So I was looking up recipes for asparagus and saw pizza mentioned. For those who don’t know yeast bread absorbs flavors. I use a lodge cast iron pizza pan as it can handle temperature up to 500 degrees and it fails to stick with raw cast iron. I mix the dough in my mixing bowl.
The dough recipes is as fallows:
around 2 and 1/4 cups of flour
2 teaspoon of yeast
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
2 cups of hot water
Mix dough recipe and let rise for a hour or so covered. Mix more flour into the dough that has risen to lower the stickiness. Put dough on the cast iron pizza pan and stretch it out with your hands adding more flour as needed. Then apply store bought pizza sauce and store bought mozzarella. Once that is ready set oven to 500 and then go out to get the asparagus as it is best fresh. Either rip of cut the asparagus into pieces and mix them in the cheese. Once oven is ready and everything is in cook for 13-15 minutes.
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Thanks for the non-controversial (I hope) idea!
Hopefully in a couple years I’ll be overwhelmed with spring asparagus; if I can get in gear & start canning I can also forego the store pought sauce instead using mine from previous season’s bounty. (I’m still in the phase of planting & garden-making all season/s to get around to the canning, but hopefully in a few years when everything’s rolling along)!
Say, I can try this this spring with wild saparagus (I map it) so I think I will!
I toggle between cast iron pans and those thin aluminum ones with all the holes in them for pizzas.
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Now you’ve done it. Baking stone or steel or get out. (You don’t actually have to get out. As a person of Italian descent, I’m legally obligated to get bent out of shape about food).
Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, you ought to try using a preheated stone or steel if you haven’t. Perfectly crisp crust every time, and faster cook times to boot.
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I thought my cook times were insanely fast as is. The cook time in the oven is only 13-15 minutes. Most of my time is in waiting the way I do it. My wait time is likely around 1.5 hours since I wait a hour for the bread to rise and it takes forever for the oven to reach 500. I have a pizza pocket recipe from a kids recipe book that does not require yeast but I forget what was required but I think it required way more materials. Instead of water from the faucet it requires milk, I think it was something like 1 cup of flour, I forget the amount of oil required and it required either baking soda or baking powder (I can never remember which one is which). The crust was good in flavor but was not as fluffy as the dough I make now. The dough I make now reminds me of the pan pizza I used to get from Pizza Hut.
I worked at a pizza place for a long time. In practice I could make a small plain and have it in the oven from scratch in 45 seconds. 4 commercial natural gas ovens, room for 8 pies each, about 15 minutes cook time per pie, we’d fill them up and have 90 minute waits on weekends. I can’t even guess how many pizzas I’ve made, but I can wash aluminum serving trays hundreds at a time with my eyes closed as long as nobody puts knives in the bin 
At home a pre-heated stone is the way to go unless you get fancy and build a backyard brick wood fired oven.
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Yeast, flour, salt, water, vegetable oil I believe was the recipe at our shop. The key is mixing long enough, letting it rest, taking tops off when it rises, and giving it enough time for that process and the yeast to do it’s job.
Usually they made dough every day in commercial Brute plastic cans, like half sized garbage cans. Typically went through at least a dozen of those per day. They used the dough made the day before.
Many hundreds or thousands of pizzas… I don’t miss the 17 hour days but the comradery developed on days like that was nice.
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I think places like Amazon sell pizza ovens if you don’t want to build an outdoor one. They are expensive costing something like at least 800 dollars though. That is about the recipe I have as noted above. Like I mentioned the dough is what seems to take the most time so I can see preparing it ahead of time. Customers are not going to be happy about waiting along time for pizza. The reason I stopped going to Pizza Hut was they would quote me at something like 15 or 20 minutes but it would be 30-50 minutes and my pizza would come out burnt. That and the fact that they started to charge more while sometimes giving less. They started charging for toppings and started to charge a bunch for pan pizza while I think they used to give a topping free and pan pizza was free too. One time my pizza came with a slice taken out of the pizza and we did not realize until we got home because they did not show it to us in the store. I guess someone at Pizza Hut was hungry and they did not mind stealing from a customer. I find it funny because Pizza Hut used to be the King of cooperate chain pizza and Dominos was seen as cheap but Dominos is now miles above Pizza Hut now. One could say Dominos has out Pizzaed the hut.
I have a cast iron griddle in my oven to cook pizza on. I preheat then slide the crust in on parchment paper. Makes the crust amazing.
Why Parchment paper? I get putting on paper if it is enameled but not for regular cast iron. I have heard of cooking it on the stovetop before putting it in. Supposedly if you cook it just right it makes an amazing consistency but it can’t be too long or too short and that gap is narrow. I even have found my cook time to be very narrow the way I cook my pizza though. 13-15 minutes it is perfect in the oven at 500 degrees but if you put it in 18+ minutes it is burnt.
The parchment is just so it’s easy for me to pull it out of the oven. I don’t have a pizza paddle. With parchment I can grab the paper and slide out the crispy crust without burning my finger on bubbly sauce and cheese. My oven only goes to 450, so it takes 13-15 minutes depending on the depth of toppings. So long as I have preheated the oven so the griddle is up to temperatre. Since I have been using the cast iron griddle, every pizza pizza evenly cooked with perfect crust. Prior to the griddle there would be places that weren’t cooked as nicely due to hot and coold spots in the electric oven.
I have rubber pieces to put it on and mittens. You may think of investing in those 2 things.
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