Freezer Feasts

I like pizza. I enjoy making pizza from scratch, but I generally don't plan far enough in advance for the dough to have time to rise, so I often ended up buying frozen pizzas to have on hand for such occasions. I have always wanted to try freezing my own and was thrilled to find Amy's blog post about her pizza freezing experience.

I doubled the ingredients from Amy's crust recipe and kneaded by hand. I ran out of bread flour for the next two pizzas, so I used whole wheat flour and a little bit of vital wheat gluten. The whole wheat added a nice flavor to these pizzas! In the future, I would like to try the pizza crust recipe from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads book.

I made my own pizza sauce from a family recipe while I waited for the dough to rise. I also preheated the oven and pizza stone to 450°F and prepared my toppings during this time.

When the dough was ready, I rolled each pizza into a large rectangle. (I made them large enough to fit into four 2-gallon-sized freezer bags).

Then, I sprinkled the pizza peel with cornmeal and transferred the dough to the oven. I baked the crust on the hot stone for 5 minutes.

The crust just started to become crisp at this point. I transferred the partially baked crust to a rack and immediately sprinkled it with shredded Parmesan cheese. I did this to add flavor and to prevent the sauce from soaking into the crust and making it soggy.

After all four pizzas were baked and sprinkled with cheese, I began an assembly line of adding toppings. We added sauce, mushrooms, provolone cheese and pepperoni; layering each until we ran out. Then I allowed three of the pizzas to finish cooling completely before freezing them.

Meanwhile, we couldn't resist the urge to try one of our pizzas, so we baked it on the stone in the 450°F oven for 12-15 minutes. It was delicious! It tasted much better than any store-bought frozen pizza.

We put the remaining pizzas in freezer bags and froze them. It wasn't long before we were craving a pizza again, so we decided to bake it straight from its frozen state. We started out by preheating the oven and pizza stone to 450°F and baking the pizza for 15 minutes. This got the initial chill out of the pizza and allowed us to cut the pizza in quarters. We returned the pizza to the oven, this time for about 45 more minutes, until the center was warm. It turned out well!

Waiting an hour to bake the frozen pizza may not seem very convenient, especially when compared to the frozen ones at the grocery store that take less than half as long. We suspect that the thickness of the crust and the amount of toppings contributed to the long cooking time. We will continue to experiment with thinner crusts and not add so many layers of toppings to see if we can reduce the baking time.

If you plan your meals out far enough in advance, you can thaw the pizza first. A thawed pizza only takes 10-12 minutes to bake completely. I thawed our last one before baking it, and it turned out well. The crust didn't become soggy during thawing and it tasted as wonderful as the first one we had made!