Oh geeze, that was a long recover time. Alan Vandegrift here, finally being human again after Jon’s birthday party. You may remember Jon getting drunk off his ass at Oktoberfest, but that man is a drinking machine and hosted a birthday party in Leavenworth the day after.  While the rest of us mere mortals started trickling in for the party, Jon prepped the ingredients for tonight’s post: Do It Your Self Pizza. Or you know, Pizza.  

As with most events that Jon hosts, there has to be alliteration involved, so for his Pajamas and Pizza Birthday Party, myself and many of his friends journeyed to Leavenworth, to drink, party, and be merry in the most casual dress that you could possibly have.  But Jon knew that to have the pizza part be a success, he had to do a little prep work. See as I wasn’t there at the time, Jon?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Where am I? What’s happenin- Oh, hey Alan. I suppose I was summoned to explain something. Reading the post, reading the- aha! The Pizza dough. Yeah. So, it’s a make-ahead no-knead dough. All you do is get 7.5 cups of flour, a just over a tablespoon of salt, and some yeast, and mix it all together with 3 cups water. Toss it in a bowl, cover for 18 hours, tear into 5-6 even balls, and let sit for an hour at room temp to become pliable. Literally easier than pie.

Less appealing to the eye, however.

By the time the rest of us showed up the food was ready to be made. For meats we had sausage, pepperonis, and… two meats I don’t recall. Jon?

Proscuitto and hot Copacolla. Basically fancy hams. Because I’m a bougie bitch

For vegetables and fruits we had tomatoes, pineapples, roasted garlic, and caramelized onions. For Cheese, we had grated parmesan and mozzarella. Finally, we had for the sauces pesto, red, and white sauce.

Put your best Italian meats joke in the comments below!

Prepping the Preparations

Some of these ingredients required a small amount of prep, notably the roasted garlic. I had never done these before and didn’t even know that this was a possibility. Start by cutting off the top of a bulb of garlic so that the tops of all the cloves have been exposed. Wrap up the head into a small pouch of aluminum foil and dribble with some olive oil.

Giving that garlic head one last glimpse of sun light before sticking it into the 400 degree oven. That’s a bit morbid.

Close up the tin foil over the garlic so it looks like little metal garlic heads and put them into a 400 degree oven for about 10 min, easy as that. Roasted garlic is a lot mellower then regular garlic and as such will go a lot better with the other tastes on a pizza. One can just put whole cloves on their pizza or slice them up and sprinkle them on before cooking.

On to the pizza making! Take the lumps of dough that were prepared earlier and place them on a shallow cooking sheet. And spread them out into roughly a pizza shape. PUT OLIVE OIL ON THE PAN BEFORE HAND, or else your pizza will stick and not be very pizza like.

Very un-pizza like, you weren’t raised this way!

Once pizza done to desired specs, put into the oven at 350 degrees for about 10-12 min, or until the dough looks to be the desired amount of done.

Don’t pizza-shame the smaller one just because he isn’t round like the others! All pizza shapes are accepted here.

This whole approach is perfect for a small group event because everyone can make a pizza to their liking. We made 5 pizzas over the course of 2 hours and all of them were pretty darn good. You can use any toppings you want, the grocery store is the limit.

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Hello? Alan? Aw man, he just left me here. 

Well, as I'm the only one with the real pizza dough recipe, I guess it's up to me to tell you guys.

RECIPE

NO-KNEAD PIZZA DOUGH

Ingredients

7 1/2 cups all purpose flour

4 teaspoons salt

1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast

3 cups water

Preparation

1. Mix together everything but the water.

2. Add the water, and mix into a dough. Move to a clean bowl, and cover with a dish towel. Let sit for roughly 18 hours, until the dough's about doubled in size.

3. Pour into a floured surface, and separate into balls. You can either spread the ball out and cut it into 6 equal pieces that you then roll, or do what I do: just tear off chunks of dough that look about right, and ball them up. Let rest in ball form for an hour. Preferably wrapped, but as you may have guessed, cleanliness and containment aren't priorities for me.

4. Roll balls into 10-12"crusts and top.