More pizza-making

I've grown fond of pizza-making for Sunday nights. I have plenty of time to make the dough and let it rise and try new sauce, etc. But it's been a month or more since I've made homemade pizza.

I tried new dough and sauce recipes tonight. The dough recipe is from Michael Ruhlman's book "Ratio," which I've mentioned before. He gives a basic bread recipe, then offers variations, one of which is pizza dough.

He recommends using a scale to weigh ingredients as it's more accurate than volume measurements. So, I pulled out the kitchen scale my parents got me for Christmas and did it his way.

The dough is:
20 oz. bread flour (I used all-purpose flour because I still haven't brought myself to keeping bread flour on hand.)
12 oz. water
2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. active or instant yeast
1 oz. olive oil

You mix it, knead it, let it double in size. Then let it rest and roll it out.

This made a denser, less sticky dough than the other recipes I've tried. That made kneading it and rolling it even easier. In fact, the dough was a consistency that I momentarily thought about spinning the dough out instead of rolling it. Of course, I knew I couldn't succeed at that, but the consistency was such that I did lay it over my fist and punch it out in the air a bit without fear of punching a hole through it.

I didn't notice that much difference in the consistency of the baked dough in the final product, though. Perhaps it's because the pizza stone just does its thing in crisping the bottom pretty efficiently.

For sauce, I tried a recipe I found online. It's called easy pizza sauce, and it's definitely easy. I like that if I just keep a can of tomato paste in the pantry, I could make this at a moment's notice and it doesn't require any chopping. (I have a jar of minced garlic in my fridge; otherwise, I guess you'd have to chop that.) It was pretty tasty, too. I think I like it better than the first sauce I made. This one definitely had a garlic flavor to it. I wouldn't mind finding a slightly sweet sauce to try.