Italian Pizza Margherita

Italian Pizza Margherita was named after the Queen of Italy. In 1889 a pizza maker in Naples made this pizza to represent the colors of the Italian flag red, white and green, in honor of the Queen. She loved it and the rest is history. It is made with simple ingredients, tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and basil. Now Pizza is supposed to made in a wood burning oven, this recipe can be made in your regular oven but technically it is not a real pizza but as close as you can get without a wood burning one. A funny story when I first made this. The dough recipe suggests you mound up the flour like a Mountain and make a crater to accept the yeast and liquid. Well my crater was not big enough and Mt. Vesuvius erupted, yeast water breaking through the mountain like a molten lava. I used everything at my disposal to contain the lava spewing from the mountain. It ended up just fine, perhaps it was the cross I made in the dough when left to rise. An old Italian trick! The lesson, make sure you make a large enough crater in your mountain to escape the drama of the eruption! Of course you can top it with whatever you like, but Pizza Margherita is simple and delicious!