Around the time I was 25 I realized that I didn't have a wife to cook for me, so I had better learn to do it myself. A friend of mine (incidentally the brother of my ex-girlfriend) taught me how to cook, as he had been doing it for years. All it took was a little courage to follow a recipe to build my confidence to start cooking on my own. It has been very rewarding.
It all started with a Crock-pot and a chicken recipe that involved brown sugar and Sierra Mist. It was rather simple, but a big step up from the frozen chicken and fries that I had been eating for nearly seven years. That's all it took. After making that first meal, I suddenly wanted to cook everything!
I made burgers and fries, mozzarella sticks, soup, chicken of all kinds, and a number of other foods. My girlfriend at the time loved it. In fact, toward the end of the relationship, she was just using me for cooking and an internet connection, but I digress.
After moving away from that apartment and away from that girlfriend, I found myself in a new city with new food interests. I decided that I was spending too much money on pizza, bread, and fast food. So I learned to make bread, pizza, and a number of copycat foods from places such as Taco Bell.
You may not know this, but bread is kind of hard to make. Like, if I'm cooking chicken in a pan, I can add a pinch of this and a dash of that and have it turn out well. With bread, you have to be so precise with your recipe, otherwise your results are wildly different. I once forgot to add salt and it didn't turn out well. Another time, I turned out a prefect loaf of white bread. It was dense, golden on the outside, and soft. I have never been able to replicate that bread, no matter how many of my previous recipes I use.
Unfortunately, bread makes up the crust of pizza, and it is therefore a challenge to get a consistent, delicious crust. I've tried probably a dozen recipes, and it seems to come down to two things: (1) the type of dough you use, and (2) how simple the recipe is. You need a good, high-gluten flour for a good crust. I've also found that the more simple a recipe is, the better it is. I can't really explain that last point, but it's true. I also like to replace white sugar with an equal amount of honey. It seems to improve the flavor.
Given that I felt like I was spending too much on pizza, I decided to try to prefect my own pizza. It's truly a never-ending quest. My goal was to combine the best elements of different pizza places into a super-pizza. I tried replicating Pizza Hut's Pan crust and sauce, Little Caesar's cheese, Domino's garlic around the crust, and my local pizzeria's generous proportions for cheese and toppings.
There's a reason why Pizza Hut makes its crusts in a factory and freezes them. They're very hard to replicate. You also have to use massive amounts of oil to get the right texture on the outside. So I kind of gave up on that. Little Caesar's cheese is 100% mozzarella and muenster, but I don't know the ratio, and it's hard to find muenster around here. So I settled on my grocery store's "pizza blend". Sauce is hard to get right, so make your own recipe.
It turns out it's hard to make pizza! But I do it routinely. I eventually started using a simple pizza crust recipe, started mixing my own sauce (the key is garlic salt, or just salt in general), and stated figuring out cheese. My best tip for cheese is: if you want a good consistency, buy a block of cheese and grate it yourself. It seems to have higher moisture that way. Bagged cheese has silica added so that it doesn't stick to itself. This seems to reduce the moisture. Also try to avoid frozen shredded cheese.
My other pizza tips are: crank your oven to 500掳F or higher. Forget the pizza stone. Be generous with your toppings. Stuff the crust with string cheese. Practice, practice, practice.