Culinary Journeys - I

So, we decided to try out hand at making pizza today, and here is the final result waiting to enter into the oven (or was - most of it is already in our stomachs).

So, I found this recipe online and decided to follow it, scaling down the portion (but still, it was rather too much for us to handle). It called for:

650g of plain flour
4 tablespoons of olive oil
1 teaspoon of salt
1 tablespoon of sugar
11g of yeast (it was one dry packet of 11g)

So, here is a picture after I added the yeast, olive oil, and sugar into a metal bowl of lukewarm water (170ml of boiling water, 340ml of water at room temperature). The white bowl contained the flour together with the salt.

So, after letting the yeast mixture sit for around ten minutes or so (it turns frothy - that's a good sign that the yeast is working), I added them to the flour, resulting in this mixture:

It was quite wet, but I thought it was fine (later on we added quite a bit of flour). It was left to sit until it doubled in size.

Well, the recipe called for an hour's time, but within half an hour this was what we got:

Well, plenty of lessons could be learnt from making the pizza. There could have been more flour, for one - and the portion could have been reasonably smaller as well. It was roughly enough for three to four medium-sized pizzas, which we could not finish. The flour should have been sifted - I decided not to go hunting for the bigger sift at home in order to save some time.

Hopefully, the next time will be better!