Garlic & Herb Crusted Pizza Recipe

Garlic & Herb Crusted Pizza Recipe

• September 23, 2012

My roommate, Rob, and I tried our hand at baking a pizza the other weekend after we saw some Garlic & Herb pizza dough at Trader Joe's. Personally, I can't resist anything that has garlic in it and you can't go wrong with herbs. Am I right? We piled on as many vegetables as we could find in our fridge, plenty of Mozzarella, and we had a quick and easy way to celebrate the weekend. I used to think making a pizza involved a lot of hard work - turns out, once you've already got the dough, it's a piece of cake! Or, in this case, 8 pieces of pizza! ;)

Ingredients
1 bag of pizza dough
1 cup of chopped onions
1 chopped garlic clove
1 roma tomato
1/2 sweet red pepper
1 1/2 cup of shredded mozzarella cheese
1 handful of spinach leaves
1/2 cup of mushrooms
3 basil leaves
1 cup of tomato sauce
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Flour

First, we preheated the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Rob was in charge of the vegetables, so he chopped up some onions and one clove and garlic and simmered them in some olive oil. He also sliced up one roma tomato, some red pepper, and two mushrooms. I'm anti-mushroom so he only covered half the pie with some of those bad boys. I was in charge of the construction of the pizza so I pounded out that dough like a pizza expert (with some flour sprinkled on the surface), evenly poured on the sauce, and very generously scattered the cheese (you can never have too much cheese on pizza). We ripped up some spinach leaves as a finishing touch and then popped our pizza into the oven.

Our only mistake was that we only baked our pizza for 8 minutes, since that's what the packaging suggested. My friend Stephen, who's an epic food blogger, later recommended that we let the pizza bake for at least 15 minutes. Whoops! At least it was still delicious. I think I'll be trying out his pesto pizza recipe next.