My favorite pizza place closed several months ago here in the San Fernando Valley. It was the only place I would order pizza because the crust was real crispy. SI guess you could say that I have been in pizza limbo for quite awhile.

A few months ago my son-in-law introduced us to his homemade pizza, made with Trader Joe’s pizza dough. It was good. Last week my son-in-law asked if I had tried the pizza dough myself? I had not. That got my brain tickin’.

When we were to have the in-laws, the kids, and the grandkids over for dinner last weekend, guess what I decided to have? The crispiest pizza I possibly could make. That meant a couple of hours on the internet reading and watching YouTube videos. I didn’t have a pizza stone for the weekend – it just arrived in today’s mail. Here is what I did to get a really crisp pizza:

• I set the oven at 475 degrees and inserted two cookie sheets.
• I dusted our glass table top with flour and rolled out the whole-wheat pizza dough as thin as I could get it.
• I stretched out the dough even more with my hands, letting gravity do its thing as I rotated the circular dough in my hands.
• I laid the round stretched dough on a piece of parchment paper.
• I spread vegetable oil on the upper side of the dough.
• I added tomato sauce, grated cheese, sliced olives and mushrooms.
• I slid the parchment paper with the pizza on it onto a wooden pizza peel (a kind of pizza tray).
• I donned my special heat-protective rubber gloves and slid the parchment paper with the pizza on to the upper-rack cookie sheet.
• I peeked in the oven at 8 minutes and at 10 minutes. After 12 minutes, the crust was medium-to-dark brown and the parchment paper was turning brown. I again donned my rubber gloves and carried the cookie sheet to the granite counter.
• I sliced the crispy pizza, and we all enjoyed it immensely.
• I repeated the same process using garlic and herb pizza dough for the second cookie sheet.

This evening my wife will be bringing home pizza dough and an eggplant. I will experiment to see what using the new pizza stone, instead of a cookie sheet, will do. I think that my eggplant pizza will become a staple around here. Yum!