My First Pizza: A Big Sucess Through Many Small Disasters!

Pizza-something I was planning to prepare for like forever. But I'd never thought I would just jump into it without any preparation. A couple of days ago I went to the nearest store, picked up yeast and green bell peppers and got started.

Well, there are more than a thousand articles in the internet on pizza recipes, so I'm not going to give you another long, boring description of my one. Rather I'm going to tell you the story behind making this pizza.

I just woke up one day and decided, "Yes. I'll make the pizza tomorrow". I went to a nearby store, where they had dry yeast bottled up. I picked up one, but there was a girl there (sales promoter should be the right word I guess) who told us (my mom was with me) that there was a better pack of yeast and handed us a packet with Chinese letters all over it. Although we had never used it before, we thought of giving it a try. We always buy things from there and the things are always good. So I didn't bother looking for the manufacture date, etc. After coming back, when I was taking all the goods out, I noticed two dates (in English, thank God!) at the lower back of the small packet.

1/1/2010

1/1/2012

I returned to the store and complained about it, and they agreed to change it. But the stupid girl there wasn't actually ready to accept the fact that the product had actually crossed the limit of its expiry date. She kept on saying that I was supposed to use it till 24 months after 1/1/2012. I didn't know whether to laugh or argue on my support!

The next day, at about noon, I started preparing the dough. By the way it was going to be a pan pizza since I still don't own an oven of my own. I googled for a recipe and picked the first one that came on the search list (now I wish I hadn't! I usually prefer Allrecipes.com for recipes). The recipe was for two 10-12 inch pizzas. Now came the moment of calculation. Being extremely weak in math, I was pretty sure my calculation would go wrong. And it did. God knows why I didn't jot down the measurements! My pan was going to yield a pizza of about 8-inch diameter. So basically I was supposed to take 1/4th of each ingredient given in the recipe. Instead, I took everything as my heart wished and messed everything up. My dough had 1 cup of warm water with yeast in it (the recipe said 1.5 cups for two 10'' pizzas!), 1.5 cups of flour (recipe said 3.5 for two), 1 tsp of soya bean oil (recipe said 2 tsp of olive oil for two, I had forgotten about olive oil until just before I started my work), a pinch of sugar and 1/4 tsp of salt. I mixed everything, and the dough was all sticky. Mom started giving me looks.

I mixed flour with it again and again, but after kneading for two minutes the dough would become sticky again! This continued for about half an hour, and I gave up hope. By that time the dough was less sticky. It looked something like this:

Sorry about the work station, it just went all messy after pouring the yeast mix.
After about four hours, it looked just the same! I was very disappointed.

Mom kept saying that I hadn't done all the steps properly (I knew it in my heart, too). Oh well. She helped me to roll it and put it on the pan. I chose green bell peppers and tomatoes for topping and also prepared some chicken. I used plain cheese (neither mozzarella nor processed, actually I don't know what it should be called, we call it 'cheese', just 'cheese') for the pizza:

I didn't have any pizza sauce. At first I though I would make some before starting the pizza. But I was in such a hurry that I forgot about it and had to use tomato ketchup:

After preparing everything I put them all on the pizza (with the cheese) and then it was sent on the stove again:

I think it took about 20 minutes to be cooked. The cheese was melted well. It was only then I discovered that I could actually put some more cheese on it. Finally the pizza looked like this:

The crust was so crispy that it felt like a biscuit! Still my parents and my brother praised the cooking. One of my friends tasted a piece and didn't say anything either. I know it's because they love me and they don't like to see me getting hurt. But I've actually promised to myself that my pizza will be way better than this one the next time. At least I can try to make it better.