Recipe: Homemade Pizza with Wheat Crust

I LOVE pizza.  I haven't really had many kinds of pizza that I didn't like.  Many people have asked me what is my favorite, and I really can't decide.  There are so many that I like!  I have been wanting to make pizza at home more and experiment with different toppings and crusts.  Awhile back I tried a mix for a dough from Kroger that I didn't really care for.  It was too thin and hard to roll out.  I've seen different dough at Trader Joe's in their refrigerated section that looked good and was only about $1 a piece, so I thought I'd give that a try.  You really can't beat a dollar for the dough.  I opted for the whole wheat dough to see if we would like it, got the sauce from Trader Joe's as well, and we went with more traditional toppings this night.

First, I put our pizza stone in the oven and pre-heated the oven to the directions on the bag of dough.  Next, I sauteed some red onion and mushrooms with garlic and olive oil.  I had some apple chicken sausage in the fridge, so I chopped some of that up and sauteed that in the pan as well.

 I put Ross in charge of the dough.  He used to work at a pizza place in high school, so he likes to re-live his old job :)  When working with this dough, you want to be sure you use a good floured surface so it doesn't stick to the counter.

He rolled it out to the best circle shape he could get.

The instructions on the dough bag said to put on your sauce and toppings on the dough then bake.  So we added our sauce, sprinkled some oregano,Italian seasoning, crushed red pepper, and garlic powder in the sauce, added our shredded mozzarella, and then our toppings on last.  I like to buy the blocks of cheese and shred it myself with a grater, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I like it better in many recipes this way.  We put the sausage, onion, mushrooms, and added some banana peppers as well.

We sprinkled the pizza stone with corn meal before we put the pizza on to bake.  Then we popped it in the oven.  We ended up baking the pizza for longer than it suggested of 10-12 minutes.  Ross and I actually were having a bit of a debate about it.  I thought it was finished around 15 minutes or so, but he was thinking that the dough didn't look finished.  We ended up baking it for about 20 minutes or so and it turned out pretty crispy.  It wasn't over-done, but I think 15 minutes would have been a bit better.

All in all, we really liked this pizza.  If you have been nervous to try wheat crust, don't be! We could barely tell a difference at all.  More pizza nights will be in our future with hopes of more variety of toppings :)

~Kate