So Mini Pizzas

It took me a long time to convince Ben to try tortilla pizzas, so I thought I'd better make the most out of this opportunity. To that end, we've tried two kinds of sauce tonight: one completely new and one not so completely new.

The sauces:

Sauce #1 Cilantro-Pea Pesto

1/2 bunch of cilantro 
3/4 cup peas (roughly equal to the amount of cilantro added)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup olive oil
salt and black pepper to taste

Blend ingredients (food processor would work better than a blender). We had to add water to get things moving in the blender, maybe 1/4 cup.

The cilantro is a nice amount of spice balanced by the sweetness of the peas. Ben and I really like this sauce and we think it could work in a lot of other foods. Ben tried it as salsa later in the night and commented that it would be pretty good with more salt. I'm going to use it as salad dressing tomorrow. Obviously it would also be good on pasta.

Sauce #2 Tomato Sauce With a Twist That Ben and Carolyn DO NOT RECOMMEND 

Ben did his usual pizza sauce but added cumin. I'm not sure why. I blame the heat. In his defense, he thought he was added only a small, subtle amount. As we found out, there is no such thing as a subtle amount of cumin. 

Eh. I think I liked this better than Ben did. I'm not sold on cumin for pizza, but I think we can make it work in another venue. Indian mock-pizza, anyone?

Our original plan for dinner was to make a regular old pizza, with regular old pizza dough, in the regular old oven. But, if you had spent any amount of time in my apartment today (forecasted high today was 90 degrees and I've only got a tiny, inefficient box A/C) you would understand why we were loath to turn on the oven. Instead, we made tortilla pizzas in a skillet on the stove. I won't write up a formalized recipe. Simply replace pizza dough with tortilla and go from there. I cooked at medium heat for at least 5 minutes, or until the bottom of the tortilla was slightly browned and the cheese was melted. I was careful to go light on the sauce and toppings so that the tortillas weren't overburdened.

Stromboli

This week's entry is brought to you by the Bloomington, IN visitors' bureau.

Welcome to dinner-and-a-movie night. Tonight's feature is Breaking Away accompanied by home-made stromboli in the style of Nick's English Hut in Bloomington.

As far as I can tell (by searching the internet and reading the Wikipedia article linked above) in most places stromboli is a delicate-looking Italian turnover sandwich. If you are in Bloomington, stromboli is a giant pizza sandwich on a hoagie roll whose only ambition is to drip tomato sauce on your pants (see above photo). We went with the second definition.

Preheat oven to 350

Slice rolls in half. We used hoagie sandwich bread, but anything in the Italian bread family should be fine. Slather on a thick coat of pizza sauce to the bottom half of your bread. Top with whatever pizza toppings you prefer; we used green pepper, tomato, and mushroom but in future I would like to add in onion (if you are non-vegetarian, Italian meats are more traditional). On the top half of your bread, pile as much cheese as you dare-- mozzarella is good.

Bake on a cookie sheet until cheese is bubbly and browning-- I think our sandwiches took in the area of 10 minutes. 

I think we'll be eating stromboli again in the near future. It's super easy and fast and we almost always have leftover pizza sauce and toppings after we make pizza. Stromboli is best paired with jelly donuts from Square Donuts on Walnut St. in Bloomington.

The perfect Pizza?

I know we had a post about pizza just a week ago, but this one was just so good it has to be logged. Carolyn made extra dough and I made extra sauce on the last pizza night, so all we had to do was pop a couple crusts out of the freezer and let them warm up for a few hours before baking. We did a few things differently this time, though, and I think this has become our new favorite.

I'm going to keep it brief by not going through all the cooking steps. See our last pizza post (link already provide above) if you need that info.

Toppings:
spinach
mushrooms (Ben's crazy, there were no mushrooms on this pizza. Love, Carolyn)
tomato slices (quartered)
shredded cheese
mozzarella chunks

We prebaked the crusts this time for 3-5 minutes, which turned out to be a great idea. It was just the right crispiness. We then added sauce, a layer of spinach (go ahead and be liberal; it always shrinks down), shredded cheese, then tomato, mushrooms, and mozzarella chunks. We used extremely little shredded cheese, opting to treat cheese as a topping rather than as a layer. If you've been following the blog, you've already read my rant about too much cheese on pizzas. Our pizzas tonight were a bold challenge against over-cheesed pizzas everywhere.

We had 2 pizzas, so we experimented with the placement of the spinach on the 2nd. Instead of putting it below the shredded cheese, we put it above with the rest of the toppings, to see if it would turn out differently. They both turned out great, but I thought the spinach didn't cook quite as well this way. It got a touch dried out.

This pizza was amazing. Top it with some black pepper or red pepper flakes for a delicious kick. I also sprinkled a little salt on the exposed tomato slices. Carolyn thinks it's gross how much salt I use; you probably feel the same way.

Pizza Night

Homemade pizza is an almost weekly occurrence around these parts. This week we were entertaining, so we made three pizzas instead of the usual single pizza. I also tried my hand at making the pizza dough from scratch (with mixed results), following a recipe from my new fancy bread book written by Peter Reinhart.

The fun started the night before, as this bread dough needed to rest in the refrigerator overnight before it was ready to be tossed out for pizza dough. 

4 1/2 C flour, chilled (I used all-purpose flour but I think I will try bread flour next time. All-purpose flour is used to make a softer crust, but given our problems tossing the dough, we might need to toughen up with bread flour.)

1 3/4 t salt

1 teaspoon yeast (recipe calls for instant yeast, but I only have active dry yeast, so I added a generous teaspoon with the liquid ingredients)

1/4 C oil

1 3/4 C water, cold (I had to add more water when I was mixing the dough)

Divide dough into six more-or-less-equal balls, wrap in oiled plastic wrap, and stick in the refrigerator. Take dough out of fridge 2 hours before you're ready to make pizza the next day. Press balls out into 1/2 inch thick disks and let them rest on the counter. Toss by hand. Get ready for fun.

Whew. We had lots of trouble tossing the dough. You're supposed to be able to gently bounce the dough on the backs on your hands and then work up to a toss. We found that the dough stretched out too much in the middle while staying too thick on the edges. We also made the fatal mistake of trying to ball up dough that we had already stretched out, resulting in tense little balls of dough that refused to stretch out again--tearing and bouncing back into a ball rather than stretching out nicely. No do-overs for spreading this dough Better luck next time, I guess.

Now on to the pizza sauce. The sauce is Ben's area of expertise, so he'll be taking over for this portion.

Hi all. I'm going to give you a recipe for pizza sauce, but frankly, it's pretty meaningless. Usually I go to the cupboard and just keep tossing spices into the tomato sauce until it tastes like something. Frequently, the result is good. This time, I kept track of all the stuff I added to the sauce, but the amounts are almost all contrived, so do what you like

First, one of the small cans each of tomato paste and tomato sauce. This give a great consistency for the sauce, but Carolyn and I like ours on the thick side.

Roughly equal amounts of the following. I used somewhere on the heavy side of 1 tablespoon:

black pepper

red pepper

white pepper

onion powder

garlic powder

italian seasoning

oregano

teaspoon of fennel seed 

salt to taste

Finish it off with 1 - 2 tablespoons of brown sugar (some use honey). Of all the the ingredients, this sweet element is the most important. It cuts the acidity of the tomato and adds a really interesting tone to the flavor.

The further in advance you make your pizza sauce, the better it will be. As with marinades, soups, and other sauces, time allows the flavors to develop and sink into the tomato. Last night, I ended up making the sauce fairly late, so the ingredient amounts are on the heavy side to make up for the fact that the flavors didn't have time to develop. Don't do it this way. Also, if you're only making one pizza, say just for you and the missus, skip the tomato sauce. Instead, use tomato paste and add small amounts of water until the consistency is how you like it.

Finally, the pizzas themselves. Two of the pizzas we made were fairly standard: one with green pepper and mushroom and one with pepperoni (Turkey pepperoni because our friends are cutting back on fats or calories or something. We didn't ask.). The only thing I'll note about these pizzas is: don't use too much cheese. I know everyone loves cheese and thinks more cheese = a better pizza, but it's just not true. The best pizza is the one with balance, where the flavors of the bread, sauce, cheese and toppings all come through. Have some mozzarella on the side, if you must, but leave the pizza alone.

The final pizza was a taco pizza, fast becoming Carolyn's favorite thing. Basically, just make a cheese pizza, light on the sauce and cheese. Pull it out of the oven and let it sit for 5 minutes or so to cool the cheese before the next step. Then spread refried beans on top, crushed chips, tomato, sprinkle on some hot sauce, and finish with shredded cheese. Everyone loved this pizza.

We baked the pizzas on cookie sheets in the oven, as hot as we could go (425). Next time we'll try moving the oven rack to the lowest rung to try to get the crust more done. Not having an oven that cooks to 800 degrees is a real handicap in pizza making.