stories : The Ten
10 Homemade Pizzas
Easy pies to please any palate
By Aïda Mollenkamp
1. Pancetta and Pepper Pizza. The most time-consuming of the lot but worth the effort (you can make all the toppings in advance), this pie is porky, herbal, sweet, and complex. Bake it on our Basic Pizza Dough for the best results.
2. Sautéed Broccoli Rabe with a Fried Egg. This one is much more than the sum of its parts. Just sauté the broccoli rabe, place it on top of the pizza dough, and bake until the crust is crisp. Meanwhile, fry an egg, then slip it on top along with a few shaves of pecorino just before serving.
3. Marinated Mushrooms and Cambozola. Keep these herby Marinated Mushrooms on hand for an impromptu happy hour or a quick pizza. For the pie, chop up the mushrooms, throw them on some pizza dough, scatter Cambozola (or any other blue cheese) on top, and bake until the cheese is melty and the crust crisp.
4. Roasted Asparagus and Prosciutto. Asparagus wrapped in prosciutto is almost a cliché. But if you roast asparagus, toss it with olive oil and lemon juice, and scatter it atop pizza dough along with some prosciutto and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano, the pairing rises to a new level.
5. Potato, Anchovy, and Ricotta. Yes, it’s double the carbs, but such worries are so early 2000s. Boil waxy potatoes until tender, then slice them thinly and spread them around the dough. Add anchovies (we love the white ones from Spain), and finish the whole thing off with a few healthy dollops of ricotta.
6. Smoked Duck Pizza with Hoisin. Though pizza hails from Italy, it has become even more transcontinental since Wolfgang Puck rose to fame. This pizza riffs on Asian flavors without ruining the balance of savory and crunch that’s key to a good pie.
7. Chorizo and Olive Flatbread. Intense oil-cured olives team with harissa paste and spicy Spanish chorizo for a North African pizza that’s as good for your next weeknight meal as it is for an all-night gaming session.
8. Pesto with Sautéed Garlic and Leeks. Mix up an arugula pesto (or one made with basil, parsley, or any other green), slather it on your dough, and top it with sautéed garlic and leeks. You may not want to kiss anyone after a few slices, but this pie is worth the sacrifice.
9. Caramelized Fennel and Goat Cheese. Thinly slice some fennel and prepare it according to our directions for Basic Caramelized Onions. Spread the cooked fennel on the dough along with a generous helping of goat cheese. Bake, then top with a few turns of freshly ground black pepper before serving.
10. Winter Greens and Sausage. Cook kale or chard following our recipe for Sautéed Broccoli Rabe. Spread tomato paste on your pizza dough, and top it with the sautéed greens and some browned sweet sausage before baking.
CHOW’s The Ten column appears every Tuesday.
Aïda Mollenkamp is a food editor at CHOW.
Me, I dig kabocha, red onion, Roquefort and pine nut pizza. or how about figs and prosciutto pizza with chevre?
another fave is good old olio-algio pizza with maybe richotta or robiola. Olive oil, garlic and some sort of farm cheese can't be beat!
Trader Joe's 99 cent pizza dough balls are the best you can get at a great price!
re: No. 2 -- was in france on a great vacation and found a flatbread there with skinny, spicy sausages, fontina and an egg that had been dropped on raw and cooked on the whole pie... wow
TJ's dough is a good deal for quick pizza - try pesto with ricotta
I like pizza with roasted garlic alfredo sauce, potatoes, broccoli, and some rosemary. Oh, and a sprinkle of parmesan.
I really like homemade pizza, but I find it very elusive. The quest for a perfect crust--which is, after all, what homemade pizza is all about--is near impossible, in my opinion, unless one cultivates an obsession about it. The combination of crackling crisp-yet chewy crust plus non-soggy toppings is very difficult to achieve without an actual brick pizza oven. I am sure others have succeeded, but I gave it one year of fridays, first in my oven with a pizza stone, and later on a gas grill, even later on a charcoal grill. Ultimately I gave up. And I consider myself a pretty accomplished home cook. So...good luck to anyone who attempts this!
the key is you have to preheat your oven to about 450. heat oven for about 20 mins. that is how to get the crispy outer crust with soft inside. and be sure to rub olive oil over the stretched out dough before any topping. i feel that creates a barrier so the dough doesnt get soggy.
bon apetito
Chorizo and olive flatbread sounds great. I will make that as soon as I can. We have been making pizza for 20 years using the Wolfgang Puck recipe for dough. We have doubled it, baked and frozen it, made calzones and stromboli with it. Preheating the oven well and the olive oil are key. Whenever you put too much on or don't have a good hot oven, you won't have as good results. We also use some perforated pizza pans. My kids do not like pizzas from anywhere else...except Giordano's in Chicago last week and Lombardi's in NY.
I think the important elements to good pizza are the dough, a stone, high heat, and thoughtful topping selection. The "Good Eats" dough is a good recipe to start with. Form it by hand, and put it up to a light to keep an eye on thin spots. A stone is a nessessity. I use a $10 stone from walmart and and it works fine. Other people have had problems, but just don't wash it and it won't break. A wire brush will get it clean. I heat the oven at 500 for at least 45 minutes with the stone and put the pizza directly on it with half of a broken 16" peel. I do oblong 10X12 pizzas. Finally, excess liquid ruins pizza. Don't oil the crust - when you cut the pizza that barrier breaks and it will turn to mush. If you are oiling your crust, your sauce is too thin. Your sauce has to be thick, and you can't put much on at all. Raw veg will leak out all of its water, and fatty meats will cause just as much damage with their grease.
I worked at a pizza place in college, and I wondered how I was going to get good pizza without a 600 degree deck oven. But, I'm getting better results with my cheap stone.
Suggestions on toppings:
Fry hot italian sausage out of the casing and mince with green olives
Caramelized onion and whole garlic cloves
Good salami
Since you will have extra sauce because you barely put any on your pizza, get another dough ball and roll it out with a pin a little, cut into one inch wide slices, and bake on your stone. Brush with garlic butter and dip in your extra sauce as an app.
Grilled Pizza is the best. The flavor is wonderful when it's cooked on a grill. My grill is a Vidalia Grill and maintains a steady heat. I use "Jiffy" pizza mix and spead it out on aluminum foil coated in butter flavored cooking spray. Heat grill to a medium heat and place foil and crust on the grate. Let it cook until just stiff enough to pickup, pull out the foil and turn the crust over and cover with tippings. Cook just until your cheese melts. YUMMMMM
The best dough recipie for making pizza at home that I've found after years of trial and error in my family is the one from The Best Recipie cookbook from Cook's Illustrated. There's a version that rises all day and then there's a variation that rises in 40 minutes in a 200 degree oven. I can go home on a Friday night, mix it up as soon as I get in the door, and while you prepare everything else, the dough is risen. I've had luck with a pizza stone in a 500 degree oven. It turns out best if you don't bother with sauce and just take some peeled canned or fresh plum tomatoes and crush them a little by hand and put them on without cooking.
The best dough recipe for making pizza at home that I've found after years of trial and error in my family is the one from The Best Recipe cookbook from Cook's Illustrated. There's a version that rises all day and then there's a variation that rises in 40 minutes in a 200 degree oven. I can go home on a Friday night, mix it up as soon as I get in the door, and while you prepare everything else, the dough is risen. I've had luck with a pizza stone in a 500 degree oven. It turns out best if you don't bother with sauce and just take some peeled canned or fresh plum tomatoes and crush them a little by hand and put them on without cooking.
A stupid-simple way to have pizza when you want it: advance preparation of the dough and retarded fermentation in the fridge.
1 tbsp yeast
1 tbsp salt
1 1/3 pounds flour (I use King Arthur white and part white wheat)
2+ cups 100 degree water (use more water for high gluten flours)
You can also substitute up to 1/4 cup olive oil for water.
Let rise and collapse; keep it in the fridge for up to 2 weeks, loosely covered (I use a Cambro 6qt food service container for it).
When you want to bake a pizza, flour a board and your hands, saw off a clump of dough, stretch it to about 1/4 inch thickness, put it on a peel dusted with #1 semolina flour (doesn't burn as easily as cornmeal) and quickly spread your toppings on. At our house, we use our BBQ grill pre-heated to 600 degrees or so, with a saltillo tile ($2) to bake on for 5 minutes. It's important that the dough be just the right thickness, and the toppings not be too wet, but other than those caveats, it Just Works for us... I would guess that we have pizza for dinner about once a week.
The same dough (and the same stone, heat, etc.) works great for making pita bread; making actual loaves of ciabatta-style bread is more challenging but not too awful. (I have also made a proper biga and a proper ciabatta dough before, it made scant difference)
The dough recipe came from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, with minor modifications along the way. Useful book, if a bit repetitive in places... the central idea is solid, though.
I am considering spot-welding a frame into the hood of my grill to hold a bunch more saltillo tiles and thus better approximate a brick oven's walls (radiant heat). Using a stone and high heat (at least 500 degrees, but the hotter the better, up to 700 degrees) are definitely quite important, I would not want to bother making pizza without them. But it's not an expensive or impossible proposition to make good pizzas at home. Since we started making them on the BBQ grill, in fact, the only cleanup is wiping up the flour from forming the dough.
grilled pizza with pesto, grilled shrimp and a bit of fresh mozzarella.
Sometimes I cheat and go to my favorite pizza place and buy the dough when I'm in a hurry but I'm definitely going to try the fridge method offered by ttriche.
Thanks!
Excellent suggestions and very much in keeping with the original concept of pizza; using combinations of foods on hand with an eye towards variety and surprise from combinations not previously encountered or expected.
One of my fave...garlic butter and olive oil on a long sliced sourdough ciabatta, aged provolone and asiago (not too much...as if there was such a thing) topped with a saute of thinly sliced and somewhat carmelized onion and banana peppers, finished with a sprinkle of some fennel, mediterranean herbs:oregano/basil, a drizzle of olive oil, finished in a blisteringly hot oven until the peppers and onions start to blacken...
I've been working on my home made pizza for years, and I think I've cracked it. The crust tastes great and is perfectly charred - I cook it on the stovetop in a cast iron pan, then under the broiler. Total cooking time less than five minutes for a perfect pie - better than any I've had in a restaurant including any number of authentic wood fired brick oven places in Italy and the US. Check out the recipe & method at http://www.breadsecrets.com/pizza.html