Deliciously cheesy pizza margherita is quite possibly the most simple pizza to make!

Pizza  Margherita

By Sue Lau | Palatable Pastime

For today, I decided to make pizza margherita. Easy and delicious, chock full of the flavor of fresh basil, it is an obvious choice for my family.

We LOVE pizza.

And I love making it at home. Don’t get me started on the unnatural nature of pizza packaged in cardboard. *insert eyeroll*

If I were to mock one of the big pizza delivery companies, it might be by saying: “Better pizza? Better get myself to the E.R., more like!” 😉

So fellow pizza lovers, trust me. Making pizza is not difficult.

There are a few things I like to keep handy for making pizza- one of them is my trusty pizza brick which has a permanent home on the lowest shelf of my oven. Used not only for keeping a hot crispy crust on things like pizza, when it stays in the oven while other things bake, it provides an even stable nature to the ovens heat, lending to better baking. When the oven is off, I keep my biggest cast-iron skillet in there on top of it (it stays in the oven too unless I need the shelf) and when baking pizza, I just move the skillet to the top rack leaving the baking stone free for pizza. Top to bottom, keeping both in there gives me really great, stable temps.

Another thing I like to keep around when dealing with bread dough is a heating pad. I use an oblong one to keep the area around the dough toasty warm while it rises and rests.

I can’t tell you how many times before I started using the hot pad in the kitchen that I would wait and wait and wait….for the dough to rise. And no luck. Believe me, nothing will make you want to give in and call the pizza boy faster than that. And you do not want to go there. So when I make dough (which I do in my electric mixer) I will drape the heating pad over the bowl and around and underneath. Dough rises like a charm. If I am using ready made pizza dough as I am today, which was made previously, then frozen for later use, then thawed, the heating pad will help it get warm, and all beautiful and pudgy, the kind you love to push your finger into.

For my home, I divide the dough into 8 ounce portions for a small, individual type pizza, press it into a smooth ball, then set it on some parchment paper, cover it with another sheet of parchment (to keep the heating pad clean) and wrap the pad around it. It usually takes about half an hour from refrigerator to ready to roll.

For this meal, I made the pizza margherita, served it with a simple Caesar salad, and had it with some Cabernet-Sauvignon red wine.

marinara sauce

pizza dough

Did you know?

If you buy a block of Parmesan-Reggiano cheese, you can grate it on a box grater, on a microplane grater or in the food processor using the shredding blade in just a few minutes, without any addition of cellulose you might get when using the cheese product in the green can?

It’s so easy to do, you will want to do it yourself from now on.