Made another attempt at pizza and I think this is a definite improvement. Went with a different recipe, this one from Michael Ruhlman. He’s a food writer with several best selling cookbooks who also collaborates with Thomas Keller’s cookbooks.
Here’s our second try: second try
Here’s our much improved third try.
I don’t think it’s a secret that I love eating pizza. So Laura and I tried making it from scratch a couple weeks ago, but I only got the pictures uploaded recently.
The most important (and only hard) part of the pizza is making the dough for the crust. So I found a thin-crust recipe that we used. I think it turned out ok for our first attempt, but there’s much room for improvement. We didn’t have a pizza stone so we used a cookie sheet. We also tried just putting the pizza directly on the rack to char the bottom after it was on the cookie sheet long enough to firm up.
So we followed all the directions for making the dough and thought we were on the right track. We even got our dough to be a “smooth and silky” ball like in the recipe photo. When I went to split it and shape half of it into a crust, it was way too dry/hard though 
In the end, I had to use a makeshift rolling pin (saran wrapped wine bottle) just to get it into a pizza-like shape. Sadly, by doing so it also was incredibly thin (I believe thinner than it should have been). It did semi-char nicely on the bottom though, but due to the thinness, it also vaguely tasted like a water cracker. There weren’t any air bubbles and it was definitely not chewy.
For our second pizza we went with prosciutto, sauteed mushrooms, and caramelized onions. The crust for this one is quite “rustic” looking as I again had issues shaping it, but didn’t use a rolling pin so the crust was a little thicker. This one had more of a pizza-like crust due to a couple factors I think. Besides being thicker, we also let the dough sit while we topped/cooked/ate the cheese pizza. I think that helped contribute to the air bubbles. Btw, if you read the recipe we used, the instructions never mentioned letting the dough sit to rise, but maybe we should have known? shrug. If we try this recipe again, we’ll definitely let the dough sit next time. I did run across a no-knead recipe that uses a slow rise in the fridge that sounds promising. So I think that’s also on the agenda.
Just in case we failed miserably, as backup, we got a pre-made dough from trader joe’s. Here’s a couple pics of that one being constructed. It was much wetter than our doughs, so that’s also something I will experiment with in the future. It wasn’t as tasty, nor fun though!!
It was a good experiment and I’m definitely interested in figuring out how to improve on our crust. More internet research! Moar!