Stuffed Crust Pizza

Yesterday I met a few of my girlfriends at the mall to let our kids play together and give us moms a chance to wind down. While we were there someone started talking about homemade pizza and I've been craving it ever since.

I actually had heard of doing stuffed crust a while back and so I just had to give it a try.

Once more, here's our cast of characters:

For the dough:

*2 Tbsp yeast

*1 cup warm water

*3 tsp sugar

*1 tsp salt

*2 Tbsp oil

*2 1/2 cups flour (+ or -)

Can you tell from the picture I shop in bulk- who would EVER go through that much salt in thier lifetime right?

Then we have the toppings:

I'm not saying thses are the brands that must be used but they happened to be what I had on hand. You could even make your own pizza sauce, I have a recipie, but.... why?

Also- I left out some slices of mozzarella cheese that should have been in this picture. SORRY!

Start with disolving the yeast in the warm water then add all the ingredients but the flour. Finally, add the flour and knead it till its a nice smooth ball. You can add a bit of flour if you need to. You don't want it to be too sticky. That makes laying it all out on the pan a huge hassle.

Let it rise for 10 min- 1 hour. I always end up going for the 10 minute route and it seems to work fine.

While the dough is rising get you pizza stone in the oven and preheat to 400 degrees.

I like to use the pizza stone because everything cooks so evenly but it's kinda a pain to get the crust onto the stone- to remedy that. I also use a non-stick pizza pan with holes. Maybe it's a bit redundant but it seems to work great.

After risen, shmoosh the dough into the pan and arrange long pieces of mozzarella cheese around the edge. The original recipie I found said to use string cheese. I just didn't have any on hand.

Seal the cheese in around the edges and poke the dough to keep it from bubbling.

Cook the crust for 7-10 minutes or until it starts to brown. I left it in the full 10 and it was a bit too long. This is an example of a tad TOO done.

Now, the fun part. Add your sauce and toppings.

Bake again for 10 minutes and Enjoy!

Ratings from the hubby were fairly good. Though, I do think that string cheese would work better. My pieces were too small and most of the cheese leaked out leaving an empty hole. Sometimes we'd get a piece where it was still nice and gewy and that was fantastic. So, bottom line, it definately has potential I just need to fine tune it.