Eliminating the Grocery Store Challenge - Day 7: Pizza! Pizza!

My family absolutely loves pizza whereas I could live to the end of my days without ever taking another bite out of one. What can I say? My husband is Italian and I am German. Oh, the battles of traditional foods that we have had. (Yes honey, butter goes onto and into everything! No, we do not have to eat something with pasta every single night. How about some meat and potatoes for a change?)

Anyway, pizza is pretty much a once-a-week kind of thing for us, especially if the Green Bay Packers are expected to play. Sometimes, we "splurge" and buy them from Papa Murphy's to bring home and bake ourselves. Most of the time, though, we buy the frozen, tasteless (in my opinion) cardboard pizzas from one of the local grocery stores. If we are going to ever be successful at eliminating the grocery store, then I absolutely have to find a way to make wonderful, aromatic, and tasteful pizzas that I can freeze and make at home.

Today, I took my basic sour dough bread recipe and added some olive oil and sugar to make some homemade pizza dough. I actually doubled the recipe so that I could make as many pizzas as possible. Unfortunately, I had to make them smaller, which means that we will eat them faster than the store versions. The smaller size was necessitated by the size of my Foodsaver expandable bags. I might be able to try to make cookie sheet type ones in the future, but I thought that I would start with cirles.

Once we rolled out the dough into a circle shape, I then used an oven-safe dinner plate to cut it out and pre-bake it for about five minutes. This is supposed to ensure that the pizza does not get soggy and mushy from the freezing and defrosting/baking process. I plan on cooking the pizzas on stoneware, so I will have to let you know how it turns out after we have actually eaten some that have been thus stored.

We then assembled seven pizzas: cheese, pepperoni, spinach and mushroom, and chicken Alfredo. Unfortunately, we ran out of cheese and so our last pizza crust was turned into a dessert pizza covered with brown sugar, white sugar, butter, pecans, and cinnamon.

To be honest, I was really looking forward to eating the dessert pizza. What can I say? I have a terrible sweet tooth!

I had a few little helpers as we processed the pizzas, vacuum sealed them, and got them put in the freezer. Out of seven crusts, I had just enough cheese for six. Of all seven pizzas we made, we were able to freeze five. The other two, we ate for dinner.

The verdict? Well, the dessert pizza was awesome! And, surprisingly, even though I used sour dough starter instead of yeast, the pizza dough tasted like, or I guess I should say better, than any other pizza I have had. If I had not made it myself, I don't think I would have ever noticed or even known that the pizza dough was made with a sour dough starter. It was all pretty good. The true test will come when we cook the ones that we froze. I have a feeling that all five of them will get eaten the same day. I may just have to designate an entire shelf in my upright freezer just for homemade pizza.

You know what they say....if you can't fight them; join them. With six kids that love pizza, I guess I better just give up and steal the chicken Alfredo all for myself.

Do you make homemade pizzas and freeze them? If so, do you have any recommendations or suggestions for me? Comment below and let me know! I could use all the pizza help I can get!

Be blessed!