Birthday Pizza: Part 2

Since I know you are all on the edges of your seats wondering about how our pizza turned out, I'll spare you the suspense and confirm it was totally delicious.

I used Rose Levy Berenbaum's recipe for pizza dough. Our normal dough recipe, from a random but awesome cookbook we picked up while we were in Italy, yields a super thin, crisp pizza, which is what I'm always looking for. We all agreed that RLB's dough has great flavor and texture but a) it is a bit tricky to work with and b) is a little thicker than I like. However, my mom and brother prefer a very bready pizza, so this pizza was a good compromise.

Our first pizza, with cherry tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, Italian sausage, basil (and no tomato sauce):


My brother is of the "pile as many toppings on your pizza as possible" school, as you can see; his pie had tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, mushrooms, tons of sausage, red onion, and basil.

After the first two pizzas, I stopped taking pictures because everyone was wolfing down the pizza too quickly. Such is life.

By the way, pizza is one of my favorite, favorite ways to entertain friends who love food as much as we do. Buy wine, lots of pizza toppings, and spend the evening inventing pizzas. I mean, it is still fun and delicious if your friends don't love food... but I'll admit I was a little disappointed that my brother preferred shredded mozzarella to the burrata, didn't care that the burrata was from a buffalo, and was not at all interested in putting arugula on his pizza. We are sooo different.