Here is what goes into every pizza I make!
The process starts 2 days before the actual cooking of the actual pizza. It starts with making a poolish. A poolish is basically a mixture of flour and water, and a liiiiitle bit of yeast, and some honey. The idea of using a poolish is to naturally cultivate yeast and ferment the flour, which in turn leads to a nice complex flavour in the final product. In a way, this is a shortcut to making and maintaining a sourdough starter.
The poolish takes around 12 hours to frement well, and once it is ready, the dough making process starts. Like all bread, the components of pizza dough is very simple - flour, water, salt and yeast. So the pizza dough I make is a mix of poolish, water, flour and salt. The dough balls are then thrown into the fridge and forgotten for at least 24 hours.
On the day of the pizza making, I plan what kind of sauce and toppings I want on the pizza. My personal favourite is using garlic cream cheese as a 'sauce'. The wife helps me make sure the sauce tastes right.
The last part of the process is to start off by praying that there is no power outage and then proceed to pre-heat the oven for an hour or so. Once the oven is nice and hot, I shape the pizza dough, add whatever toppings I had planned for the day, slide it into the oven and take out a hot, crisp and chewy pizza :)
For details on the exact steps to follow, check out the detailed recipe here.