A good pizza is truly a marvelous thing, and one of those foods that’s just about universally loved by all, making it ideal for feeding a large group of potentially finicky guests. Infinitely versatile, in that it can accommodate just about any combination of flavors you could possibly dream up, a basic pizza recipe is something that should be in every home cook’s repertoire. Fortunately, it’s also a relatively easy meal to master, provided you know a few tricks of course. 

First and foremost is to understand that a good homemade pizza is an entirely different creature than a good restaurant pizza. It took me awhile to figure out that it is near-impossible to make a pizza with a good, thick, chewy-on-the-inside, crispy-on-the-outside crust like you find in any decent pizza shop. Home ovens just don’t seem to get hot enough to do those properly. An elegant thin-crust pizza, on the other hand, turns out just dandy when made in my little kitchen, and is, in my humble opinion, the only kind of crust worth making in a standard home oven. With that in mind, let’s get started with step one: whipping up the dough …