What Pizza means to me..

Paddyscake on

I've seen tons of pics of luscious pizzas posted by TFLers. Our conception of pizza toppings varies greatly. Is it regional, age specific..snobbery? We all love the "BREAD" part,... crusty, chewy, crackery..thick..thin. We eat it folded, with fork and knife or just plain hands on!! I, personally have a hard time accepting something called Hawaiian, BBQ, or Taco pizza. It's just not pizza to me.

Mine has a tomato or white cheese sauce and any combo of sausage, meatball, pepperoni, peppers, onions, olives, mushrooms, broccoli, red potato, roasted garlic, fresh basil and oregano topped with mozzarella, parmesan/reggianno (sp?). I really have a hard time with ham and pineapple, I tried it last time we had "pizza" at work, um  let's just say..yuck..sorry.

Diversity, thank God, is a mainstay of America..the land of the free and the home of the brave..and said in not any disrespect the land of great pizza.... What's your fav..where are your from??

Paddyscake, nothing seems to generate interest here like somebody's Saturday night supper--so long as it's pizza. To me it means our one more-or-less guaranteed family night, the three humans settled in with a couple custom pies and a movie, the three dogs cued by the smell of pizza that it's 'rawhide chew night', hearty tail thumps...

I have had and quite enjoyed pineapple- (excuse me, ma'am,) and sauerkraut- topped pizzas, zucchini and eggplant, too. Greek pizzas with feta, tomato, spinach, olives and dill--mmm. Big thumbs down for the dreaded little fishes--in Hanover, NH there is a very popular little pizza joint catering to the Dartmouth crowd called 'Everything But Anchovies", affectionately diminished to EBA.

Hippie versions with tofu or tempeh and whole wheat crust...let's move on...but veggie sausage/pepperoni is a happy addition.

My hands-down favorite, however, is this recipe, courtesy of ''Moosewood Restaurant Cooks At Home'':

 

GARLIC & GREENS PIZZA

Ingredients

* 1 prebaked pizza shell (12-15 inch size) (I make my own crust and do not trouble to pre-bake.)

TOPPING

* 1/3 cup sun-dried tomatoes (not packed in oil)(optional in the recipe but I think they really boost the flavor)
* 1/2 cup of boiling water (optional)
* 4 large garlic cloves, minced or pressed
* 3 tablespoons olive oil
* 4 packed cups coarsely chopped rinsed and stemmed kale
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil (2 tablespoons dried)
* 1-1/2 cups of grated mozzarella cheese
* 1/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese



Directions

Preheat the oven according to the directions for the pizza crust you are using.

If you are using sun-dried tomatoes, place them in a heat proof bowl, cover with boiling water, and set aside.

In a large skillet, sauté the minced garlic in the oil for about a minute. Add the kale to the skillet along with the salt, and sauté on medium-high heat for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring frequently, until just tender. The cooking time will vary with the age and freshness of the kale. While the kale cooks, drain and chop the optional sun-dried tomatoes. Add the chopped basil and sun-dried tomatoes to the kale and remove the skillet from the heat.

Spread the kale topping on the pizza crust using a slotted spoon, and sprinkle the cheese on top. Bake following the instructions given for the crust you are using. Serves 2 to 3 as main dish, or 4 to 8 as an appetizer.

 

 

*Dolf, your links keep going in a circle back to the parent thread, and I'd really like to read them. Er?

This is weird. I've had people comment on previous posts that they could not open links. Every time I checked, the links were correct. I just double checked it and for me it goes straight to my comment in the "Time for Pizza" post. Not this thread. When I hover my mouse over the link, my browser says: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/4156/time-pizza#comment-21430, which is correct. Now, for a brief moment yesterday during editing I had the wrong link in there (indeed going back here), but I don't understand why that's what you see, unless you saw it in the 3 minutes it was lack that. Anyway, you see the URL above, so copy and paste that in your browser instead.


--dolf

My Bread Aventures
I've been fixing your links, Dolfs. As bwraith mentions, I've been seeing them w/ the hostname twice. Not sure why that is.
I have been in the habit of creating links with the BBCode url tag. What I was doing was typing quotes around the url (HTML style). That was one problem. The double hostnames occurred in some cases because of some paste issues. Thanks for fixing the posts!

On a general note, the "rich text" dohickey that allows for editing your posts does not behave very well (at least on my system Mac OS X). Extraneous blanks are inserted in places, sometimes the link icon does not work etc. I can live with it, but you may want to see if there is a more modern version of that code available.


--dolf

My Bread Aventures
You can also set the rich-text editor to off in your profile. I don't use it, but overall it seems to have helped people.
I have a recipe for Indonesian Rice salad that is a huge favorite. The Garlic & Greens sounds awesome..and is on the "to do" list..thanks. The sauerkraut was with the pineapple? Hmm.. I have to think about that one. I do like eggplant, summer squash and a light touch of those dreaded little fishies. They always dump too many anchovies on..just a light touch, really it's tasty  :  )

Oh, my, Paddyscake, it wasn't all at once-! That was just a stream-of-consciousness pizza toppings list. Yikes!  

The sauerkraut was with peppers and mushrooms and stuff. The pineapple was in pre-meat-free days and cozied up with Canadian bacon on the pie.

Thanks for setting up a great topic. 

I have the same conflict with my kids on the Hawaiian issue. They love it, and I find it just so-so and just not keeping with my idea of traditional brick "true" pizza. Anything goes with pizza, though. The tradition of creativity in pizza is strong even here in the staid NYC area, to say nothing of west coast creations, so I can't really say it's "not keeping with pizza tradition", given the almost unimaginable combinations I've had in some of those supposedly traditional places.

Meanwhile, my favorites are developing. I have only made pizza a couple of times at home recently, but the new brick oven demanded some attempts at it. My first was a simple NY-Style Sauce and Cheese Pizza, as on page 194 of Peter Reinhart's American Pie. I saw the potential of it, although I wasn't overwhelmed by the crust I got - maybe partly my own fault. No favorite emerged, and I was luke warm on the whole homemade pizza concept for a while.

However, after some further soul-searching, I decided to make a full frontal assault, so I worked up a sourdough/yeasted hybrid dough approximating a Neo-Neapolitan "First Generation" dough, but with an added sourdough levain, less yeast, and longer rise times somewhat like the Glezer pizza recipe.

That really worked for me. The crust flavor and texture was much more to my liking.

My favorites ended up being 1) olives, fresh tomatoes, sauce, and cheese with an arugula garnish, and 2) pesto, pine nuts, fresh tomatoes, and cheese with a basil garnish. Closely behind were 3) roasted peppers, olives, sauce, cheese and arugula garnish, and 4) shrimp (placed raw on the pie), onions/garlic marmalade, sauce, cheese, with basil garnish. The photos were taken by son, Will, who bakes some bread, too, and has blogged on TFL in the past.

Olive and Fresh Tomato PizzaOlive and Fresh Tomato Pizza

Olive and Fresh Tomato PizzaPesto and Fresh Tomato Pizza

Olive and Roasted Pepper PizzaOlive and Roasted Pepper Pizza

Olive and Roasted Pepper PizzaPizza Baking - Olive and Roasted Pepper Pizza

Pizza and pics look great..I love the "pizza baking" with the blazing fire!! They all look tasty..Actually, looking at yours is going to make it hard for any of us mere oven bakers to get excited about pies.
I know the oven is more than a little over the top, but we sure are having a good time with it. The enjoyment of being outdoors, which at the moment here in NJ is very nice, was not anticipated when I was thinking this whole thing out. Then I realized how it becomes a back yard "hangout" of sorts, since I set up tables and spend a few hours out there either baking or cooking and maybe have a glass of wine or a beer along the way. Neighbors and friends come by to pick up or drop off kids and stay a while to enjoy the atmosphere of the outdoor fire. I really only was thinking bread and the fun of doing that more or less on my own, whether indoors or outdoors. It's turned into an outdoor hangout for all kinds of different cooking adventures, which makes it much more fun than I had imagined.

But I couldn't complain looking at those beautiful pizza pies!  Wonderful job and I'm impressed with the amount of work you went to making pizza for such a large brood with all those different toppings.  But, oh, so good!  Well, worth the effort.

 

Hmmm, I'm thinking I'd like some of that olive and tomato pizza.  My hubby won't get anywhere near an olive so I never get them on pizza and I love olives! (I eat them only from my occasional martini and then its the big green ones stuffed with garlic so I have zoo breath for a week...heehee.)

 

Can I also mention that I just don't care for a pizza with pineapple.  I can eat one slice and then it just loses its interest.  I crave the fresh basil and oregano with homemade marinara.  Yum!  I can't stand it any more so I just took some Neo-Neapolitan dough balls out of the freezer so we can have pizza tonight!  (PS...I saw your mug and you don't look nearly as crazy as I'd pictured (hehe) and that Will is sure a cute kid!)

I only show a few of the 8 pies, as Will only took a few photos. However, there is one with sausage that made it into the photos, I think. In any event, we did 8 pies, some had sausage. However, the olive and tomato and the pesto and tomato were clear favorites with the adults. The kids liked the margherita and the sausage pizzas. It was a lot of work, mostly in preparing so darn many toppings. The dough itself and the shaping and the baking was all pretty much a snap, except for a disaster on the last one, when I forgot to dust the peel with flour and had a sort of pizza explosion on the hearth. The cleanup took much, much longer than it would've without that one little tiny dusting omission.

Dolf,

I posted what comes up in the status bar when I mouse over the links in that post.  I did this by "copying shortcut" and pasting into this comment with "disabled rich text". At least when I preview it, it seems to display as it appears. I had to figure out these links and enter them manually to get to them.

http://www.starreveld.com/Photos/v/1414"

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/4217/"http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/4156/time-pizza#comment-21430"
Thanks for that. So yes, it was wrong, but not wrong enough for my browser to choke on it (Mac OS X, Safari). Since it worked for me, I did not look inside the "raw" text. I fixed the post and will not fix my signature and other recent image posts.


--dolf

My Bread Aventures

Dolf,

It works fine now in IE6, winXP in your link above - same OS/browser where it wasn't working before.

Bill

Some pretty fancy Pizza's above. I discovered fresh pineapple and smoked ham using a sweet BBQ sauce for Hawaiian style pizza. It's a little out there but what a flavor! Otherwise as long as it's fresh bring it on!

Eric

Glad you got your problem fixed, nothing like teamwork!

I'm not big on anything sweet on pizza, either.  That is, unless it's a dessert pizza, made with a shortbread crust.

 

My favorite pizza, right now, is a whole wheat cracker crust, with a garlicky white sauce,  diced garlic chicken, black olives and tomato pieces.  Did I mention garlic?

 

Nancy

All this talk about pizza and I could not stand it anymore.  Luckily I had a couple dough balls of Reinhart’s Neo-Neapolitan in my freezer so it was pretty easy to make just two pizzas.  We love the spicy Italian sausage in the links, remove the casings and make tiny balls to sauté.  Then add fresh ripe bell peppers, in this case we used yellow ones and freshly grated mozzarella cheese topped with Parmigiano Reggiano.

 

  

The second pizza is an all-time favorite; pizza margherita.  I use cow’s milk fresh mozzarella since it melts better on pizza and top with fresh basil from my garden.  I should have waited to put the basil leaves on after I baked it - would have been prettier but it still tasted great.

 

 

I love the fresh and easy marinara sauce recipe in Glezer’s ABAA but I use both fresh oregano and fresh basil from my garden, chopped and mixed into the sauce. 

 

Bill mentioned making shrimp pizzas and that sounds so good I’m going to try that next time.  I am going to experiment with another crust recipe as well and try sourdough but I have to say we simply love this Neo-Neapolitan.  Very crunchy edges and nice and soft on the inside and you can toss it really thin.

 

More photos here:

http://zolablue.smugmug.com/gallery/3527433#199382934

  
I noticed the quality of your photos before, but this time I decided to check something out. Looked at the photo info on your Web version of the photos and notice you use a Nikon D200. So do I. Looks like we may have another hobby (or are we to serious to call it a hobby) in common!


--dolf


See my My Bread Adventures in pictures
ZB..those look so good.. you know how the suggestion of a lemon can make your mouth water..hah! you've done it with these pics!!

I made Wolfgang Puck’s shrimp and goat cheese pizza last weekend and it was rich and delicious.  Even my husband who is not usually as adventurous in the food department as I am thought it was outstanding.

  

The recipe is here:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_21090,00.html

  

Thought I would mention that this time I again made the Neo-Neapolitan pizza dough (from American Pie) but used 100% high gluten flour as the recipe calls for.  (I used KA Sir Lancelot.)  Neither of us cared at all for the texture of that crust which was very chewy, almost tough and just not as flavorful.  The times before I made that recipe I had not yet purchased high gluten flour so I used KA bread flour and it was outstanding.

 

More photos here:

http://zolablue.smugmug.com/gallery/3527433#199382934