Recipe: Great Pizza from Mediocre Ingredients (Serves one or two)

Great Pizza from Mediocre Ingredients (Serves one or two)
rec.food.cooking/zxcvbob/2002

Serves one, with a little left over for breakfast

The pizza I made for supper last night was one of my best, even though I just kind of threw it together from what was onhand. It turned out *much* better than I expected; a nice surprise. Here's a summary:

Take some frozen chopped spinach and frozen jalapenos out of the freezer. Chop about a 4 ounce hunk of spinach loose and put it in the microwave on lowest power to thaw.

Start the dough in the Kitchenaid:
1 cup warm tap water
2 cups bread flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
2 tsp instant dried yeast

Meanwhile, brown a pound of cheap breakfast sausage.

Add 2 Tbsp of the sausage grease to the dough, which is mixing on its own with the dough hook.

Drain the rest of the grease off the sausage. Dump the sausage into a big colander and rinse with hot water (this step not really necessary, but I wanted to reduce the overall fat content). Set the sausage aside, check on the dough, start the sauce:

Mix a:
6 ounce can of Contadina Italian Paste with Roasted Garlic
1 cup of Hunts crushed tomatoes
That's it. Set aside and let's check on that dough.

Light the oven and preheat to 450 degrees.

Finish kneading the dough briefly by hand. Let it rise until double, and punch it down. Knead lightly and shape into about a 10 to 12 inch disk. Set it on the pizza pan and let it rest a few minutes.

Stretch and shape the dough with fingertips to the final size. Smear generously with the sauce (I used about half of it). Top with sausage (I used about half the sausage) and jalapenos (cut into large dice).

Grate about 10 or 12 ounces mozzarella.

Squeeze all the water out of that chopped spinach that you forgot about in the microwave. (I ended up with a little less than 2 ounces of squeezed dry spinach). Mix the spinach with the grated cheese and top the pizza with it.

Put the pizza in the 450F and cook for about 10 minutes. It's almost done.

Remove from oven, sprinkle with dried oregano and a generous sprinkle of grated Romano cheese. Put the pizza back in the oven, sliding it off of the pan and directly onto the center oven rack. Cook for another 4 or 5 minutes.