Homemade pizza crust, sauce, and sausage recipes

It took YEARS of trial and error to find just the right recipes for homemade pizza.  We made some pretty terrible crusts during our first few years of making homemade pizza in China.  We used spaghetti sauce as our sauce for years, and tried many pizza sauces that were quite terrible.  We used whatever veggies or meats that we could find to top our pizza.  While we definitely haven’t perfected the art of making pizza, the whole family gives my pizza 2 thumbs up!

My crust recipe is very similar to the one Stacey uses.

Pizza Crust
7/8 cup warm water
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp yeast
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 1/2 cups flour

Combine all ingredients.  Let sit for a few minutes.  Cook topped pizza at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

Spaghetti sauce was really NOT a good alternative to pizza sauce, but I had no idea how to make sauce and buying pizza sauce was not available at any of the import stores in our city.  A couple of years ago, after lots of trial and error, a friend shared a sauce recipe with me.  We love it!  It makes a lot of sauce, so we freeze it in dinner sized portions.

Pizza Sauce
4 Tablespoons Oil
2 tsp. Garlic Powder
32 ounces Tomato Paste
15 cups Crushed Tomatoes
7 Tablespoons Sugar
5 teaspoons Salt
3 Tablespoons Italian Seasoning**
1/2 teaspoon Black Pepper
2 whole Bay Leaves
3 Tablespoons Corn Starch
1 Tablespoon Lemon Juice

Combine all ingredients and let simmer for about 90 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes.  Freeze what you don’t plan on using right away.

I always cook pizza sauce at the same time as apple sauce.  Look for my apple sauce recipe soon!

**A friend of ours here in China brings us the most amazing Italian Seasonings made by his brother.  If you are looking for something better than the dried stuff you buy in the store, I highly recommend all of the Italian spices from www.saucedgourmet.com.  Yes, they are much more expensive than the cheap, dry stuff, but the taste is phenomenal!

Matt likes sausage on his pizza.  We’ve tried a few different homemade recipes for breakfast sausage, but have just recently found this recipe that he loves and I can tolerate (I’m not a lover of sausage).

Homemade Breakfast Sausage
2 pounds uncooked ground pork
3 teaspoons salt
4 teaspoons ground sage
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 heaping Tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground red pepper

Mix everything together and freeze what you don’t need now.  Fry patties for breakfast or ground up for pizza.  We freeze them in hamburger sized patties (they shrink a LOT during cooking) and wrap each individually.  If your whole family is eating this for breakfast, you could easily freeze it in logs of family sized portions.