Hello all,
With this quarantine continuing, I have been cooking so much lately that I thought an interactive dinner experience would be a nice change from the norm.
For this dinner I decided to do a make your own pizza night! It turned out pretty nice considering the easiness of the planning beforehand and time allotment. I would definitely recommend this kind of cooking to families or a group of friends. I find this type of cooking connects people through the food they are making and eating together. It provides an experience to all!
Of course you can make many different dishes this way whether it be personal pastas, salads, skewers, or anything else your can imagine. You could also make one big dish and have everyone be assigned one job. Either way, this is a perfect opportunity to get everyone in the kitchen and working!
To make it easy for everyone in the family, we made personal pizzas. These are super simple for everyone involved. For the personal pizzas, there were four of us so we purchased two bags of pre-made pizza dough from the store, but feel free to try making your own. We split the dough from each bag into two so everyone would have some to work with. For the toppings you can literally go crazy. Any toppings you could possibly think of that would go with pizza is fair game. For our dinner, we decided on two sauce bases for the pizza: spiced up tomato sauce and a pesto spread. For the cheeses we got pre-shredded mozzarella, mozzarella balls, and a family favorite, goat milk honey cheese (best with the pesto sauce). Onto the extras, we had spinach, olives, sauteed mushrooms, basil, and sliced pineapples (mostly for me). For the set up, we took four cookie sheets and sprayed them with nonstick cooking spray and placed the dough balls on top. Now you are ready to begin!
Directions:
- Set the oven to 475 degrees Fahrenheit **see note one
- Prepare all the toppings and sauces for use.
- Have everyone stand next to a cookie sheet with dough and begin to pull at it to form the shape of the pizza. **see note two
- Once everyone has their shape ready, put the trays into the heated oven for about 3-4 mins. **see note three
- Take the trays out of the oven and let everyone choose their sauces and toppings to decorate their pizzas.
- Once ready, put everyone’s back into the oven and bake for at least 7-9 mins. They should be golden brown around the edges. **see note four
- Take out of the oven, slice, and enjoy!
Notes:
- I looked up the temperature at which to set your oven and they varied from 475-500, but we went with 475.
- Make sure the dough is not stuck to the sheet prior to being put into the oven. This will create difficulty getting it off the sheet and cleaning it later.
- This pre-bake is so the dough will not get soggy from the liquid ingredients. This being said, it is still okay to skip this step if you wish.
- The estimated time online was 7-9 mins bake time, however ours took more like 18 mins to bake. This time may vary between ovens and the temperature at which you choose to cook the pizzas, but make sure they are golden brown around the edges before taking out.
And the recipe is as simple as that! This was our first time doing something like this before and we had plenty of fun. We will definitely being doing this again sometime in the future. Comment below what you think and the different toppings you used!
Safe cooking,
Ella Sanders
The Traveling Wanderer 