Free Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza by Curtis Ide

the garlic and impart a sweet, nutty garlic flavor to the olive oil. You can save the oil for use in dough or for brushing the center and edges of the crust before or after baking. You can place the garlic cloves on a pizza whole, mashed with a soft cheese like goat cheese, or served with cheese and crackers as an appetizer. If you prefer, you may leave the garlic cloves in the olive oil, add your choice of herbs, or add re hydrated, sun-dried tomatoes to give it even more flavor.
     
    You should strain out any impurities and then store the olive oil at room temperature because olive oil coagulates when stored in the refrigerator. If you leave any garlic cloves, sun-dried tomatoes, etc. in the olive oil, make sure that the oil completely covers them, or they may get moldy.
     

Herbs
     
    Use dried or fresh herbs, whichever you prefer. Many of the Italian or pizza herb blends are very good. Most of the recipes in this book call for dried herbs due to their wide availability. You can certainly substitute fresh herbs; they can add a nice dash to a recipe because of their fresh, robust taste.
     
    Since dried herbs have more concentrated flavor, you need two to three times as much of most fresh herbs to get a similar flavor as the dried herbs listed in the recipe. In this book, unless the recipe has specifically said to use a fresh herb, the quantity listed gives the amount of dried herbs to use.
     

Liquids
     
    Most of the pizza dough recipes in this book call for water as the primary liquid ingredient; it works well without imparting any extra flavor to the dough. If you think this is boring or too limiting, you can really use almost any liquid in the dough, so go ahead, and experiment. The liquid you choose may have some effect on the yeast. You should try out new liquids when you can afford to have the yeast fail so as not to have an unpleasant surprise when serving company!
     
    You can bring some flavor, color, and vitamins to the dough by making it with water that you used to cook vegetables or potatoes. Strongly colored or flavored vegetables will impart some of these colors and flavors to the water and therefore to the dough. Together with the coloration, you get vitamins. It is your pizza so it is your choice!
     

Non-stick Cooking Spray
     
    Non-Stick Cooking Spray, especially the Olive Oil variety, is useful for coating the mixing bowl and surface of the dough before letting the dough rise. Just spray a light coating on the inside of the bowl, flop in the ball of dough, and then spray a little on the top of the dough – there you have it!
     
    There is an alternative to purchasing aerosol non-stick cooking spray. You can fill a device called the Misto® with whatever type of liquid cooking oil you desire. A pump contained within the device pressurizes the container so you can spray the oil in a fine mist. Using this device allows you to choose the type of oil you spray. I really like mine and use it often.
     

Salt
     
    Some people do not like adding salt to foods; I am one of those people. I almost never add salt to cooked food. However, I do put salt in pizza dough and recommend that you do as well.
     
    The small amount of salt that you use making pizza dough greatly improves the taste of the pizza dough, so go ahead and add it. It sounds surprising, and it surprised me when I started making pizza, but that little bit counts. You can make pizza dough without salt and you should go ahead and do it if it suits your fancy or meets your dietary requirements. If you must limit salt intake, try to reduce the amount of salt rather than eliminating it.
     

Tomatoes
     
    Tomatoes are available in a wide variety of forms; some of these are great on pizza and others are not so good. Feel free to use canned crushed tomatoes and canned whole tomatoes as well as any type of fresh tomato. If you do use fresh tomatoes, you might want to squeeze out the seeds before putting them on the pizza to keep the pizza from getting