Using my favorite pizza crust recipe and my pizza stone I whipped together this thin crust pizza that was nice and crispy. One thing that I do for pizza is after it has raised I roll it out with the rolling pin. I find that this makes it into a really big pizza that will fit onto my stone and leave me with extras to make some garlic fingers. Another thing that I like to do is I cook my crust first with nothing on it for 15 minutes. Then I take it out and put the toppings on. I find this gets the crust cooked before you add the toppings so you aren't left with a soggy crust and a hungry impatient family.
For my garlic fingers I use the excess crust that I cut away from the pizza stone and spread it out onto a smaller pizza pan. Then I spread it with garlic butter (margarine with mashed garlic) and bake in the over from 10 minutes. Remove from oven grate with cheese and bake for another 5 minutes. Now this wouldn't be a special pizzeria night if I didn't have donair sauce to dip the pizza and garlic fingers into.
This simple donair recipe is a most for our pizza nights!!!
1 can of sweetened condense milk
1/4 cup vinegar
1 tsp garlic salt
whisk the 3 ingredients together and ta-da, the most delicious donair sauce.
During these past couple of weeks I have been busy preparing a presentation on frugalicious meals that I will be doing for the Ladies group at my church. With this presentation, and my love for $5 dinners blog, I began to price up my recipes to see if I was actually saving money. Pizza night was a great place to start so here is my breakdown on how much it would cost me to make
1 12 pizza (Pepporine, Salomi, Ham and cheese)
1 12 garlic finger
1 donair sauce
1 12" pizza crust $0.68 cents
Pizza Sauce $0.55
Toppings (Pizza meats 2.30 and 1 cup cheese 0.97) $3.27
1 12" garlic finger (crust 0.68, cheese 0.49, garlic butter 0.22) $1.39
Donair sauce 0.58
Grand total: $6.47
Can you believe that this delicious looking meal is under $10.
Now for fun lets see how much this would be at a local pizza shop.
Pizza Delight
15" pizza (3 toppings)
Large garlic finger
Grand Total : 19.99+ tax
As you can see making pizza at home is worth it for us. Ecspecially when you get cheese on sale!! The easiest thing we do with our cheese sales is grate, lay flat on a cookie sheet, freeze. Once frozen we place in a large Ziploc baggie and it gets tossed into the pizza basket in the freezer. Another thing in case you are wondering is what about the veggies on the pizza. This wasn't factored into my pricing because I always have frozen peppers and mushrooms diced up in the freezer pizza basket that I purchase on the reduced rack. I always use what I have on hand so even if I did add in their price it may only be 0.20-0.50 cents more.
For more great ideas check out we are that family
Looks great! Great tip to cook it first, I've been wondering about that. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDelete~Liz
Another way of ensuring a cooked crust is to push toppings aside and make "holes" in the toppings so crust is exposed. After the pizza is cooked you just push the cheese & toppings right back into place. This is a trick hubby picked up while working at a mom & pop pizza / pasta store for years. I like your method better though because it's less messy!
ReplyDeleteAlso for a yummy garlic finger treat you could skip donair sauce and drizzle some honey directly on top of the hot garlic fingers. One word of caution, however, is that honey garlic fingers don't re-heat as well when serving as left overs.
Hmm... I never heard of donair sauce ... I do my pizza the same way you do yours, but I never thought of using the excess crust for garlic fingers! Definitely going to try that. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete