to pull off. Here's what you need for the dough.

2 and a half teaspoons of active dry yeast
1 teaspoon of sugar
1 cup of warm water
1 and a half cups of all purpose flour or bread flour
1 cup of Semolina flour
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 and quarter teaspoons of salt

We preheat the oven to 400. While that's going, grab a bowl and mix your yeast, water and sugar. The yeast is gonna react with the sugar and water and do what it does for about 10 minutes. It smells kind of funky to me to tell you the truth. After the yeast mixture gets kind of creamy we stir in the flour, salt and oil. Then we beat the whole mixture until it's nice and smooth. And then... well we leave it alone for a lil while and do something else because the dough is tired and needs to rest. Just kidding, but really it needs to settle a bit before you start shaping it into a pizza.

We then start making our pizza sauce. A can of tomato sauce, a can of paste, some red wine (optional), garlic salt, pizza seasoning, and cook on low heat for about 5 minutes. Just about enough time for our dough to settle. You can also put in some fresh herbs like basil, oregano, or just some Italian Seasoning mix, whatever you like. After it settles you have to knead the dough for a couple minutes to get it elastic enough to work with. So we dust our surface with some flour and work the dough out a lil bit and then roll and rub it into a round pizza onto our lightly greased pizza pan.

We spread mozzarella cheese, sliced linguica, and olives on our pizza. At the last minute I got some inspiration to slice up some left over sausage balls Mikie made as an appetizer the day before and put that on as well. We bake it until golden brown for about 15 minutes or so and then it's ready. It's a pretty simple recipe and it costs about 3 bucks to make. We buy alot of our ingredients in bulk at Winco so it's actually cheap to make. Stuff like sugar, salt, yeast, flour, spices, are all things we can buy at the Bulk section. Do what we do, buy cheap ingredients, make your own and tell Round Table to go scratch their butt.