With or without Meatza!
Well, it’s been almost a year now since Chez Venza acquired two very powerful allies: a pizza stone and a cheap, ready supply of quality frozen pizza dough.
Couple of pointers on our pizza technique: We heat the stone at 545° (the hottest our oven gets) for at least an hour. Gets the stone (and the kitchen) screaming hot. We defrost the dough for 48 hours, then stretch it out on a piece of parchment paper, load it up, and slide it onto the stone for about 7 minutes.
Here are some of our recent Pizza adventures!
Blue cheese and Roma Tomato Pizza
This is definitely one of our more unique pizzas. We got the idea from our most recent Food TV fascination, Pizza Cuz. Two New York Pizza guys travel the country visiting pizza places. This one is from the Cheeseboard Collective Co-Op in Berkley, CA. It has no sauce… just sliced fresh Roma tomatoes that slightly liquefy under the intense heat of the oven.
The crumbled blue cheese and the sliced mozzarella melt together to form a sharp tasting and rich sauce. Awesome!
New York-Style Pizza with Bacon-Cherry Pepper Relish and Coppa
Another stroke of inspiration. Making Pizza as often as we do, we have really begun to enjoy the Mezzetta products at the store. Jars of kalamata olives, pepperoncini peppers, capers… all stand at the ready for quick pizza toppings. Our newest favorite: Hot Cherry peppers. (Note: These can be hard to find… sweet cherry peppers are not the same thing.)
For this pizza, we pureed some cherry peppers and sugar, crisped up some bacon, and mixed the two together for a sweet hot relish. We put little dollops of it around the pizza. Then we covered the pizza in razor thin slices of hot “Coppa” or capicola, a spicy Italian salami.
We got it from the deli counter at our grocery. It was so thin that it more or less melted into the top of the pizza. Really good flavor.
Homemade Ricotta with Garlic, Artichoke hearts, Kalamata olives, and Homemade Pesto on Whole Wheat Crust
My sister and her husband gave us some great homemade basil-pesto. So…yeah, we made pizza. We used our favorite recipe of homemade ricotta (super easy) and a cool tool: our garlic slicer. You pop in a clove or two and twist. It basically puts the garlic through a pencil sharpener… you get a million thin slices in no time.
The result was rich and delicious. (Note the fork marks in the crust - they indicate the half of the pizza with hidden anchovies. It took pizza for me to love the little salt bombs…. but the wife, not so much.)
Pizza Pugliese
This was an attempt to replicate a pizza from Italy described by our brother in law. He described it as topped with onions. Much internet research yielded no clear answer on what Pizza Pugliese is exactly. Puglia is a region of Italy, and apparently they have a special kind of onion. Some of the recipes I found were actually for a type of onion pie tart. For our version, we caramelized a red onion until it had cooked down to a delicious, sweet onion jam.
We dolloped it on the pizza and added olives.
The brother-in-law told us as he was eating it that the onions should have been uncooked. Ours was still tasty, dammit!
Pepperoncinis, Kalamatas, Onions, Capers, and thinly sliced Pepperoni
This is a prime example of a straight-out-of-the-pantry pizza for us. The one special thing we do is to slice the pepperonis into thin strips. It helps them crisp up and render.
Mushroom and Leek Galette with Gorgonzola
Ok… so this isn’t really a pizza, but maybe it is? It’s more of a free form tart with shitake mushrooms, leeks, gorgonzola, Dijon mustard, parsley, and thyme on a whole wheat crust. Unlike the above-listed pizzas, we made this dough from scratch. It has no yeast…. but lots of butter. The mushrooms give it a great meatiness and the gorgonzola and mustard give it great, great flavor. Vegetarian = healthy, right?
Pizza has become a big part of our weeknight dinner routine. It is an easy, tasty, blank canvas into which you can easily pour a lot of creativity and freshness. And it’s so much cheaper (and usually tastier) than 98% of the pizza available for delivery.
Start making pizza you fools!
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