One of the things I miss about being middle class is the ability to obtain a pizza when you suddenly want one right now.  This is not possible on a poverty budget, unless you’re willing to give up something else – say, electricity.  Pizza made by others is frivolous and unaffordable, and as such, never enters Dogpatch.   Now I can make pretty good pizza myself, but it’s a rigmarole involving much planning and psyching myself up to do it.   All the fuss of kneading dough, waiting for it to rise twice, rolling it out, and letting it rest before you even get to turn on the oven makes pizza on a whim impossible.  So I used to make it maybe once a year.  I’d freeze half the dough and tell myself I ought to do it more often, because it wasn’t that hard.  Then I’d go back to my old pasta-boiling ways and forget about it.  Only I didn’t forget about pizza, which is also impossible. 

Of course, there’s no such thing as instant pizza, really.  No food is “instant” unless you eat it raw.  And I don’t mean instant pizza by way of frozen versions or frozen grocery-store dough or packets of cheap dough mix, or English muffins and any of the other ersatz versions employing flour tortillas, French bread, and the like.  The first group isn’t very good, and the second group isn’t pizza.  By instant pizza I mean one with real crust, made by hand, that doesn’t require thinking ahead several hours.

But it turns out nearly instant pizza is possible.  I found this out by reading a blog.  Imagine!  I can’t be the only one stunned by the secret it revealed.  This concept shook my rule-following soul to the core, and revolutionized my dinner time.  If you already know it, you may sneer at my naiveté.  If you don’t, prepare to enter the world of

NEARLY INSTANT PIZZA!!!

Courtesy of a Canadian!  It’s all bizarrely wonderful.  You don’t have to knead the dough.  You don’t have to sit around and wait for it to rise twice.  You don’t even have to wait around for it to rise once.  And yet, you will produce recognizable, somewhat-raised-dough crust pizza that tastes really good.  It is nothing short of miraculous.  God bless this food blogger and whomever she got the recipe from.* 

You do not need to know how to make bread.  A small child could make this, if it were tall enough to reach the countertop.  But first, you need to have on hand the basic ingredients.  I always have packages of yeast, flour, cheese, bottled tomato sauce and sundry suitable bits and pieces like onions and garlic and olive oil, so this part requires no effort for me.  But I realize some people don’t keep yeast in their kitchen, or if they do, its expiration date is probably back when a Bush was president.  The possibility of nearly instant pizza should get you to reform on this matter.  Get the generic rapid-rise yeast.  Fleischmann’s yeast costs twice as much for no apparent reason.  You can use regular old yeast, but if you use rapid-rise, the dough will actually start to rise in spite of you rushing it along.   If you want to buy pre-shredded cheese and freeze it, I can’t stop you, but I will look askance.  And don’t feel it has to be mozzarella.  I don’t really understand why mozzarella has become the default pizza cheese, but I guess if you’re enamored of the experience of having strings of it draped across everything, you’d better have some on hand.  God knows fontina isn’t on the Dogpatch budget, and cheddar doesn’t go with everything.

Into a bowl you put:

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon of salt

1 pinch of sugar

1 cup warm water  (hot water from the tap, not boiling from the kettle or you will kill the yeast)

Add one package of rapid-rise yeast to the above mixture.  Then mix in two and a half cups of flour.**   Cover the bowl.  That’s it.  Do  something else for ten minutes.  Feed the dog.  Saute some onions and mushrooms if you aren’t a fan of semi-raw vegetables.  Shred the cheese.  Crack open the bottle of Barilla spicy marinara, or whatever.  Locate that ancient jar of pesto hiding in the refrigerator.  Ten minutes will go by in a flash.  It can turn into twenty or thirty.  It doesn’t matter. But there’s no need for more than ten, if you’re feeling extremely single-minded about getting that pizza into the oven. 

I’m sure a better crust is produced by going through the whole double rising/resting routine.  But if you don’t have a wood-fired oven that will heat up to 900 degrees, it hardly matters.  You aren’t going to be producing the perfect pizza no matter what.  And as I said, that yeast is going to be doing its damnedest to puff up the dough without your help.

So turn your oven on to 400 degrees, or 425, or 450 if you feel you can afford the fuel.  Then get out a cookie sheet, grease it, throw some cornmeal on it, and slap that dough down onto it.  Spread it out with your fingers.  If you want to be obsessive about it, get your rolling pin and roll it out right there on the pan. If it’s too sticky, throw some flour on it.  It’s not going to give you much of a fight.  It will become a pizza crust with very little effort on your part.

 That amount of dough, rolled thin, will cover most of a cookie sheet that is 13” x 16”.  If you like thicker crust, or you get tired easily, you can make a smaller pizza.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s nearly instant pizza.  It doesn’t have to be perfect.

I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you what to put on your nearly instant nearly perfect pizza crust.  Once you’ve thrown on or precisely placed your toppings, the pizza will bake in 10 to 20 minutes, depending on your oven temperature and how thin you made the crust.  I bake mine at 425 for fifteen minutes.

I’ve made four pizzas so far in 2011.***   They were all wildly different and they were all delicious, from the leftover eggplant parmesan one to the refried beans and salsa one.  I made pizza once in all of 2010.  It was fine, but unmemorable, because when you get all caught up in the process of doing it perfectly, you don’t much want to experiment.  Nearly instant pizza begs for experiments.  Next up – Greek, I think.  Then Indian.  Then – who knows?

* She doesn’t say, and anyone who invented this idea would be a saint not to brag about it, but then she’s Canadian, so maybe she did.  I don’t know.  I repeat her link, in deep gratitude. 

** No, not whole wheat – white flour.  You’re making pizza.  If you really must, you can use half whole wheat.  But only half.

*** I would have made more, but after you’ve eaten pizza for four meals in a row, you don't want pizza for a while.