Another Pizza Party: Various and Varied Pies

After work, my pal Melanie and I decided to make pizza for dinner. We got some dough from Whole Foods (more on that later) and picked up a bunch of toppings, to add to things I already had in the house, as well as a healthy amount of wine. Talia and Ryan came by and we had a veritable party of pizza on our hands.

So, we originally planned on making 4 medium sized pies, but the dough from Whole Foods was way too cold to work with, so Talia (she's a professional, y'all!) broke the dough balls up into smaller pieces and put them on top of the oven so they'd proof faster (she also taught me the term "proof"). After a while they were warm enough to roll out, stretch, top and finally bake.

I've made the dough myself before, and I've also bought it from my local pizza place. This was the first time I tried the dough at Whole Foods. It's the same stuff they use for their prepared pizza in the store, and it's very good. But it was more expensive (only by a dollar or so but still), and it was not immediately ready to work with, a huge problem as we were just off work and really starting to get hungry. When you go to a pizza place, their dough is proofed and totally ready to go. And it's cheaper. And it's probably more convenient than Whole Foods. Win-win-win! Glad I tried the Whole Foods dough, but probably not going to do it again.

So, on to the pies. First up, we had Caramelized Onions and Vinegar (which I've made before). For this, you make Bitty's (can I call him Bitty? I saw Mario Batali do it on that terrible show they were on together and I kind of love it, but I'm not Mario Batali, so...) recipe for caramelized onions, and then stir in a tablespoon or so of good balsamic vinegar. This goes on the pizza, and the pizza goes in the oven. Do not underestimate this simple topping--it's addictive.

Next was a more traditional pizza, at least by my provincial New York thinking. I had some tomato sauce with turkey sausage in it leftover from pasta dinner the night before, so we put that on the dough along with some smoked mozzarella. This was good. Very good. The smoked mozzarella was something I was not certain about, but it's now going to be a fixture at every pizza party.

Then, a pesto pie. Once again, having pesto in the freezer ready to go is a godsend.

I just defrosted it, spread it on the dough, and then topped it with some sweet yellow grape tomatoes from the market. And some more smoked mozzarella. Again, delicious. What's not to like?

The last pie was olives and rosemary and a bit of olive oil. It was good, but certainly not the favorite of the night. Following that one, we started experimenting, making one with just olive oil, and another with a bit of parmesan and the leftover smoked mozz. Really, the main thing here is that you can't really go too wrong, and you should try anything that suits your fancy. There's about 30 variations in How to Cook Anything, and many more than that if you're feeling creative. Have a pizza party today. If you buy the dough pre-made, it's actually a pretty quick meal, and you don't need all the crap everyone tells you that you MUST have, like a peel and pizza stone.

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:

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

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:

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

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.

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.

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:

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.

...and now for something completely different: Two Boots Tavern

Pork buns in Chinatown. Lox and whitefish at Russ and Daughters. Smiley face pizza (that's olive eyes, mushroom nose, and red pepper mouth) at Two Boots. Food = memory.

Two Boots holds a really special place in my heart even among the aforementioned spots. Their original restaurant on Avenue A was a place I grew up in, eating smiley face pizzas, drinking coke out of boot-shaped mugs, and picking songs from their well stocked jukebox. It was a heartbreaking moment when I came back from Boston one spring break and took some friends there to find it was under new ownership. The fried calamari was gone, replaced with an appetizer menu of vegetarian options. The pizza was just not that great. Not long after, it closed down. There's been a sign about its eminent reopening in the window for what seems like years now, but the place is dead to me.

Now, while I'll always miss that space, this story isn't as sad as all that. Two Boots To Go, the slice joint/delivery place across the street still makes the stuff the way I remember, and they deliver to Stuy Town, so I've hardly been deprived of Two Boots for the last few years. They're also littered all over the city. I think most of the others are franchised out, but I'm not sure about all those details, and I don't really care, as all of them seem to more or less live up to the original. One thing's for sure: none of them miss the mark as badly as what the new owners refer to in the aforementioned sign as "Re:Boot." God, I hate them.

Well, last night I found a place that reminded me of the good times I had at Two Boots as a youngster. Two Boots Tavern is on Grand and Suffolk, a neighborhood that seems as random at first glance as Avenue A and 3rd Street must have back in 1987. It's a bar, it's an authentic Two Boots experience, and it's somewhere I'll be returning to quite a bit in the future. I had a chance to speak to owner Phil Hartman last night, and in between gushing to him about how I was raised on his pizza, he asked me to tell all my friends about the new spot. Well, Phil, that was already the plan: I can't recommend it enough. This place has a real appeal to it. Sure, that neighborhood doesn't hurt for lack of bars, but it could use more laid back spots, and that was exactly what we found at the Tavern last night.

So please, everybody reading this in the New York area, check out the Two Boots Tavern. You can drink (full bar plus beer on tap) AND eat delicious pizza. Plus they invented this thing called Cajun Pigs in Blankets that's a piece of andouille sausage wrapped in pizza crust. And it is GOOD. There's other bar snacks too, the drinks were reasonably priced, and what's more, Two Boots is back to its former glory. See you there.

Update: Phil Hartman just emailed me some kind words and corrections about the history of Two Boots:

Thanks for sharing your memories with me, and thanks for spreading the word to your blogsters...I raised three kids in the East Village -- and in Two Boots! -- and they've shared many of the same experiences as you...

Just wanted to clear up some of your misconceptions about Two Boots...

Two Boots was started by Doris Kornish and I in 1987 at 37 Ave. A. A local real estate developer, John Touhey, owned the original space, and we gave John permission to open Two Boots Brooklyn in 1989 -- he's done a fantastic job out there in Park Slope, especially with parents and kids.

Two Boots has grown over the years -- we just opened in LA, have a big, beautiful, full-service location in Bridgeport, Conn. with a stage for live music, and are building a small branch in Hell's Kitchen (9th Ave. & 44th St.)...NONE of the branches are franchises; all are owner-operated, and my office is right here in the EV on East 3rd St.

As for the original location at 37 Ave. A, Doris and I split up several years ago, and while I got Two Boots in the settlement, she received the original restaurant...Doris is a vegetarian, and Re-boot expressed her interests and sensibility. What more can I say? I find it as sad as you that our original location has been lost, but I'm glad you see that the spirit is still alive and well on Grand St. -- and at every branch of Two Boots, I think.

So, there you go. Avenue A, still dead to me, other branches, still legit.

What to Eat at Two Boots Tavern [Grub Street]
Picture also lifted from Grub Street.

Minimalist Wednesday: We Have a Lefty!

Mark Bittman: rule breaker. In today's minimalist, he expands upon the savory oatmeal dish that he took to NPR and the blogs a couple weeks ago. Also featured is breakfast pizza, made on a crust of polenta. Hell yes. Bittman also took the idea to the Today Show, to show an overly sassy Meredith Vieira how the polenta pizza idea works and profess his leftiness. It looks dank. Check out the Today Show clip below, and don't skip the Times article which has even more recipes for what look like tasty and easy savory breakfasts. There's also a video with a different savory breakfast recipe on the Times website.

NOTE: If you're reading this, NYTimes web people, PLEASE make your videos embeddable. Then I could post those instead of the Today clips, and that would make me extremely happy. Alternatively, if the hosts of the Today Show would stop talking to their audience like a bunch of confused toddlers, maybe I wouldn't have such a problem with sharing their videos. So, there's two possible solutions.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Your Morning Pizza [nytimes]
Savory Breakfast [ntimes video]
Savor a slice of Mark Bittman's polenta pizza [todayshow]