I recently bought tomatoes from Safeway when they were on sale, the really good vine ripened ones!  I’m not sure if anyone else does this; but sometimes I get so excited about grocery shopping that I over buy.  Well that is what happened to me with the tomatoes, bought way too many of them!

So the day was filled with watching football, more football and we love to munch while we watch football.  So I thought lets make a margarita pizza!  I had never made one of these before; but used to order it all the time when I frequented an Italian restaurant back in the Midwest.

So I started with my old standby thin pizza crust recipe.

1 pkg.  yeast

1/4 tsp. sugar

3/4 cup water

1 3/4 cup flour

1/2 tsp. salt

Mix the sugar, yeast and water (make sure this is warm enough so the yeast starts) let set for 10 minutes.  Then mix in the flour and salt.  Knead for 5 minutes and spread out on a pizza pan that has been lightly oiled.  Let the crust rest for 10 minutes before piling on the toppings!

I then took the tomatoes about 8 and sliced them really thin.  I gave them a sprinkle of kosher salt so they would “sweat” out some of their juice!  I don’t like a soggy crust!  I then took the tomato slices and placed them in a colander to drain off the liquid.

While the tomatoes were sweating, I lightly rubbed the crust with olive oil and then minced 3 cloves of garlic on top.

The next step was carefully placing the sliced tomatoes on top of the crust.  Go ahead and place them all the way to the edge of the crust.

Then I took a 1/2# of fresh mozzarella chesse that I bought with the intensions of making caprese salad and placed that on top of the tomatoes.  If you can buy the fresh mozzarella, it really is best for this pizza!

The final step is taking a lot of leaves of fresh basil and slicing them into ribbons and sprinkling over top.  Then I didn’t think I had enough cheese so I took a handful of fresh Parmesan and topped it off!

The trick to a good thin crust pizza is:  Move your oven rack to the lowest shelf and preheat oven to 500 degrees.  Bake the pizza for about 10 minutes on the bottom rack then move it to the top rack and broil for about 2-3 minutes or until the desired amount of browning is done!

Let the pizza rest for 5 minutes before slicing!  Pour yourself a glass of vino and enjoy!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 9:18 am and is filed under Pizza & Sandwiches. Tags for this post: appetizer, margarita pizza, pizza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.