Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Pizza Party: Pizza Dough, White Pizza with Caramelized Onions and Vinegar, & Pizza with Tomato Sauce and Mozzarella

So, my mom's been wanting to make pizza for a long time now. The project seemed the perfect excuse, not that you need one: all things considered, it's a simple process and it yields great results even if you don't have a pizza stone, which *gasp* we do not. And it's really fun. And you can't argue with this:

Pizza.jpg

So you take flour, cornmeal (optional, but makes the crust crispier), yeast, and salt, and put them in the food processor.

Pizza3.jpg

Turn it on, and add some water and olive oil through the feed tube. It will form a ball within about thirty seconds; if it doesn't add some more water. What you end up with looks like this:

Pizza5.jpg

Put it on the floured counter. Knead it a little bit.

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Put it in a bowl, cover it, and let it rise for 1-2 hours. Sounds like a lot of downtime, but this is when we threw together our toppings. Each batch of dough makes two pizzas (or one huge one, I guess). On one we did just some caramelized onions and balsamic vinegar. The other, tomato sauce, mozzarella, mushrooms and turkey sausage (from DiPaola Farms at the Greenmarket--the best turkey sausage I've ever tasted). So, we caramelized some onions, over fairly low heat, for a pretty long time til they were nice and brown and sweet and delicious. Did pretty much the same thing with the mushrooms, which cooked faster. Browned the sausage (crumbled out of its casing), and threw together a batch of Fast Tomato Sauce.

Pizza-Toppings.jpg

And by then, the pizza dough was ready.

We stretched and rolled it out so it was as thin as we could get it, then laid it out on the baking sheets and got to topping. For the white pie we mixed a bit of the balsamic vinegar with the onions and just spread them out on top. For the other pie, I spread out a pretty thin layer of sauce, then the cheese slices, then scattered about the sausage and mushrooms. Sprinkled some grated parmesan on top of that, because why not, and our pies were good to go.

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Bittman says that they need to bake for 6-12 minutes on 500 degrees. Ours took more like 20 minutes, but maybe that's because we like a nice crispy crust. Here's the finished white pie:

Pizza2.jpg

This one is definitely going into heavy rotation; let me know if you ever want to have a pizza party and I'm so there.

5 comments:

  1. looks so yummy!

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  2. It was so much fun, and tasted great! I can't wait to do it again.

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  3. DiPaola turkey sausage is the BEST. Did you know he used to be a wedding photographer before he was a turkey farmer? I had a nice chat with him once at the Grand Army Plaza market when I was there taking photos for a class.

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  4. Ooooo pizza! I like the concept for your blog by the way. It will be fun to watch you cook through his ginormous text book!

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  5. I like pizza with chilled beer. This recipe would keep me busy in the kitchen again.
    Planning to have this in the weekend.

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