A couple of weeks ago I was at Nello’s and I was just thinking about how good their pizza is and how it seems impossible to reproduce good pizza at home. Then I thought it would be cool to go on a mission and make a bunch of pizzas and try to improve them until I arrived at something that could compete with pizza from a restaurant. I started with a little research on the Internet and came across this page, which inspired me because the pizza looked awesome. I told my brother Mike about the idea and he was in. We started by just eliminating some of the common mistakes of homemade pizza. We set the oven as high as it could go (550 degrees) and made sure the pizza stone was hot before putting the pizza on it. I suggested we do the margherita style using fresh mozzarella and plain tomatoes. We used canned whole skinned tomatoes, then ran them through the Cuisinart. You can read more about the first few on Mike’s site.

Anyway, today was the first attempt at my house. My kitchen isn’t as well equipped as my mom’s, so it was a bit more work. We had to make the dough without the Cuisinart, but otherwise it wasn’t too bad. Today we did the Nello’s clone, using whole slices of tomato with mozzarella on top. This time we used gangster style mozzarella from Safeway, but it was pretty good. Anyway, here’s the pizza before cooking:

…and here it is done:

This time we gave the dough some time to rise before making the pizza, and I think it helped. You can see it’s pretty puffy. The pizza was pretty good, although it was a little lacking in flavor, especially when you hit a piece with no cheese. I am itching to try the oven cleaning mode trick suggested on the site I mentioned.