Tagged with Pizza

Cheese Pizza with Chimichurri Dipping Sauce

Yesterday I was in the mood for pizza.  I wasn’t sure what kind of pizza I was in the mood for, but I was set on having some combination of dough and cheese for dinner.  I usually pick pizza toppings by looking in my fridge for items that need to be used up, but nothing was really jumping out at me.  Plus, I was all out of banana peppers, and pizza night without banana peppers is like Christmas without presents.  Or Easter without candy.  Or movie night without popcorn and Junior Mints if you have a differing view of Christmas and Easter than I do.

I turned to the interwebs for inspiration, and I found it in the form of an Ina Garten recipe for Baked Fontina that I’d recently bookmarked.  One day I will work up the nerve to eat a crock of molten, herby fontina for dinner, but until that day arrives, I will stick to eating my slightly less gluttonous pizza version. For my interpretation I kept the fontina, added a few other kinds of cheese and a very thin layer of red sauce, and, in lieu of the herb combination in Ina’s recipe, I made a chimichurri sauce for either dipping or smothering on the baked pizza.  I really wasn’t sure how this would turn out, but judging by the fact that my boyfriend went from “not that hungry” to eating 2/3 of this pizza in addition to a couple of slices of another pizza (one with banana peppers!), I think it was a success.  The cheese pizza on its own was really good, and the chimichurri sauce added a nice, bright dimension to it.  Mmm…chimichurri…

Cheese Pizza with Chimichurri Dipping Sauce

For the pizza:

  • Pizza dough
  • 1/3 cup pizza sauce
  • 2-3 cups grated cheese (I used mostly fontina and farmer cheese with a little mozzarella and parmesan)

For the chimichurri sauce:

  • 2 cups flat-leaf parsley, leaves and thin stems only
  • 3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
  • 1 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 2-3 tbsp fresh lemon juice
  • 1 tbsp vinegar (optional)
  • Olive oil
  • Salt

Notes:

  • All measurements are approximate and should be adjusted to taste.
  • Leftover chimichurri is great on eggs, meat, potatoes, sandwiches, and many other things.

Combine the parsley, garlic, red pepper flakes, lemon juice, vinegar (if using), and about 1/2 tsp of salt in the bowl of a food processor.  Process into a rough paste, then pour in olive oil while the motor runs until it thins out into a sauce.  The consistency will be similar to pesto.  Season with additional salt.  Set the sauce aside, keeping it at room temperature, while you prepare the pizza.

While making chimichurri sauce, you should not let your giant thumb get in the way of your extremely sharp knife while chopping garlic.  Because that’s what I did, and it led to the near loss of a considerable piece of my thumb, the utterance of several not nice words, a panicked series of phone calls to my dad, mom, and boyfriend, more panicking when nobody was answering their phones, the application of a lot of pressure and bloodying of several paper towels, and finally a returned phone call from my dad with his doctor’s orders of pressure, band-aids, and, eventually, super glue.  The bleeding stopped, the panicking subsided, and the cooking continued (with cleaned surfaces and a new round of garlic cloves, of course).  Whew.

Preheat your oven to 450.  Stretch the pizza dough on an oiled baking sheet.  Cover with a thin layer of pizza sauce (just like the one pictured above on the right).

Cover with cheese.

Bake for about 15 minutes, or until the crust is browned to your liking.

Serve with chimichurri sauce.

Delicious!

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Pesto Veggie Pizza

To go with the beef and sauerkraut pizza from last week, we made a slightly lighter veggie pizza to balance things out.  It started with a pesto base and was topped with fresh spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, feta, and a mozzarella/provolone mix.  The sauerkraut ‘za stole the show that evening, but on any other night this pizza would have been the winner.

Pizza dough + pesto + spinach + artichoke hearts + sun-dried tomatoes + feta + mozzarella + provolone.  Bake at 450 for 20-ish minutes or until the cheese melts and the crust is crispy.

And…photos from a busy, fun-filled weekend

Tailgating on Saturday

The girls

I know.

Perfect fall day for football

Twin Cities 10 Mile on Sunday (that’s me to the left)

We didn’t get medals this year, but the nut rolls that they handed out at the finish more than made up for it.  I snagged two.  Holler!

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Deep Dish Pizza

As a former resident of Chicago, I’ve consumed a fair amount of deep dish pizza.  Some good, some not so good.  My favorite is Lou Malnati’s with its ultra buttery, flaky crust.  While I generally prefer a thin, chewy crust, I do get the occasional Malnati’s deep dish craving and want a more substantial slice.  I could shell out $50 to have a frozen pizza mailed to me, or I could attempt to make one myself for considerably less.

The only problem with making it myself is that I needed to find the perfect recipe.  What makes a Malnati’s pizza great is the buttery crust – as melt-in-your-mouth as pizza crust can be.  I was fearful that I would find a recipe that sounded promising, invest a lot of time (and calories) in it, and end up with a bland, bready crust more resembling Giordano’s.  I don’t want bland and bready.  I want buttery!  Enter Cook’s Illustrated and their laminating (layering butter and dough) trick to create a close-to-Malnati’s-but-not-quite-there crust.  For a lot less than $50 I ended up with two deep dish pizzas that will tide me over until I make it back to Chicago.

One more thing: this recipe may look a little intimidating – the list of ingredients is lengthy, the dough needs to rise twice, and there are a lot of steps in general.  Do not be afraid.  The nearly two hours of rising time allow you to get the rest of the ingredients ready while the yeast is doing its thing.  I got home from the grocery store a little after 4PM and had dinner on the table at 7:15 when our friends Sam and Laura arrived.  I even managed to make a batch of fresh ricotta in there.  The only thing I didn’t have time to do was vacuum and clean up the coffee that I had somehow managed to spill all over my wall that morning, but that’s what boyfriends are for.

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Rosemary Pizza

I really, really wanted to call this Rosemary Flatbread, but after some in-depth research on Wikipedia I learned that this is actually pizza. According to the almighty Wikipedia, flatbread is unleavened bread (made without yeast or other leavening agent), and you had better believe that there was yeast in my dough. I did find a few sources that say pizza actually is flatbread, but I am going to stand by Wikipedia on this one. I guess I need to make flatbread one of these days to satisfy my need to label something as such.

You might be wondering what the big deal is with calling it pizza or flatbread, and boy do I have a few things to tell you.

1. Mind your own beeswax.

2. Remember the part in The Life Aquatic when Steve and Ned are wandering around the ship arguing and end up on the deck punching each other? Ned says, “I can’t believe I asked if I could call you dad. Of course you said no,” and Steve responds, “I let you call me Stevesy. It sounds better.” That’s exactly how I feel about this. I really want to call it flatbread, but Wikipedia will only let me call it pizza.

3. Go to bed, you sons of bitches. Just kidding! That’s a Steve Zissou line that always makes me laugh, and I heard it again today when checking my quotes for accuracy. I don’t really want you to go to bed. I want you to keep reading.

Rosemary Pizza

  • Pizza dough
  • Cheese, grated or crumbled
  • Rosemary (preferably fresh, but dried should also work)
  • Olive oil
  • Sea salt
  • Garlic in some form (optional)
  • Freshly cracked pepper (optional)

Preheat your oven and pizza stone to 400-450. I usually stick to 400 because I have a fire alarm that has adverse reactions to oven temperatures over 400, and some days I just don’t feel like setting myself up for the stress of flinging all my windows open, turning a fan on high and frantically waving a towel in front of my fire alarm. If I did not have such issues to deal with I would turn the oven up as hot as I could get it.

I used the remaining dough from my recent bread making for the crust. I was planning on using some Trader Joe’s pre-made pizza dough that I bought a while back, but there was some ominous liquid that had developed in the bag. Kind of weirded me out. If your dough is in the refrigerator, let it sit at room temperature for at least 20 minutes before working with it.

I recently discovered that rolling dough out on a silicone baking mat is super easy.
You just flip it over onto a pizza peel dusted with cornmeal and slowly peel it off the mat. If you don’t have a mat just stretch or roll out the dough however you normally would.
Drizzle the dough with a little olive oil, and rub it over the entire top of the crust. If you go overboard with the oil just blot some off with a paper towel.

Cover the dough with grated cheese and a few sprigs of rosemary that has been torn into little pieces. Sprinkle with a little sea salt. Add cracked pepper if you wish. As far as garlic goes, I meant to rub a clove of garlic over the raw dough, but I completely forgot. My back up plan was sprinkling on a little garlic salt when it came out of the oven, but next time I will either rub the crust with garlic or infuse the olive oil with a little garlic.

As far as cheese goes, you can use just about anything. The first time I made this was during our Italian dinner party when I was stressing out about not having enough food. I happened to have fresh rosemary and monterey jack in the fridge, so I threw them onto some pizza dough and everyone loved it. This time around I used mozzarella, and that worked as well. Be creative.

Bake until the cheese is melted and the crust is done to your liking.  Oh, and try not to break your pizza stone in the process.
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