Frugal Friday: Homemade, Homegrown Pizza

We love making things from scratch, especially when we end up with a high quality meal that cost us significantly less than out at a restaurant. Pizza comes up on our menu fairly regularly, not just because it’s delicious, but it’s also pretty easy to make.

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Our favorite pizza crust recipe is this Quick Beer Pizza Dough– it’s just flour, yeast, baking powder, salt, olive oil, and 1 bottle of room temperature beer. This recipe is enough for two 12″ pizzas. We prefer to make the dough fresh, but it does freeze well. A couple weeks ago, Eric happened to open a bottle of beer he didn’t like; not wanting to waste it, I took it and made up a batch of this dough and froze it in a ziplock bag. It sat in the freezer until yesterday, when we harvested these beautiful tomatoes:

Before we made our pizza sauce, we de-seeded the tomatoes to save for next year. Then we made up a quick sauce by sauteing onion, garlic, tomatoes, and the hot pepper from the garden in oil until everything was soft and fragrant, then we added fresh basil, oregano, and parsley from the garden, and of course salt and pepper to taste. We prefer a smooth pizza sauce, so we blended it in a small food processor- you can keep yours chunky if that’s your thing. Keep in mind, the longer your sauce cooks, the more flavorful it gets.

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Next, the fun part: assembling your pizza. Eric has experience at pizzerias, so he rolls out the dough by hand; you can also use a rolling pin. As for toppings,  Eric uses high quality cheeses and I’ll throw on some Baetje Farms goat cheese or vegan cheese or opt for a tomato pie (cheese-less). We try to use as much from our gardens as possible. Even if you do have to buy some toppings, it’s still way cheaper than having to pay for each topping at a pizzeria.

Enjoy!