You want pizza. No, you want homemade pizza. You can make it easily using these recipes no matter how much time you have.
So many recipe sites frustrate me and others because their recipes assume you have tons of time to cook. These recipes provide options for any cook, no matter how busy.
Pizza in Flash: Ready-Made Ingredients
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When you want to make pizza but you have no time, you need dinner on the table in 15 minutes or less. These recipes serve your dinner guests.
Each recipe uses all pre-made ingredients. You only need a minimum of a pre-baked crust, ready-made sauce, and cheese. You can add to it any ingredients you like, from bits of sliced garlic to pepperoni.
1. Pepperoni Pizza with Frozen Pizza Dough
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Start with a frozen pizza crust of 12- or 14-inches. Use your favorite jarred pizza sauce, your favorite pizza cheese, Parmesan cheese, and pepperoni.
The olive oil goes on the crust before the toppings because the dry crust needs moisture. Baking time depends on the crust you choose, but you can ballpark it at 15 to 20 minutes. Look for the cheese to bubble on the top and the crust to turn light brown on the bottom.
2. Speedy Breakfast Pizza
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Make breakfast for six in 15 minutes total with this breakfast pizza recipe. You’ll need one ready-made pizza crust, four large eggs, 10 slices of fully cooked bacon, and one cup of cheddar cheese. You don’t have to cook the bacon yourself.
You can buy pre-cooked bacon to save more time. Scramble the eggs then spread them on the pizza crust. Sprinkle on the bacon then cover it all with cheese. Bake for 10 minutes. Serve hungry people.
3. 15-Minute Flatbread Pizza
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Start with a piece of flatbread. You choose the kind of flatbread and add a pre-made sauce plus your favorite toppings, including whatever cheese you desire. It bakes up in just eight to 10 minutes, meaning you can put together this recipe in under 15 minutes, including the cooking time.
4. 15-Minute Personal Naan Pesto Pizza
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Everything in this recipe comes ready-made but you’ll seem like a five-star chef making it. You only need Naan bread, pesto, mozzarella cheese, spinach, grape tomatoes, plus salt and pepper. The pesto replaces any sauce you’d usually put on the pizza.
Pile on the rest and bake for 10 to 12 minutes. You put a gourmet meal on the table. Serve this one with a three-green salad topped with Roma tomatoes.
Quick Pizza with Homemade Ingredients
When you’ve got a little more time to spare, experiment with these options. These recipes use one ready-made ingredient, such as pizza sauce, but everything else gets the homemade treatment. Every recipe tastes homemade.
5. Quick and Easy Pizza
How about a pizza dinner with eight servings in a total of 45 minutes? This recipe starts with homemade dough consisting of salt, olive oil, bread flour, sugar, and yeast. If you double the dough recipe, you can refrigerate this dough for up to five days.
Make it ahead and pull it out when you need a quick dinner of pizza, calzone, or stromboli. You add a jarred sauce of your choice plus any toppings you want. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes.
6. Five Minute Sauce, 15-Minute Pizza
Top a flatbread or pre-made crust with this homemade sauce that takes a teeny tiny five minutes to make. Combine tomato paste and tomato sauce with Italian seasoning, oregano, garlic, onion, pepper, and a bit of sugar.
You’ll have enough sauce for two 14-inch pizzas. You can also use this sauce on the chef’s whole-wheat or zucchini crust. Baked for 10 to 15 minutes if you use a pre-made crust, you can top it in any way you like.
7. Bisquick Margherita Pizza
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Usually, homemade pizza dough takes forever to make, but this Bisquick version requires just two minutes to mix and eight to bake. Once it begins to brown, you pull it out and top it with pesto, tomato, basil, olive oil, and Parmesan and mozzarella cheeses. Bake it for another 10 minutes and you have dinner on the table in a total of 35 minutes.
One pizza makes eight servings, so make a double batch if you have a large family.
Old-fashioned, Homemade Pizza
Sometimes, you have time for a pizza night with friends or family. Of course, you want to eat something yummy, but part of the fun comes from making everything from scratch. These recipes use homemade dough, sauce, and fresh ingredients.
8. Hamburger, Green Peppers, and Onion Pizza
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Set aside at least an hour and a half for this recipe – 25 minutes of prep time, 45 minutes for the dough to rise, and 25 minutes to bake. This traditional yeast dough requires one punch down. It makes two 12-inch rounds. You’ll top it with spices, mozzarella, onion, green pepper, and sauteed ground beef.
9. Homemade Pepperoni Pizza
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Set aside two and a half hours for this pizza recipe. The prep time takes 35 minutes and cooking takes just 15 minutes, but you will need patience for the one-and-a-half-hour rising time for the dough. Expect a sweet sauce since this uses a bit of honey in it and a cheesy pizza.
This recipe uses Parmesan and mozzarella. For all of this work though, you will make one 13-inch pizza. The recipe easily doubles though, so it works well if you want to use it for a pizza night.
10. Alyona’s Deep-Dish Supreme Pizza
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Made famous in Chicago, this thick-crusted pizza can handle as many toppings as you can pile onto it. The yeasty dough requires 25 minutes of proofing. This pizza works well in a square or round pan, but the pan needs sides since you’re making deep-dish pizza.
Dredging the dough ball in oil and cornmeal ensures the hard crust on the bottom of this pizza. Drop a bit of all of your favorite toppings onto this dough once you’ve rolled it out and covered the pan. The recipe suggests mozzarella cheese, pepperoni, onion, bell pepper, mushroom, and olives.
It uses jarred pizza sauce, but you can also use the homemade recipe from above.
Making Pizza: Frequently Asked Questions
Baking pizza contains so many variations because so many variations of pizza exist. Every city with a large Italian population makes its own type of pizza. Chicago, New York, Milan, Pisa. No two places make their pie the same. With so much variety, questions arise. I’ll try to address them here.
Does the pan I use matter when making pizza?
In some cases, the right pan makes the pizza perfect and the wrong one spells disaster. For example, you can’t make deep-dish pizza on a pizza stone or pizza round because it doesn’t have sides to hold onto when baking. Deep-dish must have a casserole pan or other two-inch deep or deeper pan.
Thin crust pizza, the traditional northern Italian pizza, you can make on any pizza stone or pan. Using a black dish will burn the bottom of the pizza though because it is so thin. When the recipe depends on a specific baking dish or pans it will say so. Use that pan.
What flour makes the best pizza dough?
Bread flour, also called baking flour, produces the best crust. You can also use all-purpose flour in a pinch. Other kinds of flour won’t work. You can make the gluten-free crust using gluten-free flour but it won’t taste like regular pizza crust.
What kind of sauce do you use on pizza?
You can make pizza with any sauce you like, but for traditional pizza, you need a rich, thick marinara sauce. To make an authentically Italian cuisine variation, use Alfredo sauce. Other options for pizza include BBQ sauce, soy sauce, olive oil, or pesto.
Which cheese works best on pizza?
So many recipes use Parmesan and mozzarella because they have a low moisture content and low-temperature melting point. You use other cheeses with these two features, such as provolone, and cheddar.
What’s the difference between using a pizza stone and a pizza pan?
Using a pizza stone provides an appropriate setting for your pizza dough to bake with a crisp crust. In lieu of a stone, you can use a piece of parchment paper for assembling the pizza while you heat the pizza pan or cookie sheet in a pre-heated oven. When the pizza pan becomes hot and your pizza ready to bake, you remove the pan and transfer the pizza onto it, then return it to the oven to bake.
Once pre-heated in the oven, the flat pan becomes hot enough to do the same job as the stone – making the crust crisp.
What does the term artisan pizza mean?
Artisan refers to a hand-crafted item, so the term artisan pizza refers to handmade pizza. It’s from scratch and you can taste the difference. Typically, recipes for artisan pizza use gourmet ingredients.
What toppings work best on pizza?
You can top a pizza with almost any food, but to make a traditional pie you need pepperoni or Italian sausage. A lengthy list of other meats to put on pizza includes ham, bacon, ground pork or beef, sausage, chicken, and fish. I’m not just talking anchovies here. You can put hake, codfish, or salmon on pizza, too.
Many vegetables also work fabulously as toppings. The most common options include onion, green and red bell peppers, olives, tomatoes, and spinach. Some folks like squash on artisan pizza but it doesn’t go well with the pepperoni.
Some nuts taste good on pizza, too. Pine nuts complement the flavor of chicken or spinach. Peanuts aren’t a thing though. The less nutty, the better. Pizza likes things serious.
Tips for Making Delicious Pizza
Really great pizza takes practice to make. You’ll need to bake pizza frequently to get great at it. Follow these tips from the pros to make the best pizza possible.
1. Use a pizza stone.
Ovens in homes don’t get as hot as commercial ovens which reach more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit. The dough rises rapidly in commercial ovens, but in your kitchen’s oven, it needs the stone’s help to get the dough that hot.
2. Never use ketchup in your pizza sauce.
Some chefs say to avoid tomato paste, too. The best sauce comes from a combination of salt, garlic, tomatoes, and onions. Use a food processor to blend them.
3. Know when to use a rolling pin.
When you want the perfect thin crust pizza, bring out the rolling pin. Using it helps you achieve that crisp, thin-crust of traditional Italian pizza served in most areas of the country. When making a thicker crusted pizza though, only use your hands to craft the dough. Hand shaping it produces an airy, crumbly crust.
4. Cook Your Toppings
Cook all the pizza toppings before you put the pizza in the oven. Both meats and vegetables need to cook fully before going on the pie. A home oven won’t get hot enough to cook the meat, especially, in the short amount of time it takes. to bake the crust. Vegetables would remain too crisp without pre-cooking.
5. Buy and use a pizza peel.
When you visit a pizza place that uses commercial ovens, the chef places the pizza in the oven using a pizza peel. That’s the long-handled wood spatula that lets them safely place a pie in the oven. The commercial ovens in a restaurant stay on constantly and pizza ovens stay about 800 degrees Fahrenheit, so accidentally touching one would cause irreparable damage.
6. Full-fat cheese melts better.
You might put low-moisture, part-skim milk cheese on everything else, but pizza needs a moist cheese that melts quickly, like mozzarella.
6. Limit the number of toppings to let each flavor burst.
According to one chef who specializes in pizza, you only need three ingredients on top of the sauce. Anything more than that muddies the flavor.
7. Limit the amount of sauce and cheese.
When you spread your sauce, you should still be able to see the dough through it. Otherwise, you spread it too thick. Use just one cup of cheese.
8. Your dough can get too elastic.
If it stretches too much and tears, let it rest for a few minutes.
9. For a richer dough flavor, use milk instead of water.
10. You can pre-mix dough in the morning, refrigerate it, and it will rise while you work.
Dough that rises in the fridge needs about 12 hours before you can knead it.
11. Using brewer’s yeast to make pizza dough.
It works better than regular yeast.
12. When you make whole wheat or whole grain crust, you still need to mix in a little bit of white flour.
13. Try using a sourdough crust recipe for lighter pizza.
14. Despite what a recipe says, begin mixing small amounts of water with flour.
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By adding a bit of flour at a time to the water, you’ll perfect your pizza dough. The recipe works perfectly where the chef developed it but you might live at a different elevation or in another hemisphere. Your different conditions mean you need to alter the recipe somewhat. You might not use all of the flour the recipe calls for or you might use more than that.
15. Don’t add the salt just before the yeast or after it.
The two ingredients conflict with one another and should be added as far away from one another as possible.
16. Prepare the yeast properly.
Dissolve it in water with a pinch of sugar and let it sit according to its package directions before adding it to the flour.
17. You can help your pizza dough rise to the occasion by folding it.
That term means that you fold the pizza dough into a rectangle repeatedly as you would fold clothes. Do this a few times to help the dough build itself up, then let it sit still and proof.
18. You will know that you can use the dough for your pizza when a small ball of dough dropped into a glass of water floats.
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