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For the crust:
Into the bowl of a food processor (perhaps it will save you some trouble if I mention that the motor of my mini-processor stalled and nearly burnt up when I tried to use it for this), put:
1 1/5 cups (360 ml) flour - I use white, unbleached
1 (5 ml) teaspoon salt
1/2 (2.5 ml) teaspoon yeast - at altitude, you might want to cut this a little so that the dough does not rise too quickly; if it rises too fast, the crust -- the flavor of which develops during the dough's rising -- will not taste much better than typing paper

Put 1 1/4 cups (300 ml) warm-ish (not as warm as a bath; not as cool as what first comes out of the tap) into a measuring cup with a spout or anything from which you can easily pour -- not dump -- water into the food processor's feed tube. DON'T POUR IT YET AND, ALSO, YOU MIGHT NOT NEED ALL OF IT.

Turn on the food processor. Mine doesn't have multiple speeds, just "pulse" and "on" and "off", so I go with "on" here.

While the food processor is running, into the feed tube pour 1 cup (240 ml) of the water in a slow but steady stream. The flour mixture will first start to look like it is making lots of little spit wads and, if this is enough water, will within a few seconds (3 to 5, I think; not 20) form something that really does look like a ball.

When the ingredients look like a ball, let the processor throw the ball around the bowl about sixty times. If you lose count, it's probably better to err on the high side.

Still got a bunch of little spit wads? SLOWLY add water, not more than a teaspoon or so at a time. Watch it carefully; when enough water has been added, the ball forms itself in just a few seconds.

This is the trickiest part. If you don't add enough water, the dough ball won't form. If you add too much, you'll have something like taffy, but less tasty. The fix for that is adding more flour and boy, howdy do you want to avoid that. There seems to be an inversely proportional relationship between humidity and how much water is needed.

But whew! Turns out it is a lot easier than these instructions look, so drop maybe a teaspoon of olive oil into the bottom of a bowl at least a 2 quart (.5 litre) bowl. Throw the dough into the bowl and roll it around so that the oil lightly coats the dough. Cover the bowl with cling film or a cloth towel and leave the whole business in the warmest part of the kitchen or on top of the clothes dryer, if it's warm but not hot to the touch.

Pre-heating the oven and the pizza stone

About a half hour after making the dough, position a pizza stone (this is one of two pretty important implements in these proceedings) on the middle rack of the oven, preheat the oven to 475F.

Back to the dough, which is about to become a crust

Around the time the oven has reached its temperature, check the dough by plunging a (clean) finger into it. If it has risen enough, the hole your finger made will pretty much keep its shape. If the dough needs to rise more, the indentation will start immediately to rise bump back up.

The next part involves flattening the dough ball into the size you want for your pizza. My experience is that a 13" - 14" circle makes a thin, crisp crust.

This is the point at which some people call in the pizza peel. A pizza peel is like a huge spatula, usually made of wood but sometimes of steel. I'm not quite ready for it, but if you wish to involve it throughout the flattening process, sprinkle a little corn meal (corn flour) on the peel: enough that you can see it, but not so much that you can't see the wood! You'll need corn meal on the peel in any case; might as well do it now. Commence flattening..

You can flatten it a little with your (clean) hands and then begin throwing it around in the air, just like you've seen. Centrifugal force works! I use a French rolling pin -- like a thick wooden dowel -- to roll the thing out to the thickness I want. A very little flour, less than a teaspoon, dusted onto the rolling pin and the spotlessly clean work surface, helps to keep the dough from sticking.

When the dough is thin enough, if it isn't already on the peel, put it there. If you rolled it out, it's easy to fold it into quarters to transfer it to the peel. If you're tossing it, just let it drop onto the peel, Mr Smarty Pants!

On the peel, I like to pinch up the edge a little because I probably put on more sauce and cheese than you want. Also, if the peel doesn't have quite enough corn meal on it and the thing has to be shaken a little too vigorously to get onto the stone, even a little rim helps to contain things. (In that event, you're going to have a mess; we're talking damage prevention here.)

Pizza heresy alert

Here, as in so many places, I depart from the masters. I slide the crust into the oven for 2 to 3 minutes. This seems to avoid the pizza becoming too soggy; alternatively, you could probably brush the crust with a little olive oil. Heck, you can do that even if you pre-bake; why not?

Topping: sauce and cheese

Whether pre-baked or not, this is where toppings come into play. Frankly, if you are enough of a novice to be plowing through these tedious instructions, you could do worse than to open an 8 ounce (240 ml) tin of tomato sauce and brush it on the crust. I use a fancier sauce (just the sauce, not the ravioli, too), but defaulting to tinned sauce -- you could dress it up with some gently sauteéd onion and garlic, maybe a small onion chopped very fine and three crushed garlic cloves -- wouldn't bother me a bit. Last on is about a cup (240 ml) of shredded cheese: a combination of mozzarella and parmesan, for example. That's a reasonably cheesy pizza; perhaps you could do with less.

About other toppings, my opinion is that they exist mostly to make up for inferior pizza. But suit yourself. In the Oregon life, I regularly carmelized buckets of onions to use in between the sauce and cheese. That sounds quite good, in fact. Maybe I'll make the effort soon.

Ready, steady, BAKE!

Open the oven door; the heat should just about blast your face. Throw a couple of teaspoons of corn meal on the pizza stone and then position the peel just above the stone. If there's enough corn meal on the peel, the pizza should slide off pretty easily. If the pizza is stuck and you haven't already spattered it all over the inside of the oven, one option is to pull it out, close the oven, and try to lift the edges enough to slip corn meal underneath. Live and learn.

From this point, just watch it. Eight or nine minutes is about right for our taste. The main thing is not to let it go so long that the cheese on top burns.

Done!

When you think the pizza is done, use the peel to remove the pizza from the oven. I slide it onto a big cutting board so that the peel doesn't get as messy and then, instead of a pizza cutter, I use a nice long knife to cut wedges. I haven't yet found a pizza cutter that works very well, and I'm something of a gadget geek.

Getting back into the groove of this took me only three tries. The first wasn't bad, the second was not so great, and tonight we rang the bell. It's way easier than this makes it sound.

No warranties about how this will work for you.

patrica "at" g mail dot com

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