I live in a neighborhood where there's decent pizza on nearly every block. But the best pizza in my neighborhood comes from my own kitchen, from the hands of my husband and our three-year-old son, Sam.
Sam loves pizza, which puts him in a group with nearly every other kid in America. (Pizza Hut alone sells 1.3 million pizzas a day worldwide, and the National Frozen Pizza Institute says pizza has replaced hot dogs as kids' top meal choice.) But the ones he loves best are the ones he has a hand in making.
"You want pizza? I'm your man," he says, misquoting a book called SAM'S PIZZA by David Pelham (Dutton). It's the story of a boy who tops pizzas with toads, eels, bees and other icky creatures.
We can, of course, get pizza by picking up the phone. But satisfying the urge for a hot crust topped with tomatoes and cheese needn't depend on takeout or delivery. You and your kids will get more from one that you make yourself--if not from scratch, then with refrigerated dough, prepared pizza shells, pitas or tortillas. Even an English muffin with pizza toppings makes an appealing lunch, one that's ready by the time the children have hung up their coats and washed their hands.
I know because our family--Sam, his one-year-old brother, Galen, and their parents--decided to try them all and see which was best. To make the competition fair, we gave all the pies the same tomato-cheese topping.
The good news was that we ate everything we baked. Nothing tasted bad. But what could taste bad covered with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce?
Pita, English muffin and tortilla pizzas, we agreed, are OK when the pie is a quick lunch or snack, but they just can't compete with honest-to-goodness pizzas in taste. On the plus side, they're inexpensive, super-quick and require no special equipment. We could even make them in the toaster oven--if we had a toaster oven.
Prepared pizza shells or focaccia baked with pizza topping tasted good, we all thought. They, too, are fast--a few minutes to put together, 10 minutes to cook--and require no special equipment. But three individual-size Boboli pizza shells cost $3 at my supermarket.
At first, Sam liked our experiment with refrigerated pizza dough in a tube. "The can popped; I heard it. Cool," he said. But at the table, he decided that our homemade crust tasted better. We all agreed. And while tube pizza was simple to make, one 12-inch can of Pillsbury pizza dough cost $2.29.
Many supermarkets and specialty stores sell frozen pizza dough, enough for two pizzas: It costs $1.69 in my market. And many pizza restaurants will sell you the dough. Just ask.
In fact, our trial of almost-homemade pizzas found them all to be quick, simple and satisfying.
Ah, but real homemade pizza is bliss.
Here's how it's done in our house: On many Friday nights, Sam climbs up on a red kitchen chair pushed up to a counter so he can work side by side with his father. He adds the packet of yeast and a bit of sugar to warm water, and he and Mitchell watch the roiling and bubbling. "Look Mom, the yeast is starting to work," he says.
Sam stirs in the flour until the dough gets too stiff and then Mitchell takes over. They knead the dough on a big wooden board, the same one my grandmother used every morning to knead bread dough on her farm.
With help from his father, Sam pushes the dough with his palm. "We go like this. It helps the dough get all stretchy," Mitchell says. "We knead the dough and the dough needs us."
They talk about how there's yeast in bread and beer and pizza, and how the little ball of dough they make will grow to a big ball in about an hour. Sam says, "In my heart I say, 'Is it magical?'" Of course it is, even though it's science, not magic.
Our homemade pizza takes 90 minutes from start to table and takes even less time when we make the dough in advance and freeze it. If we take it out of the freezer in the morning, it will have risen by dinner, which makes it a great choice for casual company. The dough we make from scratch is cheap, with enough yeast--the costliest ingredient--for two 12-inch pizzas costing 60 cents.
And it's always good, thanks in part to a couple of inexpensive and easy tricks.
As with any food you cook, the quality of the ingredients dictates the quality of the finished dish. I make and freeze tomato sauce every summer using fresh, organic tomatoes. We also freeze baby-food jars of basil pureed with a touch of olive oil. The mozzarella cheese is made daily by Sal, the owner of a little neighborhood Italian food store.
The second trick is to bake the pizza on ceramic tiles. You can buy a pizza stone in gourmet stores or, for a fraction of the cost, you can buy a few porous tiles from a tiling shop. In either case, place the stone or tiles in the oven while it heats, and cook the pizza directly on them. A pizza paddle--a long-handled wooden shovel--helps us transfer the dough to the stone. While cookie sheets do work, the crusts are far less crisp and taste less like pizza-parlor dough.
Whether almost homemade or homemade, I've found that making pizza is affordable, nutritious, delicious and not too difficult. But I get more than that from these pizza pies. I get to watch two of the most important males in my life work and laugh and create together.
Mary MacVean has recently moved from New York City to Moscow, where she says it's not easy to find good pizza.
