PRETTY LITTLE THINGS

Living in Italy, one would suppose that I'm surrounded by innumerate occasions to eat good pizza. Unfortunately, Rome is full of mediocre pizza, and finding a really good one is quite an challenge. You're best off buying it at the small standing-in pizzerias where they sell lot of types by weight. Spending around 8 euro, you can sample around 4 pieces with different toppings.
But when I'm not into eating out, I like making pizza at home. It's cheap and tasty, and good girl as I am I will even share my treasured never-fail pizza recipe with you.

You start with this:
325 ml water
4 Tbsp olive oil
500 g bread flour
1/2 tsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 packet dry yeast

Dump it all into the bread machine choosing the pizza-sycle (1,5 hours). (of course you can make it without bread machine, too. Dissolve yeast in a bit if warm water knead all the ingredient for about 10 min, until you've a smooth elastic dough. Put into a lightly oiled bowl, cower with a towel and let rise in a warm place for about 1 hour)

Go on to prepare the toppings and the sauce.
For the sauce, you will need about half a liter of plain tomato sauce, in Italy it's called "passata di pomodoro", basically it's just pureed canned tomatoes with a bit of salt. Add some olive oil, salt, a bit of sugar and a bit of dry oregano. Done.

Now shred your mozarella. You don't want to waste your good stuff on the pizza - it will be too watery. Use the dryest kind you can find, and pat the moisture with a paper towel. Shred it or cut into little cubes.

Preheat your skillet.

By now your dough shouldbe ready. Pour it onto your well floured working surface and divide it into 5 pieces (makes medium-sized pizza).



Roll out the dough to fit your skillet. Dust the skillet with flour, put the dough disk inside, smear with the sauce, top with mozarella.

It will look like this:




Put lid on top and lower the flame:


Cook for about 5-7 minutes, taking care not to burn the undreside too much (a bit charred is ok, though, it gives it the "real" pizza touch.

When it's ready, put other toppings - here I used basilikum and prosciutto - and enjoy :)