ALTHOUGH THE PIZZA has become the apotheosis of our phone-it-in food culture – touch a few buttons and, a short while later, a customized, boxed pie appears at the door as if by magic – it need not be so. Visitors to Greens, for instance (the long-running, high-end vegetarian restaurant in Fort Mason), will have noticed pizza looms large on its menu – and on meatless menus and in meatless lives generally – because of its adaptability and its capacity to satisfy without recourse to pepperoni or other flesh.

So pizza can be classy and sophisticated and healthy as well as convenient. Greens proves the case. As it happens, it was the Greens recipe for pizza dough (first published in 1987 in The Greens Cookbook, by Deborah Madison) I found myself using in my own early adventures in homemade pizza. It was a decent recipe with a few twists – a few tablespoons of milk, some rye and whole-wheat flour to relieve the whiteout conditions ordinary flour would otherwise produce – and it resulted in a pizza crust we liked but found just a tad spongy.

When the latest Greens cookbook – Everyday Greens, by Annie Somerville (she succeeded Madison in 1985) – arrived recently in the mail, I immediately scouted out the recipe for pizza dough. It has "evolved over the years," Somerville explains, by which she means the milk, rye and whole-wheat flour have been dropped and some cornmeal added – the last for a bit of crunch as well as greater ease in sliding the crust on and off the peel. This is an indispensable characteristic if your peel is steel, as mine is.

If I still used the Greens recipe for pizza dough, I suspect I would eagerly embrace Somerville's tweaks. But I don't: for years now I have used a recipe for pissaladière crust given to me by a friend; pissaladière is the onion tart of Provence, and the crust produced by this recipe is, well, crusty – cracker-thin and crisp, the way pizza crust is supposed to be.

The recipe is simple: 1 1/2 teaspoons yeast dissolved in 1/3 cup tepid water, with half-teaspoons of sugar, salt, and extra virgin olive oil. The original text calls for 1¼ cups flour, but I use a cup of flour and ¼ cup corn meal or – better – polenta meal, which is coarser. I then let the bread machine do the mixing and proofing (a tip of the hat here to Dame Evelyn), so that, 90 minutes later, I have a nice blob of supple dough, ready to be rolled out and topped – in the food sense, of course, not the Shakespearean.