How To make Pizza at Home

Pizza is one of the most popular dishes around the world. It is generally a flat round bread which is oven-baked and covered with tomatoes or a tomato-based sauce and mozzarella cheese. Toppings are also added depending on the region, culture or personal preference. In this article, we will be learning how to make a pizza at home.
The basic steps in pizza making are first preparing dough, then pizza sauce. After that, cheese and toppings are added according to taste and then the pizza is baked in an oven. This seems to be simple while reading but preparing a good mouth watering pizza at home drains in a lot of hard work. However, you will be able to make pizza at home easily using this step-by-step guide.
Let's start from the scratch.
Making Pizza Dough
Dough making has been known to humans since ages now, but mastering the art to make perfect pizza dough can be a bit cumbersome sometimes. At home, Pizza dough is prepared by hands, no special machinery is required. However to prepare hand-made dough you will need to have a large mixing bowl, a measuring cup, measuring spoons, a large whisk or wooden mixing spoon and some kitchen film before you start. It will be better if you also keep a small hand towel ready before starting the process.
Ingredients:
1 - 1/4 Oz Envelope - Active dry yeast, (or 2 1/4 Tsp)
1 1/2 Cups - Warm water (110°F - 115°F)
4 Cups - Bread flour
1 1/2 Tsp. - Salt
2 Tbsp. - Extra virgin olive oil
1 Tbsp. - Sugar
Extra flour
Extra olive oil

Process
Pour the warm water in a large mixing bowl, then add the sugar and dissolve it. Next, dissolve the yeast by stirring continuously after addition. Allow the mixture to settle down for 10 minutes or extra so that the yeast becomes active.
Now add the yeast and olive oil, when the appearance of the mixture becomes foamy and cloudy at the surface. Dissolve it continuous stirring. Then add 3 cups of flour to the mixture one-by-one and whisk in until dissolved completely. Make sure the mixture is completely smooth. Use your hands to combine the dough until all of the dry flour has moistened into a mass.
When the flour has absorbed all of the moisture and congealed into a firm mass, remove it from the bowl to a floured tabletop to knead it. Fold it in half again and push it into itself, again and again for perhaps 10 to 12 minutes or so, or about 200 cycles. It is very important that the dough is very well kneaded.
After kneading is complete, when dough transforms into a silky, smoothly-textured ball, coat the dough ball with a thin layer of olive oil. After that place it in the bottom of a large mixing bowl that has also been coated on the inside with olive oil.
Now comes the step on panning the prepared pizza dough. One of the most demanding of the pizza maker's many challenges is getting the raw pizza dough ball into a pizza pan. The panning of pizza can be done by various methods as per your convenience. The popular methods are Pizza dough sheeting, pizza dough pressing, hand tossing pizza dough- do it only if you don't get hazy when catching, hand pressing pizza dough, and last is pin rolling pizza dough.

Making Pizza Sauce
Normally at home, we recommend using tomato sauce only which is lightly herbed with oregano and basil. Some pizza lovers prefer to have even simpler sauce than this, however tomato sauce is the simplest to prepare at home.
Ingredients:

3 Tbsp. - Butter
16 Oz. - Can of tomato puree
3 Tbsp. - Olive Oil
1 Tsp. - Salt
3 Cloves - Garlic, minced
1/4 Tsp. - Black Pepper
3 Large - Yellow onions, minced
1 Tsp. - Whole oregano
2 Qts. - Canned whole Italian tomatoes
1 Tsp. - Whole basil


Process
Melt the butter with olive oil in an oven or large skillet. Now slowly but completely sauté the garlic and onion. Then add the tomatoes, salt, pepper, oregano, basil and puree. Boil it.
Cover the mixture and let it bubble for two hours. In between, stir it occasionally. Crush the tomatoes with the masher. Continue the process till the sauce reaches the consistency of a soup.
Set the sauce aside to cool before applying it to your pizza dough, or, or refrigerate it for use in the future.
Pizza Topping
Ladle about 7 to 8 oz. of pizza sauce into the middle, bottom of the dough shell. Spread the sauce evenly over the surface of the dough sheet. Spoon the sauce out to the edge of the dough sheet. Leave a small margin on the outer-side of the dough sheet, which allows the crust to rise and crisp more quickly than the covered dough; creating the classic, puffed up edge of the pizza.
Now create a layer of the shredded cheese over the sauce. Shred about two cups of cheese. Arrange your toppings over this layer of cheese.
Add toppings according to your preference.
Baking the Pizza

Preheat your oven up-to the temperature of 450° F for about 10 to 15 minutes. When preheating is done, place a prepped pizza in the oven at the centre. Place the pan in the oven such as there is maximum circulation of air around the pan. The baking will take about 10-15 minutes at that temperature.
Signs to look for that the pizza is ready are:

1) The cheese has melted on top and is beginning to brown.
2) The crust edge has browned, from a medium to a golden brown.
3) Now carefully lift the edge of the pizza to inspect its bottom, it should be evenly brown.

If these signs are evident, your pizza's done! Thus now you are ready to throw regular pizza parties of your home made pizza to your friends and family.

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How to book tatkal tickets faster (Tips)

In India, trains are one of the easiest and cheapest modes of transport. Over the years, booking train tickets has become convenient using the IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation) website. In fact, according to the comScore and ASSOCHAM India report, IRCTC is the leading travel e- commerce site in the country with the highest transaction share in the travel category. One out of five online users in India visits the Indian Railways site, with almost 12 million unique visitors monthly and majority of the traffic is seen between 10 am to 12 pm. It is during this time that IRCTC allows booking Tatkal tickets, which means tickets that are reserved for people with last minute travel plans, travel emergencies and so on.
IRCTC receives a lot of flak for its slow, sluggish performance and had become a laughing stock when the site crashed (server inability, low bandwidth) during the festivities last year, just minutes after Tatkal bookings began. Currently, it is said to sell about 40-45,000 Tatkal railway tickets between 10 am and 11 am (its 10 and 11, because all tickets are sold in one hour – in fact, 45 mins), which it plans to spruce up to 60-65,000 with the help of its new Rs. 10 crore drive for better, upgraded servers to 64GB RAM. This will allow 80 lakh concurrent connections compared to the current 10 lakh. The Tatkal online booking window opens a day in advance before the date of your journey just for an hour and tens of thousands of people try to log into the Tatkal booking system, which makes it as tough as getting into an overcrowded Mumbai local train during the peak office hours. If you’ve ever tried booking a Tatkal ticket, you will know how important each minute is and how annoying IRCTC’s online passenger reservation system can get. You have to make optimum use of each second as soon as the online booking counter opens, and those 5 to 10 minutes before the counter opens are also very crucial. We’ve laid out a guide to help you book a Tatkal ticket, along with a set of handy tech tools and tips and tricks that will help you bag a confirmed Tatkal ticket faster.
First, the Tatkal or last minute online booking window opens only a day in advance of your journey between 10 am and 12 am. A person can book only two Tatkal tickets on one user id, so for any more tickets you will need to login using other IRCTC user ids. Now, you need to successfully log into the IRCTC reservation system at exactly 10 a.m., but remember, there are tens of thousands of other people trying to log into the site, so one needs to be really quick. Try to login using multiple accounts on different browsers such as Mozilla, Chrome, Opera or take a hand from your pals 10 minutes before. For this, ensure that your time is synced with the IRCTC server time, so that there are no issues due to difference in time as a delay in a minute means lesser chances of getting a ticket.
Once you log in with the IRCTC account, the key is to keep the session active. Those who have tried booking a Tatkal ticket may have often faced the error which says “Session expired”, which means you have to start logging in again, and this delay can cost you your ticket. To keep the session alive, ensure that the screen doesn't go idle for more than 3 minutes, because as soon as it does, the session will expire. So do not spend time thinking which ticket to choose or go hunting for your debit/credit card details at the last minute; keep everything handy so that the screen doesn't go idle.
As the only way to avoid the session from
expiring is keeping the page active, here are
two handy tricks. You can use this link. All you
need to do is make a note of the Session ID
and the Engine ID (from the address bar),
replace it with your session and engine IDs and
use the URL in another browser (For instance,
if you are using Chrome, then use it in Firefox)
and keep doing it till you complete your
booking process. If you think this is a
complicated method, then the other trick to
keep your session active is by going to the
IRCTC website > Login > General > Terms &
Conditions. All you need to do is copy the
“Terms and Conditions” URL in another
browser and keep pinging it every 2-3 minutes.
As soon as you successfully log into IRCTC, choose the starting point and destination, then a list of trains will appear and you can choose the train and the ticket type – Sleeper, 3-tier AC, 2-tier AC and so on. You will then have to key in all the necessary details including an identity proof. One has to be really quick in filling these details and don't forget to keep your identity proof handy. For instance, if you plan to choose the PAN card, then make a note of the PAN number. As you have to be very quick and can't keep typing in details for minutes, here’s what you can do – keep all the information like name of the passengers, age, PAN number handy in a notepad and just copy paste the information while booking the ticket.
Another alternative is an extremely handy tech tool called Autofill that can be used on Firefox as well as Chrome . Using the autofill add-on or extension, you need to visit IRCTC, say, about half an hour or so before the Tatkal bookings begin. Just go to the usual ticket booking page and fill in your details. Simply follow the booking procedure till you reach the payment gateway and then go no further. The add-ons will ensure that the browser remembers these details and you will not have to spend a lot of time typing them while booking the Tatkal ticket. Another tool you can use is the Magic Autofill . To use this tool, fill in all your details and click on “I’m feeling lucky”, a “Magic Autofill” blue button will appear and you have to drag it into your bookmarks. While booking the Tatkal ticket, once you are done finalising the train and berth, click on the Magic autofill and it will do the rest and you can quickly proceed to payment.
The IRCTC website is jam packed and quite slow during Tatkal booking, so ensure that you are patient and do not double click on anything or hit the backspace button as this will log you off and you will need to start the complete procedure again. You will even come across a message that reads “Service Unavailable”; in this case, just keep refreshing the page. Once you are done with the payment, wait until it takes you back to the IRCTC page (unless the transaction fails).     
     These tech tools and simple tips and tricks will definitely increase the chances of bagging a confirmed ticket. Do share with us your experience of booking a Tatkal ticket.