One down, seven to go!

Tonight was, in a nutshell, somewhat disappointing. Unfortunately, it was my fault- my pizza sucked. We dubbed it "garlic breath"- not exactly something you'd line up around the block to taste. Though the pizza was sub-par, the recipe was actually quite good, it just needed to be altered a bit. I started by rolling out the dough and gently placing it onto the pizza stone. I spread the dough evenly around the circular pan making sure to leave extra at the edges for crust. After the dough was molded to the shape of a pizza, I put it aside, preheated the oven to 450 degrees, and started the olive oil mix. I used a small bowl to mix olive oil, dried oregano leaves, parsley flakes, freshly ground sea salt, black pepper, garlic powder, and a dash of onion powder. I mixed the olive oil with all the spices and then brushed it over the dough.

Afterwards, I took 3-4 garlic cloves, minced them with a food processor, and sprinkled over the pizza. Then, I took a few slices of white onion and drizzled them on top of the garlic and olive oil mix. After everything was settled, I finally started the cheese. The first layer was shredded mozzarella, then shredded parmesan. I took sliced provolone and broke it up into quarters draping it across the previous two layers of cheese. The final layer of cheese consisted of a mixture of shredded mozzarella, provolone, romano, and parmesan. This was it- the moment we had been waiting for; the pizza was complete and ready to be placed into its electric womb. I set the timer for 18 minutes and the countdown began. It seemed like forever waiting for the pizza to be ready but when I finally heard the timer beeping, it sounded like a harp chime, dancing its way into my ears. This was it, the moment of truth! We sliced the pizza into eighths and waited while it cooled. We placed two slices of pizza onto each plate- went in for a bite, and as my teeth broke down into the tip of the first slice of pizza, my taste buds went numb with pure excitement. My mouth was expecting a fierce fiesta, all it got was a boring hangout session with the kids who weren't even cool enough for the nerds but BAM! There's the garlic- ready to hit you like a ton of bricks. The pizza was way too salty, the olive oil base made it much greasier than I'd like. Overall, disappointing. Using our handy-dandy scorecards, we rated this pizza a 44 out of 60 giving it a solid B-/C+ grade. So much for the night of my life. *sigh* Well, off to hit the hay, another adventure awaits us tomorrow as Ryan is up to bat- making pizza number two for 8 Days of Pizza.

Stay cheesy!