Roasted garlic bacon pizza, chorizo mushroom pizza and puttanesca pizza

For Pi Day. Just 3 pizza pies. You're on your own for the .14 etc.

The first one takes a bit more effort, but you can do a lot of the work ahead.

Roast garlic bacon pizza

Adapted from The Little Guides Pizzas

2 heads garlic

Olive oil for drizzling

1 tablespoons olive oil

2 onions, chopped

2 garlic cloves, chopped

2 pounds tomatoes, chopped (about 6 cups)

1 pizza crust dough, risen

Cornmeal for sprinkling pan

4 rashers Canadian bacon

¾ cup of the prepared tomato sauce

¾ cup grated mozzarella

Preheat oven to 450. Score garlic heads a short way down from the top. Drizzle with olive oil. Wrap each head in aluminum foil and bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until soft. Squeeze garlic out of peels and set aside.

Shortcut: If you’re lucky, you can find roasted garlic at the deli. Chances are it won’t be spreadable like the kind you roast at home, so you’ll have to puree it in the food processor to get it to a useable consistency.

Advance prep: Roasted garlic can be frozen either whole or mashed and stored in ice-cube size servings. See these tips for how, and think of how many more recipes you won’t flip past because you don’t have roasted garlic and don’t have time to make it before dinner.

Put a large saucepan over medium heat. Add olive oil and tilt to coat bottom of the pan. Add onion and saute until almost translucent. Add chopped garlic and cook another minute. Season lightly with salt (you’ll be adding more later, so go easy).

Add tomatoes and bring to a simmer. Cook over medium low heat for an hour to an hour and a half, until nearly all the liquid is gone from the sauce. If you’re making this in advance, you can measure out how much you need for a given recipe and freeze the rest in portions as you see fit. You’ll use ¾ cup in this recipe.

If you own a baking stone, preheat it to 450 degrees. Sprinkle a pizza paddle or cookie sheet lined with parchment paper with corn meal. Shape pizza dough into desired shape and place on corn-meal lined surface. When baking stone is ready, slide dough over to the stone. (If you don’t have a baking stone, just use a baking sheet or pizza pan and skip the part about preheating the pan.)

Spread roasted garlic over the pizza dough. Spread tomato sauce on top of that. Cut Canadian bacon into strips and array around the pizza. Sprinkle with cheese and bake for 15 minutes or until top is golden.

Rating: Very worth repeating. It's so close to a basic, generic Canadian bacon red sauce pizza. But then you add roasted garlic, a nicely made tomato sauce and, if you're lucky, some really good Canadian bacon like the stuff we got from Hilltop. All of a sudden you're talking about a great pizza, especially if you start with a crust made with Popine. It's worth making on a nice pizza crust, but if you don't have time for that sort of thing and can't buy it from a local source, I won't tell if you use a Boboli crust.

 

Speaking of Bobolis, this next recipe actually calls for a prebaked crust, although I'm sure Jacques Pepin had in mind a slightly fancier version that you prebaked yourself. 

Chorizo, mushroom and cheese pizza

Adapted from “Jacques Pepin More Fast Food My Way”

Ingredients

1 prebaked pizza crust

Olive oil

1 small onion, thinly sliced

1 cup cooked chorizo sausage, crumbled or sliced

2/3 cup chopped fresh mushrooms

½ bell pepper, sliced into thin strips

4 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced crosswise

Salt and pepper

1 cup sliced Fontina cheese

Method

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place pizza crust on a pizza pan. Drizzle pizza crust lightly with olive oil. Top with onions, then chorizo, mushrooms, peppers and garlic. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Top with cheese and bake for about 20 minutes until well browned.

Rating: Dave really liked this one. I wasn't blown away by it, but as he pointed out, well, sausage. So it's a guy thing.


 

And this next one actually does probably mean a Boboli. A fast weeknight alternative if your credit card bill shows too many deliveries from Pizza Luce.

Puttanesca pizza

Adapted from “Rachael Ray 30-Minute Meals.” This one combines the flavors usually associated with puttanesca pasta.

Ingredients

1 prebaked pizza crust

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 large garlic cloves, minced

A pinch of red pepper flakes

2 anchovy fillets

1 14-ounce can diced tomatoes, drained

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

2 tablespoons drained capers

¼ cup sliced Kalamata olives

½ cup grated fresh mozzarella or other softer cheeses

Method

Place pizza crust on a pizza pan. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Heat olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet. Add garlic and red pepper flakes and heat just until the garlic starts to give off fragrance. Add anchovy fillets and mash into the garlic mixture with the back of a spoon. Stir in drained tomatoes. Remove from heat.

Spread tomato mixture over crust. Sprinkle with the parsley, capers and olives. Top with cheese. Bake for 12 minutes or until cheese is browned.

Rating: Fine enough, although not a wower. Again, weeknight fast food, and better than most frozen pizza options. But puttanesca pasta is better.