Porcini and proscuitto pizza with sun-dried tomato sauce

 

Today was National Sourdough Bread Day. I didn't have time to make Popine into bread, but in her honor, here's a pizza to which she contributed nicely.

Porcini and prosciutto pizza

Adapted from "The Little Guides Pizzas." Apparently you can now buy this gem new for 99 cents. I only paid $5.98 for it years ago on the book store discount table and still got a bargain.

Ingredients

½ ounce dried porcini mushrooms

1 pizza dough to make 1 crust, risen

½ cup sun-dried tomato sauce (see below)

2 proscuitto slices, cut into strips

½ cup grated mozzarella

Method

Put porcini mushrooms in a bowl. Pour over enough boiling water to cover. Let steep for at least 30 minutes. Drain and coarsely chop.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Preheat baking stone or sheet at the same time.

Remove baking stone from oven. Sprinkle with cornmeal. Form crust dough into desired shape and place on preheated stone or sheet. Spread with tomato sauce. Top with prosciutto, then mushrooms and then mozzarella. Bake for 15 minutes until golden and crust is crisp.

 

Sun-dried tomato sauce:

1 tablespoons olive oil

2 onions, chopped

2 garlic cloves, chopped

2 pounds tomatoes, chopped (about 6 cups)
9½ ounces oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, drained
1 tablespoon torn fresh basil leaves

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. 

Puree drained sun-dried tomatoes in the food processor. Stir into tomato sauce. Mix in basil leaves. Use ½ cup of the resulting sauce for the pizza recipe above. Divide remaining sauce into portions for future use and freeze. 

(Alternatively, you could use half the amount of sun-dried tomatoes and blend it into half of the tomato sauce, saving the other half of the tomato sauce for use on future pizzas.)

Rating: Tasty, tasty.

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.

Butternut squash and bacon pizza

This recipe combines most of the basic ingredients of your favorite roasted squash-bacon-kale salad recipe, only on a pizza crust.

Roasted bacon and butternut squash pizza

Adapted from dashrecipes.com, Oct. 2013, a recipe from Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen that I clipped out of the Sunday paper.

Ingredients

½ butternut squash, peeled, seeded and diced

¼ pound thick-cut bacon, cut into bite-size chunks

½ a medium red onion, sliced

1 crust pizza dough

4 ounces fresh mozzarella balls

¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese

Balsamic vinegar for drizzling

Method

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. Toss squash, bacon and red onion on sheet. Roast for 25 minutes.

Heat oven to 500 degrees. Sprinkle a baking stone with cornmeal (or large baking sheet if you don’t have one). Stretch pizza dough into a large rectangle. Top with roasted vegetable mixture. Top with cheeses. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake until browned, 10 to 15 minutes. Drizzle with vinegar for serving.

Rating: Like I said, it’s like that kale salad. In fact, if I make this again, I might well add some baby kale leaves sliced into ribbons, so it’s kale chips meets salad meets pizza.

Make ahead: I prechopped the veggies, and I'm betting you could easily preroast the veggies and bacon and hold them at room temperature for some time until the final baking.

Pizza with leeks, proscuitto and goat cheese (and maybe an egg)

Cornmeal, cornmeal and more cornmeal. Or maybe semolina. Or parchment paper. Or all three.

That's the advice you get online when you look for guidance on how to get a pizza to successfully slide off a pizza peel. I looked around for tips in an attempt to make better use of a the peel I got awhile back but didn't have the best success with. It got tucked away in a closet, but tonight's recipe made me decide it was time to try again.

Leek, proscuitto and goat cheese pizza
Adapted from Sur la Table

Ingredients
1 recipe pizza dough
Cornmeal, cornmeal and more cornmeal
2 tablespoons butter
2 large leeks
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, plus more sprigs for garnish (if you can find lemon thyme leaves, you'll be ecstatic with the results)
1 tablespoon olive oil, plus more for oiling hands
4 ounces goat cheese
5 slices proscuitto, torn into thin strips
1 large egg, optional

Method
Put a pizza baking stone into oven. Preheat to 425 degrees for about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, wash leeks. Using white and light green parts only, slice lengthwise, then crosswise into 1/4-inch pieces. Soften leeks and thyme leaves in butter in a skillet over medium heat, about 5 minutes.

Put a sheet of parchment paper on pizza peel or rimless cookie sheet. Sprinkle profligately with cornmeal. Put a dab of olive oil on your hands and then roll/toss/coax pizza dough into desired shape about 1/4-inch thick and place on prepared parchment paper.

Brush dough with olive oil. Spread with leeks. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Top with crumbled goat cheese and proscuitto strips.

Slide pizza, with or without parchment, onto preheated baking stone. Bake for 12 minutes. If you want to top it with an egg, break egg into a bowl and then pour onto center of pizza with about 5 minutes left to go in baking time. Remove from oven and let sit for a few minutes before slicing. Garnish with thyme sprigs.

Rating: The cornmeal on parchment is a winning combination to get a pizza peel to be less frustrating. Nice combination of flavors in the pizza topping, especially nice with lemon thyme from the patio herb garden. We opted for the egg on top, which worked just fine, but if that's not your thing, it's perfectly nice without that.

Sausage mushroom pizza

This is my version of an antidote to a weekend OT shift that left me cranky. It didn't entirely cure the crankiness, but it did cure the hunger factor.

Pizza with sausage, shiitakes and fire-roasted tomato sauce

Ingredients:
1 pizza crust dough (or I suppose you could use a Boboli in a pinch if you don't have packets of pizza crust dough lurking in your freezer courtesy of your sourdough starter)
1/2 pound sausage, sliced 3/8-inch thick
1 package sliced shiitake mushrooms
1 15-ounce can fire-roasted tomatoes
2 garlic cloves
shredded pizza cheese

Method:
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Sprinkle pizza baking stone with cornmeal. Shape dough into rough rectangle about a 1/4-inch thick.

Brown sausage in large skillet. Remove from pan. Add a drizzle of olive oil and saute mushrooms. Remove from pan. Add garlic to pan and cook about one minute. Add tomatoes and cook until liquid has nearly evaporated. If your sausage isn't salty, you might want to salt the sauce, but I found cooking the sauce in the same pot made it pick up the flavors so it wasn't necessary.

Spread tomato-garlic sauce over crust. Top with sausages, then mushrooms, and as much shredded pizza cheese as suits your fancy. Bake about 15 minutes.

Goat cheese zucchini pizza

A nice quick Friday night supper, at least if you have prepared pizza dough on hand:


Pizza with goat cheese and zucchini
Adapted from "The Little Guides Pizzas"

We used our standard sourdough pizza crust in this recipe, a worthwhile repeater:

Ingredients
zucchini, sliced in mandoline
leek, white parts only, sliced thinly
1 garlic clove, minced
small package of goat cheese
salt, pepper, dried basil

Method
Saute the zucchini, leek and garlic in enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Spread over crust. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and dried basil. Bake for about 8 minutes at 500 in a convection oven, or 10 minutes in a regular oven.

This book is worth the $5.98 I paid for it on the discount aisle, now available for even less online.