Last year... wow, has it really been a year!? Jeebus, I guess so... time flies. Regardless... last year... I made a batch of Peter Reinhart's pizza dough where we put it all in the freezer with the idea of getting in the habit of making pizzas every week.
Obviously that didn't happen.
We made the batch and learned a lot about making pizzas, but never got to keeping pizza dough in the freezer at the ready. But it's still a great idea! Frozen pizzas are really the only processed food I eat anymore, and I eat more than I'd care to admit. While homemade pizzas aren't nearly as easy as frozen... e.g., defrosting the dough, letting it warm up, shaping, etc... they're not all that labor intensive, and they're pretty cheap when it comes to ingredients.
Obviously that didn't happen.
We made the batch and learned a lot about making pizzas, but never got to keeping pizza dough in the freezer at the ready. But it's still a great idea! Frozen pizzas are really the only processed food I eat anymore, and I eat more than I'd care to admit. While homemade pizzas aren't nearly as easy as frozen... e.g., defrosting the dough, letting it warm up, shaping, etc... they're not all that labor intensive, and they're pretty cheap when it comes to ingredients.
So, with the idea of getting into the habit of pizza making for reals this time, I made a batch of Reinhart's dough this weekend... leaving two dough balls in the fridge and putting the other four in the freezer.
The first pizza was pretty standard, as the Swiss Chard Anna planned to use for something more exotic had gone bad (whoops!). Luckily, we had a big container full of slow roasted tomatoes to use, so we used chopped the tomatoes up to use as our sauce... then threw on some fresh mozzarella, dollops of ricotta, and fresh thyme. You could do something similar with sun dried tomatoes if you rehydrated them first, but the slow roasted tomatoes taste far better in my opinion. This was not a spectacular pizza, but it was quite good and I'd certainly make it again. I was most pleased by how well the tomatoes worked in it... I'd gladly use them as the base for any sauced pizza.
Now on to the superstar of the evening:
The first pizza was pretty standard, as the Swiss Chard Anna planned to use for something more exotic had gone bad (whoops!). Luckily, we had a big container full of slow roasted tomatoes to use, so we used chopped the tomatoes up to use as our sauce... then threw on some fresh mozzarella, dollops of ricotta, and fresh thyme. You could do something similar with sun dried tomatoes if you rehydrated them first, but the slow roasted tomatoes taste far better in my opinion. This was not a spectacular pizza, but it was quite good and I'd certainly make it again. I was most pleased by how well the tomatoes worked in it... I'd gladly use them as the base for any sauced pizza.
Now on to the superstar of the evening:
Yes, that's right: fruit on pizza. Trust me, it's not that weird... most people have had pineapple on their pizzas by now... so there's no reason to think that other fruits couldn't work just as well. For this, we followed the recipe for "Nectarine Pizza with Fresh Basil and Reduced Balsamic" posted at alexandra's Kitchen... substituting a peach for the nectarine. Goat cheese is key here to balance some of the sweetness of the peach/nectarine, but I was surprised at how mild that sweetness was overall... less sweet than the tomato based pizza above, in fact. It was really quite delicious and I highly recommend it... don't skimp on the reduced balsamic though! That's a key element that adds another dimension to the flavors. Note that I followed the directions for Reinhart's pizza not hers... so I can't vouch for the crust... but everything came out great.
No comments:
Post a Comment