A pizza I didn't mess up!

A few years back, when I was living in D.C., I bought a $9 pizza stone at Target thinking it would change my life.  Since then, I have never made a good pizza.  I usually use the Trader Joe's refrigerated pizza dough, which you can find in a variety of delicious flavors at any Trader Joe's for under a $1.   You can make an entire pizza for less than $7 that is much, much better than any other place (unless you live in New York or New Haven).

At first, I didn't realize you need to pre-heat the pizza stone which of course meant I was cooking the pizza for an hour and inevitably burning the cheese, while waiting for the dough to cook. 

And then I found on the internet that you should not only pre-heat the pizza stone, but also pre-heat the crust to avoid the burning of the cheese problem. 

So finally, I put all of these pieces of advice (which I now feel may actually be common sense) to make a great pizza.  Recipe is below the picture.

For this awesome pizza, I used:

1 bag of Trader Joe's refrigerated whole wheat pizza dough

Pizza sauce -- very easy to make and the recipe makes 2 servings of sauce.  Another recipe from AllRecipes.com:  http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Easy-Pizza-Sauce-I/Detail.aspx

• This recipe uses tomato paste, garlic, dried basil and oregano, salt and pepper, water and olive oil.
• I highly recommend that you make the sauce a day ahead to let the flavors blend.
• I also highly recommend that you reduce the water needed for the recipe to no more than 1 cup of water and if you want a thicker sauce, you should also reduce the amount of olive oil you use.

1 - 1.5 cups of part-skim, low moisture shredded mozzarella

Any and all toppings that you want -- I usually just mince 3-4 cloves of garlic as well as maybe 1/2 of a large fresh jalepeno for my pizzas.

To make the pizza:

• Preheat your pizza stone at least 30-40 minutes at the full temperature recommended for your dough.
• Follow the Trader Joe's directions to roll the pizza dough (and depending on the dough you use, you might want to hand stretch it to prepare it as some of the flavors do not take well to a rolling pin!)
• Throw the dough onto the hot stone, and preheat the dough for 5-7 minutes.
• Take the preheated dough out of the oven, sprinkle mozzarella and toppings.
• Bake another ten minutes, or until the cheese is completely melted AND the center of the pizza dough is fully cooked through (poke in a knife or fork in the center of the pie to make sure it is no longer doughy)

Enjoy!