melting your mouth

So as you may remember, pizza is not exactly a new challenge for us, but even so I was excited that a new pizza dough would be the recipe for this month, hosted by Rosa at Rosa’s Yummy Yum Yums. I’m always interested to try different takes on pizza crusts, and while my mom has gone through several iterations, I’m still not sure she’s found the perfect recipe.

This dough, from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart, was decidedly different from the other pizza crust I or my parents have made in the past, not so much in the ingredients or proportions, but in its method. Instead of letting the dough rise after mixing all the ingredients together, it’s formed into balls and refrigerated for 1-3 days, then rested at room temperature for “exactly” 2 hours before forming into crusts. The result was a dough that we found very difficult to work with — as soon as we tried to lift up one of the disks, it just kept stretching and stretching and stretching, so that it often tore, and was very hard to get even. I tried doing the traditional “tossing” method, but for the most part, the dough just stretched too thin for that as soon as I picked it up, so it was more a game of picking it up as quickly as possible and laying it on the pizza peel before it got any holes in it. (My parents came over for dinner the night we made this, so I put her to work shaping dough as she’s much more practiced at it than I am. I’ll try to see if she’ll let me take some instructional pictures at some point.)

Even though it was hard to work with, though, this dough had a really excellent flavor. I think it might’ve been from the tablespoon of sugar, but it just seemed like it had a little more flavor than our normal dough recipe, and it was a nice balance between crispy and chewy. So I’m not writing it off yet. Next time I think I might try letting it rise a bit before refrigerating it to develop the gluten a bit more. I also think it needed more flour — the dough seemed kind of shaggy even after sprinkling a fair amount on top, so that might help as well.

On the topping front, we tried a new potato pizza inspired by this one at Smitten Kitchen, but changed around a fair amount. We also made a couple of our familiar favorites — caramelized onions with blue cheese; feta, bacon, pesto, and pine nuts; and margarita — tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil. For more topping ideas try here or here.

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I think this is the longest gap in posting I’ve had, at least in a good while, and I’m sorry. What can I say — we’ve been traveling a lot (the summer of 5 weddings is now done. phew!), I’ve been pretty busy at work, we’re trying to train for a triathlon in September, I’ve been sick for the past several days, and our camera has pooped out on us so we haven’t really been able to take pictures of what little we have been cooking! Basically, life gets in the way.

Anyway, I did still have a couple of things saved up from before the camera started screwing up, so hopefully I can now get back on the ball and these will tide me over until we can get the camera fixed!

So no more of this whining about being busy — let’s talk about pizza! Grilled pizza is something we tried for the first time on the weekend of a thousand posts I keep talking about. I have to admit, my parents’ pizza oven back in Raleigh has pretty well spoiled me for pizza. It took a few years, but they really have it down pat now and make some pretty excellent pizza. I’ve occasionally made pizza on our pizza stone (thanks, Saket!) in the oven, but it’s never quite as good as I want it to be. However, grilling pizza is really the way to go to me. This makes a nice crispy crust, seemed to be pretty forgiving if you’re not able to get the crust as thin as you’d like (that’s me!), and cooks everything pretty fast which is nice for making a lot of different types of pizza to please everyone. I’m not trying to say it’s as good as wood-fired, but it might start to be on the same spectrum, and if you’re 3,000 miles away from the pizza oven you’re used to, it makes a pretty darn good substitute.

For the dough, I of course used a recipe from my mom, which she in turn got from the folks over at Mugnaini, where they bought their pizza oven. She has done a lot of experimenting with pizza dough recipes over the year, and this one is her favorite. The topping combinations listed at the bottom are also some of the favorites my parents have refined. What do you like on your pizza? I’d always love to hear your suggestions in the comments!

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I think this is finally the end of my Christmas Eve dinner posts, at least until next year!

As you can see, my parents have a wood-fired pizza oven, which makes for a nice party centerpiece as well as some absolutely delicious pizzas, and also other dishes including breads, meat, and roasted vegetables.

These are not so much recipes as lists of some combinations of toppings we enjoy for pizzas. As I said, we served them as appetizers, but they can definitely make a good main dish instead. Most of these are based on ideas from Mugnaini, the company where my parents bought their oven and where they recently went to cooking school. The last one is based on something we had at Myth, a restaurant in San Francisco.

Sometime I promise to share my parents’ delicious new recipe for pizza dough as well (assuming they’ll share it with me first!).

What are some of your favorite pizza toppings? I’d love to hear more suggestions in the comments section!

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