Hank's Homemade Cornmeal Pizza Crust

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Let the Big Dog eat! courtesy Karen Keb

According to industry calculations, Americans eat roughly 100 acres of pizza per day. And those pizzas are built on roughly 100 acres of pizza crust. Whether you prefer thick crust, thin crust, crispy crust or stuffed crust, that doughy foundation can make or break the eating experience. If creating crust, one of the simplest forms of yeast bread, is an impediment to your making pizza at home, read on. Making a tasty cornmeal pizza crust isn’t so daunting as parlor managers would have you believe.

When I was young, about the only kind of pizza that ever came through our house was homemade. So delicious was my mother’s sliced Smokie Link–topped pie that for many years I requested it for my birthday supper, along with chocolate mousse pie for dessert. Part of what I really liked about Mom’s pizza was the crust … crisp, yet yeasty and not too thick. Since homemade pizza only materialized once or twice per year, I always thought it must be terribly difficult to create. I figured the tough part was creating the crust.

Fast forward close to five decades or so, and homemade pizza hits our table at least once a week and sometimes twice. It turns out that this dish is pretty easy to make – it’s actually simple if you keep a couple of balls of pizza dough in the fridge or freezer. My preference for sauce is homemade pesto, and I enjoy toppings like garden-fresh shallots, peppers and tomatoes along with farm-fresh pork sausage and fresh mozzarella cheese. My favorite crust is one I adapted from a recipe that my Partner in Culinary Crime turned me on to some time ago (a hand-scribbled version of it is clipped to the fridge with a magnet). This crust is simple to make and stores unbaked very well.