Jay and Shaun Endres - Uncle Bud’s Hut 2/6/16

To celebrate their 10th year of hut trips, Jay and Shaun Endres outdid themselves by making 10 separate pizzas. The process used up nearly every dish in the hut and made an epic mess to clean up, but all of the effort was worth it for an amazing dinner! I recommend this on the first night in the hut as it has tremendous potential for leftovers.

• Crust: Martha White pizza dough mix - 1 package per crust (just needs water + 1 tsp oil). Jiffy makes a crust that is about the same.
• Tomato Sauce: McCormick spaghetti sauce mix, 6 oz tomato paste, and 1/2 the recommended water. Also included were some secret herbs from Shaun's kitchen. (By the way, the "secret herbs" are oregano and basil. Shaun didn't measure, so let's just say it was generous but still reasonable.) Two packages made 5 pizzas.
• Alfredo Sauce: McCormick Alfredo sauce mix, butter, and 1/2 the recommended milk (powdered milk was used). One package of sauce mix per pizza.
• BBQ Sauce: Sweet Baby Ray's, straight from the bottle. It was the smallest size bottle (not sure the weight). It could have made 3 pizzas, but we only made 2 with it.
• 2 large foil baking sheets were brought up to bake the pizzas with (the flexible foil meant that they could be shaped to fit into the small oven

The crust was mixed in a large bowl and left to sit in a warm place for about 30 minutes (top shelf above oven).

Meat toppings (sausage, chicken, bacon) were cooked in a skillet. Veggies were sliced. Artichokes came in a can. Each pizza crust was rolled out (with a Nalgene bottle - this is critical!), and then cooked in a cast iron skillet, both sides, using an olive oil spray to keep it from sticking.

One thing learned on the job was to have some extra flour so that when you roll out the dough you can completely eliminate any 'stickiness'. When you are ready to move it to the skillet you should be able to pick it up easily in two hands without stretching it.

The pizzas were topped according to the fabulous spreadsheet, and put in the oven to melt the cheese. Since we did not trust the oven to cook this many pizzas evenly and in a timely manner, cooking the crust in a skillet I think was key to making sure it was done right.

The 2 large aluminum pans were helpful in having a surface to roll out the dough in some flour, and in having something to put the pizzas in the oven on.

The pizzas were then constructed (with the help of many hut folk) based on "the spreadsheet"...

...this is what happens when you let a bunch of engineers go into the backcountry -- they build spreadsheets to make dinner. The spreadsheet listed each pizza and the toppings required (it also calculates the weight/amount of each topping). You can download the original spreadsheet here and tailor it to your liking.