Adventures in Pizza Making

I'd like to preface this post by mentioning that Nick used to work in a frozen pizza factory when he was in high school.  He wanted me to let you all know that little factoid, in case you already didn't (he only mentions this as every opportunity given to him).

As you may remember in previous posts, I'm a bit of coupon freak and I've been able to get Tombstone pizzas for around $.50 or less a piece (they have even made me money).  Nick is addicted and I admit, I love the convenience.  BUT they are full of junk with ingredients a mile long and I just can't stand buying them anymore even at that price.  I, myself do not eat them (I tend to eat a Kashi frozen meal instead on Tombstone night) but my kids do because dad eats it and they love it.  It's our go to meal when time is tight or whenever a pizza strikes Nick's fancy which is fairly often.

I love to cook, but I don't have the time to wait 2 to 3 hours for dough to rise every time my husband feels like pizza. Besides, the whole reason we like frozen pizza is for its convenience, right?  We used to buy fresh pizza dough from Trader Joe's when we lived in "the big city" but we don't have that option anymore (the nearest Trader Joe's is an hour and 15 minutes away, though I hear we will have a Trader Joe's in our area within the next year!)  Another pizza we used to make was a "Flat Out" version here.  You use a pre-made low carb bread as the dough.  It's very low cal and delicious.  When we started to coupon though, the cost of the bread became a factor.  A package of Flat Out bread runs about $3.50.

So, I've decided to go wild and try making our own from scratch and freezing it ahead of time. All I have to do is thaw the dough in the refrigerator a day or three before we need it.  Then when I need a super quick meal, it's right there in the fridge in no time at all without all the preservatives and without costing a fortune!  Why haven't I been doing this all along?

Sunday night I went crazy and tripled a recipe for whole wheat pizza crust I found here.  Tripling the recipe produced 6 thin crust pizzas and it only took me about 20 minutes of preparation time (it technically took about 3 hours with rising time).  With my coupons, I get cheap to FREE, no-hormone cheese to put on the pizza so I'm guessing with sauce these pizzas will be about a buck a piece not including toppings.   Cheap, easy, fast, AND good eats.

Foamy yeast.

Resting dough.

Ta-da!!  Ready-made pizza dough in the freezer!  (I may have skipped a few steps)

I froze the dough packs on Sunday and then thawed one pack of dough this morning to use for dinner tonight.  I spread out one crust, added the topping like usual and put it in the oven.

Then, our oven failed.  Son of a !@#$!  Right in the middle of cooking, no less.  My poor, experimental pizza could have used 10 more minutes in the oven. 

The result: delicious but undone pizza.

Prior to oven failure, Nick had already rolled out and dressed a second pizza (I had the audacity to think our family could get by on one pizza.) and now it was too thin to transfer to another pan and yet too big to put in our convection oven. 

The result: pizza rolls.

Certainly, not what I expected from our pizza experiment.  I'll be calling the repair man first thing in the morning.