Our family LOVES  to have a pizza and movie night on Friday nights. 

We put a blanket on the floor; and the kids sit on the floor and eat their pizza and watch a movie. There were  only a few problems with this scenario:  my children hated the cheap frozen pizzas, I hated paying for good pizzas, and I found making pizzas every week grew old. So last year, a friend in our church gave my mom a recipe that uses a whole 5 pound bag of flour. You can use this recipe to make bread, rolls, and even pizza crusts! When my mom makes the recipe, she does a combination of all 3 things, but I usually only make pizza! I roll out the crusts rather thin, so this recipe will make 8-9 pizzas for me. Let me explain and show you how I do it:

• First, you make the dough. This process of making the dough and rolling out the dough can take a couple of hours.

Recipe for the pizza dough:

1. Take a 5 lb. bag of flour and dump it into a very large pan! I use my roasting pan.
2. Pour 2 packages of yeast into a small bowl. Add 1 cup of warm water and 1 teaspoon of sugar. Stir until sugar and yeast dissolves. I let this mixture sit while I do the next step to allow time for the yeast to activate.
3. In a small sauce pan, melt one stick of butter or margarine, add one cup of water, two tablespoons of salt, and 1/2 cup of sugar. Heat this mixture until the sugar and salt are melted. (This will only take a couple of minutes.)
4. Pour the liquid in the saucepan (step #3) into the flour (step #1) and add 5 cups of water. Stir.
5. Add the yeast mixture (step #2) and knead. I put all of the dough onto a floured pastry sheet and knead it.
6. Let it rise for one hour. I put it back in my roaster pan, put on the lid, and let it sit in a warm spot.

• Prepare all the toppings while the dough rises. 
  • I get a 5-pound block of cheese when it is on sale and shred it with my Kitchenaid stand mixer shredder attachment.
  • You could cook up or dice any meat and chop any veggies you would like to put on your pizzas. 
  • I put all these toppings along with 2 jars of spaghetti sauce (For 5 larger pizzas, I needed more than one jar of spaghetti sauce), a jar of alfredo sauce, and parmesan cheese in the middle of my kitchen table.
  • I spray my pizza pans/cookie sheets that have a lip with cooking spray. (I use 8-9 pans, depending on how thin I roll the dough–I use one 12″round pan, two 13″ round pans, one 14″ round pan, one 16″ round pan, a 9″ x 13″ pan, two 15″ x 10″ pans, and one 18″ x 12″ pan.)
• Start rolling out the dough.  I take the amount of dough I think I will need, roll it out, and place it on the pan. If there is excess, I cut it off with my kitchen shears and use it for the next pizza. When the crust is ready, I place the pan along the edge of my kitchen table. When I am done with the pizzas, they are completely around the outside of my table.
• Time to put the toppings on the pizzas! This is what the kids do! I pour some sauce on, they spread it out, and then put on the toppings. We like what we call “white sauce” as well as “red sauce”, so we use alfredo sauce too!
• Bake the pizzas. If you are going to eat them right away, bake them for about 20 minutes at 400°. For the pizzas you will freeze, bake them for 10 minutes at 400°.
• Cool the pizzas that you want to freeze and cover them with aluminum foil. I then stack the pizzas all up and place them in a big plastic bag. I use a 13-gallon kitchen trash bag. Then they go into your freezer! Voila! No more cooking pizzas for a while!
• To heat pizzas, pre-heat oven to 400°. Stick frozen pizza in oven. Cook for about 15 minutes or until cheese is melted and pizza looks done.

Enjoy!

Cost analysis:

$1.75 for flour, $0.70 for yeast, $0.50 for [email protected]$2.95 for crusts

$10-$15 for cheese, $4 for sauce, $5 at most for other toppings=$24 at the high end=

$27 for 9 pizzas at high end; maybe $22 or cheaper if you can get really good sales.