Fall Pizza – Easy to Fall For

Fall pizza is easy to fall for because you can use almost any type of flour to make a heart crust. You can love the comfort bread crust and home pizza toppings! 😋 And call it a pie.

I think bread flour is the best pizza flour to use for a softer pizza crust in any shape. You decide how thick you want your pizza crust to be.

Pizza is the perfect comfort food for a cozy fall meal and all year round. And they can be made hearty and healthy if you like!

Unlike bread making that needs a higher protein or gluten flour 🍞 for a higher rise, a pizza crust can work well for gluten-free people too. You don’t always need to use gluten bread (or 00) flour.

Especially flat bread pizzas that are more like cracker crusts, where the toppings are the stars.

Goes to show you, you can make a nice crust from just about anything. 😀… maybe not sawdust, but you know where I’m going.

That confidence came from practicing and making pizzas as one of my first loves (and from my food service work journey where I sniffed food all day).

But my humble beginnings were in a busy pizza shop as a teen. That’s a throw back to when we sported our baseball caps that was part of our work uniform that we called our clown suits.

And us clowns banded together, so we were used to our daily attire 🤡

Who knew caps would become such popular wear?

And maybe that’s why I still like to sport a baseball cap (decades later) when I’m baking or near the kitchen.

Those pizza making shop days were so much FUN and I ended up staying on there for 4 years before I was rushed off to college.

The shop was like a second home to me before then. During fall football season 🏈, we were busy pizza making bees lined up on the make line. 🐝 🐝 🐝

And as busy bee pizza makers, we were not watching any TV.

We worked as a team under fun pressure to crank out pizzas as fast as we could… 30 minutes fast to be precise… that was the expectation from order taking to door delivery.

So that boiled down to about one-and-a-half minutes to make and prep each pizza from dough to toppings, and then into the magical baking oven.

That reminds me of an I Love Lucy chocolate factory episode 📺

But we weren’t in a losing game most of the time… occasionally, when the line was backed up or an oven broke down, production came to a halt… it was people (and not machine production run) so we didn’t have to scarf down pizza ingredients to keep up.

…We just chilled out during those times.

And when back on track, our heads were down during the rush (that often was during a football rush). But if you weren’t a pizza ingredient or pizza-in-the-making in front of our eyes, we didn’t have time to look up.

Translated: if Travis Kelce had proposed to Taylor Swift on the field or they came into our shop, those moments would be missed.

…Our fall pizza makeline (production line) took priority no matter what.

And was worth it because making pizzas was a one-of-a-kind experience. Those franchise booming years were a recorded phenomenon…

It was history in the making as business college text books I read even had case studies on the 30-minute guarantee I knew firsthand.

And in the shop organized chaos hoopla, while breathing in pizzas, I learned the trick to consistent pizza crusts.

The shop dough would rest in the cold walk-in cooler overnight and get hand sprayed with water to keep from drying out.

It was such a critically important job that only the managers who were the kings of the shop made sure to treat the dough like babies.

They gave the dough some TLC and the proper rest needed that dough babies need to rise on game day.

And when game time was ON, the dough slapper would crank out dough crust, one after another with quick speed, tossing them in the air like frisbee footballs to the next team member…

Sometimes I was the receiver. And that’s where my play was.

If you were assigned the next role, you could catch the frisbee-shaped dough with your two fists and knuckles. Then you would flip out the dough on a pizza screen so they would lay flat and taut without wrinkles.

There’s a lot of dough gymnastic action going on. 🤸‍♀️

Or they were already set on a screen as the dough slapper’s choice. You could say they’re the Quarterbacks calling the plays.

And then after center screen placement, the pizza sauce is added. That’s a 10-second or so second position, that I was told was the second most important position too.

There’s no dilly-dally time to waste during the busy hours.

Saucing takes a little smooth surfing action 🏄 to evenly spread the sauce… stopping right at the crust like a professional skier at the bottom of a hill. ⛷️

During the slow hours, saucing was a skill that I got to learn, perfect, and throw the ladle in the sauce bucket without it splashing to show I was “a professional”… and I wish I could say that skill has paid off as a useful one, but all I can say is it was FUN. 😀

And today, that’s still the sauce technique I use at home under no pressure where all I do is imperfectly slow bake and prep.

And in that spirit, you can bake your own sporty no-stress pizza at home in about 35 minutes (and in less time than it takes to order out).

Once you know the basics you can apply this to any type of healthy pizza, fall pizza recipe, or crust style that fits your fancy.

Pizza Making 101 (For Regular Home Pizza Crusts)

You need 4 ingredients for pizza: flour, salt, water, and yeast.

Sound familiar…maybe?

It’s the same 4 ingredients you need for bread making.

(Tip: try using semolina flour for your bench flour underneath your pizza for a nice crunch and to make your pizza experience special compared to bread making).

Semolina flour good for pizza bottoms feel like coarser desert sand and is more uniform than sugar or salt. It’s not fine like most all-purpose flours like we used in the shop.

Here’s how you can make homemade pizza step-by-step.

You’ll find the recipe for a light Neapolitan style pizza crust (that’s know to be charred and airy).

Other simple tips for fall pizza include skipping the brown charring of the crust. Regular baked crusts are even easier to make.

Those are like the regular crusts we had in the pizza shop or when you order a pizza.

…where you simply mix the 4 ingredients, knead the dough, let the dough proof for a couple hours, shape and flatten the dough except for the crust, and then bake on 350°F for about 20 minutes.

From there, I then add the toppings that are already pre-cooked. I do that part separately as different toppings need different cook times in a regular oven. And from bake start to finish, a pizza is done in 30-35 golden minutes. That’s still a magical number today.

In the pizza shop ovens, we always added the uncooked flat meats and veggies first, and then the lumpy items.

They were timed to perfection because through the conveyor belt, the heat was distributed specifically for the needs of pizzas. They only needed 8-10 minutes of baking time.

In the shop, they also weren’t experimenting with new toppings. But they did have pre-made thin crusts (like a cracker crust) and pan pizza crusts that were baked in different ovens.

But the regular crust was the one that most people loved…

Like I did with this sea creature pizza 🦑..which btw, you don’t have to be Jacques Cousteau adventurous to come up with your own unusual creations…  like squid here that has a tougher texture. And I made a whole wheat flour crust.

And if you’re a more traditional pizza fan, I GET it… I used to hate anchovies and now I love ’em. I also found a Hawaiian pineapple and ham (sweet and sour) combination delicious… but some don’t like that adventure. You decide!

And besides traditional mushrooms that I’ve always loved, onions make for great toppings on traditional fall pizzas.

Onions (and mushrooms 🍄) are great for boosting your immunity during cold and flu season. Red onions are more mild tasting than Vidalia or white onions. 🧅 And you can mix and match.

In the spirit of veggie fall pizza, you can have fun with your rings.

For more savory and simple delicious ideas, you could add za’atar spices to your fall pizza… or even pair with crunchy za’atar crackers. Crumble on top for some extra crunch. Why not?

What else can you home fall pizza dream up?