Homemade Pizza! A Valentine's Day Tradition

This year, for our Valentine's Day Dinner, I made homemade pizza, which I also made last year. I'm not sure I'd actually call it a tradition, but all traditions start somewhere, right?

Here's our pizza making experience!

I use crust mixes to make the crust, but I add to it.

For these pizzas, I added red pepper, garlic powder, and Italian herbs to the crust mix.

Once the dough is ready to be made, I brush the dough with a garlic butter mix, and bake the dough for about 5 minutes with nothing on it. This speeds up the baking process, since the length of time involved in making a pizza from scratch is allowing the dough to bake. When it has toppings on it, it takes longer.

This is the crust after the pre-bake.

Here's the crust as I spread it with the sauce & pepperoni mix from the Chef Boyardee kit. I've used this type of kit for years and years, but this time, the sauce was more watery, and the dough was sticky- indicative of too much water, which is usually not a problem for these. Typically, it's a little on the dry side because I add the spices and herbs. I usually have to add a few drops of water. This time, I was adding more spices and herbs to try and dry it up a bit.

I think next time, I'll stick with the much cheaper Betty Crocker mix kits. The dough turned out perfect! Price wise, the Chef Boyardee kit is $5, and comes with a small packet of parmesan cheese, a can of sauce with pepperoni, and 2 dough kits (which make 1 large rectangular pizza).

The Betty Crocker is just a dough mix for $.89, and I used 3 to make the other large rectangular pizza. I also bought a packet of Pepperoni for $.98 (1 is enough for 2 pizzas), and 1 jar of pizza sauce for $.89, which was enough for 1, and thicker than what the Chef Boyardee comes with.

On the pizza for me and the kids, I add pepperoni, shredded ham, sausage, cheddar cheese, and mozzarella cheese.

On Nick's pizza, I added shredded ham, sausage, pepperoni, green olives, mushrooms, cheddar cheese, and mozzarella cheese.