Grow Your Own Pizza

What if you can grow your pizza at home, would you do it?

Homemade pizzas are mainstream but homegrown ones are legendary! Let’s take a journey into growing all the ingredients in a basic cheese pizza: dough, cheese, tomato sauce, and onion.

Prepare the ingredients

The most difficult, but certainly doable, part in this journey to homegrown pizza is the preparation of ingredients.

Dough. Dough for the pizza crust is made from wheat. When thinking of growing wheat, we may imagine several acres of barnyard, large wheat mill machines, and farmers attending to the crops daily. The good news is you could actually grow small patches of wheat right on your backyard! It may take 5-6 months before you can harvest but there are many wheat grinders in the market that will help extend the storage life of your wheat. This way, you don’t have to wait for the next 6 months to have another homemade dough.

Cheese. This is probably the most challenging of all the pizza ingredients because you would need to grow a cow! Cheese is from milk and milk is from cows. Can you picture out a cow on your backyard? Let’s say that you can, and you decide to grow your own cow. The next thing would be to milk it and follow these easy steps to turn it into cheese.

Tomato. Once you are done with the wheat farming and cow nursing, the rest of the ingredients should be easy peasy. Growing a tomato begins indoor. The seeds may be planted in a pot and when the flowers start to open, they are to be transferred outside. The main stem is then tied to a vertical bamboo cane. They are to be watered and fed with fertilizer regularly for optimised growth. They are best planted in the months of April to July (depending on location) and can be harvested 4-5 months later.

Onion. Onion is a major taste contributor to pizzas. White onions are preferred because they have a milder and sweeter taste than other types. Growing onions is simple. You just need to prepare a raised bed of soil that has plenty of room and can be directly hit by sunlight. Onions generally have short growing season so it shouldn’t be long before you can harvest them. You can plant them a few weeks after the tomatoes so that you’ll harvest them in the same timeframe.

Make the pizza. Finally!

Once the ingredients are harvested and ready, we finally get to making the actual pizza. Here are seven simple, no-brainer steps:

1. Prepare the crust using your homegrown dough.
2. Make sauce out of the tomatoes.
3. Spread the sauce evenly on top of the dough.
4. Grate the cheese and sprinkle generously on the crust.
5. Cut the white onion in thin, circular slices. Arrange on top of the cheese.
6. For a cheesier pizza, you may add one more layer of grated cheese.
7. Heat in a oven or a pizza maker.
8. Eat with pride and some bragging rights for a totally homegrown pizza!

Ready to try this out? It certainly is a different kind of pizza-making fun!