Archive for the ‘Pizza’ Category

Our favorite pizza place, Locatelli’s, is closed on Mondays. And it never fails – on Monday, we always want pizza. (It’s the same way with Chick-fil-A – every Sunday morning I wake up needing a chicken biscuit.) More than once, I’ve pulled into the parking lot at lunch on a Monday and let loose a creative string of expletives as I was forced to u-turn and head back to the office. No pizza for me!

We make homemade pizza nearly once a week. In it’s most un-fancy form (pepperoni and sausage), it’s one of the quickest dinners in our rotation. The dough, which is the longest part of the process, can be made ahead and par baked and we always have red sauce in the freezer. A handful of toppings and some cheese later, dinner is in the oven.

I was digging around on the book shelf and found an entire cookbook dedicated to our favorite food, pizza. An entire cookbook devoted to fancy pizzas. As I was flipping through the pages, oohing, aahing, and occasionally crinkling my nose and questioning the author’s sanity, I landed on a barbecue chicken pizza that was loaded high with a ton of tasty toppings. Fancy toppings. Dinner.

The flavors are very summery – caramelized pineapple chinks, grilled chicken, smokey cheese, with a spicy kick from the barbecue sauce. It’s not too much work for a school night dinner and like just about everything else that can be grilled, goes perfectly with an un-fancy ice cold Shiner

Barbecue Chicken Pizza with Grilled Pineapples, Smoked Gouda, and Speck
Printer-friendly recipe

Your favorite pizza dough recipe, enough for 1 large pizza
Olive oil
1 cup barbecue sauce, divided, plus more for serving (I used Stubbs spicy)
1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 pineapple, cored and cut into 1/2-inch slices
4 oz speck, sliced deli-thin and torn into pieces*
8 oz smoked gouda, shredded
4 oz mozzarella cheese, shredded
1 handful fresh cilantro, chopped

*If you cannot locate speck, sub prosciutto or another favorite porky pizza-topping.

Heat grill to high. Put 1/2 cup barbecue sauce, pepper, and chicken breasts in a baggie or glass bowl to marinate for 30 minutes. Place chicken breasts on the grill and cook until juices run clear, approximately 6-7 minutes on each side. Remove from grill. Let rest for 10 minutes and then slice or shred.

Brush pineapple slices with olive oil and grill 5 minutes on each side. Remove from grill and cut each ring into 8 chunks. Get sauce and toppings assembled near the grill.

Stretch out your pizza dough to the desired thickness on a cornmeal-dusted peel. Brush the top with oil and place oiled-side down over the grill. Cook for about 3 minutes – the dough will begin to bubble on top. Oil the top side of the dough and flip, using tongs. Cook the crust for an additional 3 minutes while assembling the pizza.

Spread 1/2 cup of barbecue sauce over the crust. Top with the mozzarella, half of the gouda, chicken, pineapple, and speck. Top with remaining cheese. Turn off the grill (after the 3 minutes) and close the cover. Let sit for 5-7 minutes, until cheese has melted. Remove from grill and let sit for 5 minutes. Top with cilantro, drizzle with additional barbecue sauce, and serve.

Adapted from: Pizza, 50 Traditional and Alternative Recipes for the Oven and Grill

…and it’s not DiGiorno but it is frozen pizza.

Frozen pizzas have their appeal – they’re a cheap way to have dinner on the table in 15 minutes. They also have severe drawbacks – the toppings aren’t fresh and a lot of times, even a single slice can be a hidden sodium bomb. With some prep work on a rainy weekend afternoon, you can prepare your own frozen pizzas for those busy days when you need a cheap lunch/dinner on the table in 15 minutes.

To start, you need a good pizza dough. I like this one (yields enough for 4 8-inch pizzas) and this one (two pizzas). Then you need to decide: do I just want to have a frozen crust ready to add some fresh toppings later on or do I want to build a complete pizza with standard (aka, freezable) toppings?

Prepare your pizza dough recipe through the point where you need to shape the dough. Preheat the oven to 500. Sprinkle one or two baking sheets (depending on how many pizzas you’re preparing) lightly with cornmeal. Divide the pizza dough into two or four equal pieces (if using one of the recipes above). Stretch each dough round into a 7-8in round and place on the prepared baking pans. (I take a gallon freezer bag and lay on top of the rounds to test that they’ll fit inside.) Bake the crusts for 5 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool completely.

To freeze the crusts naked: Place the cooled crusts on a baking sheet in the freezer. Freeze through and then place in separate gallon freezer bags. For storage, stack them horizontally or “file” vertically.

To freeze complete pizzas: Transfer the cooled baking pans to the freezer to freeze through. Top the frozen crusts with the sauce, cheese, and freezable toppings of your choice (if you want to use fresh vegetables or other freezer-unfriendly toppings, I recommend freezing the crusts naked or only with sauce/cheese; then add your veggies before putting into the oven on the night-of). Place the baking pan back into the freezer and freeze. Once frozen through, store the pizzas in separate gallon freezer bags.

To cook: Preheat oven to 425. Place the frozen pizza on a pan in the top 1/3 of the oven. Cook for 12-15 minutes, until toppings are bubbly and crust is golden brown.

Pizza is in heavy rotation on our weekly menu. We’re crust people – and I don’t leave a scrap of it behind. Nothing screws up a good pizza like a bad crust. We’ve gone through several pizza doughs looking for the perfect crust and we always come back to The Usual. We’ve been baking pizza with the Gourmet recipe for nearly 4 years now.

Occasionally, I’ll want to try something different and I stumbled across an old bookmark that provided the perfect opportunity: Deep Dish Pizza. Not just any deep dish – one that promised a far less messy outcome than some of my previous attempts.

I swapped out The Usual for Baking Illustrated’s Basic Pizza Dough. The recipe has been on my radar for a while because I frequently see it baked into all kinds of tasty forms on one of my favorite food blogs, Annie’s Eats. The recipe also conveniently yields enough dough in a single batch to get a deep dish pie on the table for dinner.

I was pleasantly surprised. The bread flour for which the Baking Illustrated recipe calls produced a noticeable difference in texture. I’m not sure that I’m ready to completely give up The Usual but this crust is definitely at least the second best pizza crust recipe we’ve tried.

Deep Dish Pizza
For the dough:
1 3/4 cup warm water, divided
1 tsp sugar
1 envelope (2 1/4 tsp) instant yeast
2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for greasing bowl and springform pan
4 cups (22 oz) bread flour, plus more for dusting
1 1/2 tsp salt

For the pizza:
1 cup pizza sauce
2 cups shredded fresh mozzarella
Fillings of your choice (we used cooked italian sausage, pepperoni, and pineapple chunks)

Put 1/2 cup warm water into the bowl of your stand mixer and stir in sugar until dissolved. Sprinkle the yeast over the top and let stand until frothy, about 5 minutes. Add the remaining water and oil.

Add the flour and salt to the stand mixer bowl fitted with the dough hook. Mix on low until the flour is combined and then turn up the speed and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 5 minutes. Transfer the dough to an oiled bowl (I remove the dough, oil the stand mixer bowl, and put the dough back in… one less dirty dish). Cover with plastic wrap until it doubles in volume, about 1 ½ to 2 hours.

Preheat oven to 400. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface. Divide the dough into two pieces, about 2/3 and 1/3 in size. Gently form into two balls, cover with a damp cloth, and let the dough relax for ~10 minutes. Assemble a 10-in spring form pan and oil the bottom and inside ring.

Shape the larger piece of dough into a round and drape over the springform pan. The dough round needs to be large enough to cover the bottom and slightly hang over the edges of the pan. Use small pieces from the other dough ball to patch any trouble spots.

Sprinkle 1/3 cheese over the bottom of the pan. Top with the fillings of your choice and cover with half of the remaining cheese. Shape the remaining dough into a round and drape over the springform pan. The dough round should also slightly hang over the edge of the pan. Taking a rolling and roll over the top edge of the springform pan to seal the pizza. Tuck the crust edges around the top of the pizza. Using a pair of kitchen shears, cut a few steam holes in the top crust. Spoon pizza sauce over the top and sprinkle with remaining cheese.

Bake for 40-45 minutes until crust is golden and cheese is bubbly and beginning to brown. Remove the pizza from oven and immediately remove the ring from the pan. Cut into wedges and serve.

Yields: 8 wedges
Source: Crust adapted from Baking Illustrated; Springform method from Evil Mad Scientist