There are a million pizza recipes online. The best pizzas are (in my opinion) cold-proofed sourdough on a hot woodfired oven. Typically high hydration, and unforgiving if you don’t develop enough gluten. Not to mention you need the oven! Here’s one of mine that’s much more forgiving and, if you close your eyes, basically pizza!
Cheats easy pizza – the dough
A low-cost, low-difficulty impression of a good pizza. Good enough to fuel you through the evening
Prep Time
15 mins mixing, 3.5 hrs proof
Cook time
10 mins
Serves
2
Meal
Dinner
Ingredients
- Strong white flour – 265 g
- Sugar – 1 tbsp/12.5 g
- Salt – 0.25 tsp/1.5 g
- Dried active yeast – 0.5 tsp/2 g
- Baking powder – 0.5 tsp/2.3 g
- Whole milk – 25 ml
Directions
- Preheat oven to as hot as it will go. If you have a thick cast iron pan or baking stone, put that in to heat up too.
- Mix flour, sugar, and salt
- Activate yeast – whisk with 100 ml of warm/lukewarm water and a pinch of sugar. Make sure it smells nice and yeasty and is completely dissolved.
- Mix milk into yeast
- Pour into flour mixture – knead for around 5 minutes until smoothy and elastic
- Put in bowl, cover with a damp teatowel and leave to proof in a warm area until approximately doubled in size – around 2 hours
- Knock down (throw onto the worktop and squish) then sprinkle the baking powder over
- Knead and work the baking powder in – another 5 minutes
- Cut the dough into portions. Cutting into 4 will make pizzas around 6″ wide – just enough to go into an air fryer if that’s what you’ve got. Cutting into 2 instead will make a better size pizza
- Shape into balls, and let them rest for a minute or so.
- Shape the pizzas – lightly oil your hands and work surface. Form the crust by poking your fingers in around the edge, leaving a gap about 0.5 cm wide. Squish the centre to push the dough out. Work the centre with the edge of your palm to get it nice and thin, maintaining a small crust. You can pick the dough up around the crust and work it around. Stop once it starts to get too see-through!
- Leave it on a square of greaseproof baking paper to make it easier to handle. Cover and leave to proof for approx. another 1.5 hrs
- Top, and bake for about 10-15 minutes until the base is cooked through and toppings suitably melted
The life story
Another life story. I started baking when I left university in 2017. I made my first baguettes using leftover oil from a duck confit (hardly cheap!) and they were chewy and tasted of duck – unsurprisingly!
My housemate and I used to have pizza every week – and I decided to start making them. Some failures and disasters later, I decided to go on a course at the local bakery. While there, the subject of pizza ovens came up and they specifically cautioned against a wood-fired Ooni/Uuni if you’re making lots because it’ll take all your time managing the fire.
So what did I do? I went and got an Ooni! I loved it, but they were correct – it’s a pain to make lots of pizzas on. After using my friend’s large clay oven, and working constantly to turn pizzas, get them out and immediately be launching another, I was set on an upgrade. But then I left for New Zealand and started living in a van – no wood fired oven here!
This recipe satisfies my (occasional) craving for some hot carbs. In a pinch, you can steam the base to cook it, fry the toppings, then pull the toppings out of the pan, fry the base until browned and throw the toppings back on. I cook the entire thing in an air-fryer (I did tests about which I preferred, steaming the base and air-frying with toppings on or air-fryer all the way. It’s basically the same).
This recipe originally came from a Bao recipe – hence the idea to steam the bases.
Nutrition and cost
This recipe is just for the bases. If you split the recipe into 2, then you’ll be looking at the following:
| Energy (kCal) | Protein (g) | Carbs (g) | Fat (g) |
| 525 | 16.8 | 102.2 | 2.8 |
Hardly high fat or keto. Definitely high carb. But sometimes that’s what you need.
For costs, I’ve assumed you use 300 g of flour due to wastage. At the moment in New World that comes out at 69 cents for the whole recipe – 35 cents per serving (if you cut it into 2). Cheap, and effective. This must be why flour and salt were handed out as rations! (N.B. Costs have been rounded to the nearest cent, salt isn’t free).
| Item | Recipe price ($) |
| Flour | 0.51 |
| Baking powder | 0.02 |
| Yeast | 0.07 |
| Salt | 0.00 |
| Sugar | 0.03 |
| Milk | 0.06 |
Toppings
Toppings are a personal preference but obviously you can’t just eat pizza-biscuits (unless you really want to). I’m a big fan of a four or five cheese pizza – quite the expensive habit. I recommend trying a blue cheese pizza with some thin slices of a sharp apple thrown on – it sounds odd but it really pops.
To make a basic tomato sauce, you can do the following:
- Pour a can of peeled plum tomatoes into a bowl, and squish with your hands
- Add any of the following to taste: salt, olive oil, oregano, basil, sugar. Mix in, and taste frequently.
That’s it. I typically use around 4-5 teaspoons of that base per pizza so it lasts for ages. The entire base will set you back around $1.5 (depending mostly on how much olive oil you put in), so per serving I estimate you’d be spending around another $0.15.
Top with around 50 g of mozzarella – approximately $1 – and a couple of slices of ham – around another $1 – and you’ve got a tasty cheap meal. Excluding energy costs you could be making this for around $2.50/serving!
Bonus photos
Here are some I made earlier. On the left, one that’s just been air-fried. On the right, the base was steamed for 8 minutes, then topped and air-fried.
Eating cheap 
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