You don’t need a recipe to make great pizza at home

Some nights are made for pizza. But before you dial up your favorite delivery, consider homemade, or at least semi-homemade. In the time it takes to have a hot pie delivered to your door, you can make a perfectly good custom pie in the comfort of your own kitchen, using ready-made pizza dough (available at most supermarkets) or par-baked crusts. Top as desired and you’ve got dinner on the table faster than any delivery driver.

Best of all? You don’t even need a recipe.

When it comes to the sauce, sure, you can go for a can of the purchased stuff -- and that’s fine -- but a basic no-cook tomato sauce is super-fast and you can’t beat that fresh flavor. Purée a can of chopped tomatoes with a little fresh oregano, basil and garlic. Give the sauce a little depth with some chopped Kalamata olives and season with a touch of salt.

For a quick weeknight pizza, buy a package or two of ready-made pizza dough. Ladle on some sauce and a sprinkling of cheese, and top it with whatever suits you. Your pie will be ready to bake as soon as the oven is heated.

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Of course, one of the biggest tricks to a great homemade pizza is a hot oven. To give your crust a better crunch, bake your pie on a pizza stone. Better yet? Invest in a few ceramic tiles from your local hardware stores. They’re cheaper than a pizza stone and work just as well.

And if you’ve ever wanted to mimic the effects of those great brick ovens you see in pizzerias and bakeries, you can -- for a fraction of the price. Invest in a few firebricks, and you’ll be baking like the pros. We ran an article a few years ago on homemade pizza, and did more than a little research on converting a normal home oven into a brick oven.

A conversion isn’t complicated at all. You’ll need to get the right bricks (you need firebricks, as regular bricks aren’t made to withstand the heat), but the whole thing is surprisingly easy. Give those bricks a little time to heat up and you’ll be baking like your favorite pizzeria or bakery in no time. When you’re not using it for pizza, give it a try sometime for homemade bread.

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