pizza sauce recipe

We'll branch out a bit with this recipe. A normal tomato base pizza sauce recipe is great, but we want something a little bit exotic today. Alfredo pizza is a great deal richer than tomato-sauce pizza, and will often have big chunks of chicken and garlic-sometimes artichoke hearts. It's an opportunity to try other veggies as ingredients, and it's quite hearty. Today, we're going to make an alfredo pizza. And an alfredo pizza starts with an alfredo pizza sauce recipe.
Here's what we need:
4 tablespoons of butter
1/2 teaspoon of salt
4 tablespoons flour
1 cup of cream
3/4 cup of fresh Parmesan cheese grated from a block
Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat. Add the flour, salt, milk and cheese. It's important to stir fairly rapidly-cream, when heated, has a tendency to curdle. Once the ingredients have fairly well homogenized, turn the heat up to medium and stir constantly until the sauce has thickened. Turn the heat down and cover the sauce; you may choose to refrigerate it as well. Add more or less cheese depending on taste, remembering that adding too much will cause your sauce to thicken and bind.
I like to make my alfredo pizzas with chicken. You can use fresh chicken breasts, or frozen-that's my preference. Season as desired, pop them in the oven, and then section into morsels to spread on your pizza.
Veggie wise-some people like to put artichoke hearts on their pizza. I'm not really a fan of artichoke, so instead I feature purple onions, small pieces of kale, and largish pieces of garlic. It all depends on your taste. Just remember, because you used alfredo instead of tomato-based pizza sauce, you've painted with an entirely different palette.
Enjoy!

I really can't recommend bread makers enough. They are great tools. Waking up every morning to the smell of fresh bread is amazing. Even better? Spreading butter over warm bread. Over a year or so of making your own bread, a bread machine will also save you money; it costs about $8 for several weeks worth of bread flour. You'll also give yourself access to tons of bread variety-there are vast tomes of bread machine recipes out there.
All that said? That's not why we're here. I like to talk about pizza sauce recipes. And pizza sauce needs to go on a pizza crust. Today, I'd like to detail my recipe for pizza dough, using a bread maker.
This will make a pizza crust between 14 and 16 inches.
Water----1 cup
Olive Oil---1.5 tbs
Salt-----.5 tsp
all purpose flour- 1.5 cups
wheat flour--1.5 cups
baking yeast-- 1.5 tsp
It's best to put in your liquid ingredients first, followed by flour and salt. Make sure to put the salt in one corner of the bread maker-you don't want to deactivate the yeast accidentally. Even out the ingredients-a good tap against the countertop will work-then put a small divot in the flour for your yeast. Your bread maker will have a "dough" setting. That's what you want to use-obviously we don't want to bake the dough in the maker!
When the dough is finished, roll it out into your preferred shape-square works pretty well if you lack a pizza stone. Place your index of your non-dominant hand along the side of the crust and use the index finger of your dominant hand to fold the edge of the dough over your index finger. This will form a small "roll" in the dough. By repeating that process along the whole edge of the dough, you'll form a crust that will bake up nicely.
There you are! You've made a crust. Slather it with pizza sauce and put on toppings, then bake. I like to bake at 325 for about 25 minutes-long enough to bake the crust, without burning the cheese. Try it out and let me know what you think!