Is it Possible to Make Artisan-Style Pizza in 5 Minutes?

Here comes an admission that I find pretty embarrassing: I regularly buy frozen pizzas.

We reserve such pizzas for crazy days like the one we'll have tomorrow. Mondays start bright and early at our house since we have to get ready for a visit from Sweetie Pie's speech therapist. That means I have to get all of us bathed and dressed (as well as vacuum up the graham cracker crumbs that mysteriously got ground into the living room carpet) by 8 AM. There is also a piano lesson for The Thinker and separate basketball practices for The Thinker and Mini Me. (Did I mention that basketball practice is a 45 minute drive from our home?) In between all the appointments, I manage to squeeze in homeschooling and laundry.

Frozen pizza just fits our schedule on days like that.

But what if it was possible to make homemade pizza in the same amount of time it would take to bake a frozen pizza? What if you could save money, cut out preservatives, and break yet another link to the processed food industry? Oh, and did I mention it would taste far better than frozen fare?

Enter the book Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day. After I read an article on this quick method of making homemade pizza in Mother Earth News, I decided to spend part of my February prepping budget on the book.





The method literally could not be easier. Mix up a four ingredient pizza dough, all from your food storage. Refrigerate. Use any time within 14 days.  The refrigeration actually improves the dough, making it easier to handle and giving it a bit of a sourdough flavor. Plus, you can make enough dough for eight+ pizzas at once, saving you time and dishes to wash!


Here's the recipe for a basic crust. This will make enough dough for four, 12-inch pizzas:

1-1/2 c. lukewarm water
1 T. yeast (instant or dry active - doesn't matter)
1 t. table salt
3-3/4 c. unbleached, all purpose flour (The authors of the book say the recipe won't turn out right if you use bleached flour.)

Add water to a large mixing bowl or other container. Add yeast and salt, stir. Add flour and mix until combined. Cover the bowl with plastic or a loose lid (you don't want it to be perfectly air tight). Allow to rise at room temperature for about two hours. Refrigerate for up to 14 days or use right away. The dough is easier to handle after it has been chilled.


This pizza is designed to be baked at high temperatures on a baking stone,which gives the crust its wonderful texture. You can also use a heavy duty baking sheet if you would prefer.

You can use canned pizza sauce if you like, or do what I did and make sauce ahead. I took 2-28 oz. cans of crushed tomatoes and seasoned them with minced garlic, oregano, basil, and crushed red pepper. I simmered the mixture over low heat for two hours. I then measured out 1/3 c. portions (enough for one 12" pizza) and froze them individually. Now all I have to do is quickly defrost however many bags of sauce while I preheat my baking stone for 30 minutes at 550 degrees.

The crust is rolled out to 1/8th inch thick and is topped with about 1/3 c. of pizza sauce and whatever else you like. I used 1-1/2 oz. turkey pepperoni and 3 oz. fresh mozzarella.

The trickiest part of the process is baking the pizzas, or rather, transferring the crust and toppings to the baking stone without it sticking to your pizza peel (I don't have a peel so I used a baking sheet like this one.)

Turkey pepperoni and fresh mozzarella pizza

After about eight minutes in the oven, I became nervous about the pepperoni burning so I took the pizza out. That was a bit too early as the crust wasn't quite as crispy as it could be and the cheese should have browned more. I'll get all the ins and outs figured out with practice. Even so, the pizza tasted amazing! The kids snarfed it down so fast you would have thought they were in a competition. And would you believe that a 1/4 of this pizza is only 225 calories and 7 grams of fat?

This was so quick and easy to make, I think it is safe to say that we've kicked frozen pizza to the curb.

Here are some resources if you're interesting in trying this method out:

• Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg, MD and Zoe Francois. The book has many different crust recipes (including whole wheat!) and topping ideas. 
• "The Secret to Incredibly Easy Homemade Pizza" in the February/March 2012 Mother Earth News. This gives more details about the recipe than I wrote above. 
• "Pizza-Making Supplies: Build Your Arsenal", also from Mother Earth News. Links to kitchen items you'll find handy for this recipe. 
• http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/  The authors' website. Good information here, too. 

A Review: Emergency Food Storage and Survival Handbook by Peggy Layton

I’ve never been dissatisfied with living in the Midwest until I started getting into prepping. Materials for prepping are so much more easily available in the West. I’ve heard that regular ol’ Wal-Mart carries #10 cans of dehydrated foods and big buckets of wheat in certain areas! I’m sure many libraries in the West also carry a variety of food storage and preparedness books. I’ve not had much luck finding any at our local libraries.

I did, however, stumble upon a copy of Emergency Food Storage & Survival Handbook by Peggy Layton at a big city library. I was so excited I did the moonwalk down the aisle. The reason I embarrassed my darling children with my dance moves is that Peggy Layton is one of the big names in food storage literature. She has written about eight different food storage cookbooks that are highly recommended.

The subtitle of this book is “Everything You Need to Know to Keep Your Family Safe in a Crisis”. I tend to disagree with that since this book really doesn’t touch many of the key survivalist topics in detail. It does, however, cover food storage extensively as well as 72-hour kits and water storage to a lesser extent.

The chapters of the book are entitled:

Preparing for Short-Term Emergencies

Storing Water for Emergency Use

The Economics of Long-Term Emergency Storage

The Logistics of Long-Term Emergency Storage

Building Your Stockpile of Food and Other Necessities

Obtaining Food for Storage

Implementing Your Food Storage Plan

Recipes Using Stored Foods

One of the strengths of this book is the many checklists Layton includes. Want to know what should be in your car kit or canning equipment? She’s got a checklist for that. She also includes many pages of inventory planning charts that you could photocopy and use for your own family.

There are many different types of recipes included in this book. They use commonly stored items like beans, dried eggs, powdered milk, etc. I have only tried one of them - Cracked Whole Wheat Cereal - and it turned out to be a failure. That may be more my fault than the recipe's fault, though, and I'll discuss that next week. The recipes do seem a little basic, but they would be a good starting place to design a meal that caters to your family’s taste. I’m kind of scared to try the “pinto bean punch”, though. I don’t think beans combined with 7-Up would ever agree with my family’s palate!

This book was obviously written with a wide audience in mind. She has taken this notion as far as not even bringing up the LDS food storage guidelines (ie. 150 lb of wheat per adult per year, etc.). These guidelines are accepted by preppers far and wide, so I’m not entirely sure why she omitted them in her book.

In fact Layton never gives you an idea of how much of anything you should be storing. She suggests listing some recipes and then figuring out how much it would take to make three months of those meals. Multiply by 2, 3, or 4 and you will know how much to purchase for 6, 9 or 12 months of meals. That’s all well and good, but I think it’s important to give food storage newbies an idea of just how much this will be. This is not to overwhelm anyone, but it is important to be realistic. The 202 lb of wheat I just ordered sounds huge, but because I have an idea of the amounts you are supposed to store I know that is only about 3 months worth of wheat for my family.

I’m being nitpicky. Overall, this is a great book that you can learn a lot from. I do not feel compelled to buy my own copy of the book because I a) have a lot of this information from other sources, namely Food Storage Made Easy and b) I’m going to photocopy the relevant pages to add to my food storage recipe or preparedness binders.

You can buy Emergency Food Storage & Survival Handbook at amazon.com or www.peggylayton.com.

A Review: Emergency Preparedness the Right Way, by Howard Godfrey

The first prepping book I bought was Emergency Preparedness the Right Way by Howard Godfrey. I’m not exactly sure why I decided to purchase this one over the many other books on this topic available. I was just browsing on amazon.com and somehow this book ended up in my cart. I think it was the cute little girl on the cover that did it.

This is a small book – only 143 pages including the index and references. Small though it may be, it does cover the major survival topics. Chapters include:

-Planning and other random thoughts

-Water

                                       -Food

                                       -Storage Tips

                                     -Cooking, lights and fuel

                                     -Medical and sanitation

                                     -72-hour kits

                                     -Miscellaneous recipes (HH says: These are truly
                                      miscellaneous. Don’t buy this book for food storage recipes)

                                     -Improvised equipment

                                     -Some Last Thoughts

One thing I appreciated about this book is that it makes survival topics very accessible for the novice prepper. It’s not full of jargon or highly technical discussions. I got a good basis and it inspired me to do further research.

One weakness of this book is that it has a bit of filler. The author includes long (the one on pinto beans is 1+ pages) quotations from scholarly studies done at BYU. While the information may be relevant, the author could have simply summarized the findings of the studies. It felt like the author was trying to beef up the page count of his book, much like my students would do when I was a teacher back in the day. Add a bit of filler, make the margins 2 inches, jack up the font size and PRESTO you have a 5-7 page research paper, teacher! This book is self-published. This kind of stuff, plus the random nature of the first and last chapters, wouldn’t have made it past the editing process of most publishing houses.

Since some people are put off by heavily Mormon content, I will make note of it when I do reviews. Personally it doesn’t bother me. Some of the nicest people I have met are Mormons. I also have read enough Mormon preparedness documents to be able to quote their scriptures by now! The Mormons are on their game when it comes to prepping. The author does say "Remember, if you are prepared you shall not fear", which is a Mormon scriptural reference. That is about it.

This wasn’t a bad start to my prepping library. It covers the most important topics, albeit not in great depth. There is some filler included, but it is an adequate primer for the beginning prepper. I’ll keep this for reference and it has whetted my appetite for more.

Emergency Preparedness the Right Way is available at Amazon.com