Birthday Pizza

Have I mentioned that my wife makes the world's best pizza crust? Thin crust, with a bit of whole wheat flour in the dough. She made several pies for daughter's 9th birthday. One of my favorites is this one with caramelized onion and blue cheese for the adults. The kids got mozzarella and pepperoni. For vegetables lovers there was the ever-popular broccoli variety. Pizza made at home is so easy there's really no reason to order out for it. We keep a pizza stone on the bottom rack of the oven full-time. Besides crisping the pizza crust, it helps regulate the heat in our old electric oven.

Here's the recipe for the dough.

Everything-in-the-Fridge Pizza

Pizza is something we sometimes save up for, meaning a ball of mozzarella cheese allowed to sit in the fridge for a few days while other ingredients accumulate as leftovers.

When the mood suddenly strikes, my wife the baker launches into a frenzy of kitchen activity, making the dough, proofing the dough, assembling toppings, sometimes making a sauce. Since one of our favorite pizzas is topped with caramelized onions and blue cheese, the process also involves a long, slow simmering of onions on the stove top, filling the house with that unmistakable caramelization aroma.

Last night the pizza maker was foraging in the fridge for all kinds of leftovers to go on the pizza. The one in this picture was made with previously frozen spinach, along with the remains of a tin of roasted red peppers and a fairly ancient tomato sauce. There were also two kinds of chicken pizza--one with barbecue sauce--caramelized onion without blue cheese, and daughter's favorite, pepperoni and cheese.

We were even able to enlist a container of previously grated Parmesan cheese. Not a bad night for cleaning out the fridge.

I may have previously mentioned that my wife makes the world's best pizza crust. We like it thin, just a little chewy and more on the well-done side. If you are so inclined, here is the recipe for the dough. It will make four medium-size pizzas, plenty of room to display all your leftovers. And you'll have tomorrow's lunch as well.

Accidental Pizza

A slushy snow storm last week cancelled some of my "food appreciation" classes and left me holding four wads of pizza dough the kids had made the day before.

I had been holding the dough in the fridge, wrapped in four bundles. By the time Sunday rolled around I was desperate to do something with it. A call to sister Linda and brother-in-law Tom and we were soon cooking the toppings and readying ourselves for a championship football game to be broadcast from the frozen depths of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

For the occasion, oenophile Tom brought the usual traveling bag containing his favorite wine glasses--mighty big ones, the better for swishing the wine around--as well as two outstanding red wines. The first, a 2003 Saint-Emilion Grand Cru, was incredibly deep and rich, almost chocolatey. The second also was wonderfully inky and smooth, a Craneford Cabernet from Australia.

As for pizzas, we had caramelized very slowly two onions, thinly sliced, in our cast-iron skillet. The sweet onions make a wonderful combination with Gorgonzola cheese. A second pizza was topped with fennel, browned very aggressively in the skillet, then simmered with white wine. We paired this with a truffled Pecorino cheese we just happened to have on hand. A third pizza was slathered in the home-made pesto we keep in the freezer, then topped with turkey pepperoni. Finally we made a vegetarian pizza with broccoli and fresh mozzarella.

I'll have to call this Clean Out the Fridge Pizza Night, because we did not do a lick of shopping, just used the stuff that was there.

We watched the New York Giants miss two field goals and send the game into overtime. Improbably, the Giants' kicker came onto the field for a third time and we were certain he'd miss. Lucky guy--he had his redemption. I couldn't help thinking the Redskins coulda been in that game, going to the Super Bowl.

Any bets on New England versus the Giants?

Kids Make Healthy White Pizza

My wife thought the work I was doing teaching nutrition labeling to the kids in my "food appreciation" classes was so important I should do more. So we designed another lesson around pizza.

Last week among the processed foods we examined was a DiGiorno "Rising Crust Supreme" pizza. We were impressed not only with the mile-long ingredient list--obviously constructed in a lab somewhere off the New Jersey Turnpike--but the fat and sodium content.

The pizza weighs in at a few ounces more than two pounds, which puts a single serving size--one-sixth of the pie--at more than five ounces. That one slice contains 370 calories--140 from fat--fully 6 grams of saturated fat, 30 milligrams of cholesterol and a whopping 1,000 milligrams of sodium. These figures are even more staggering when you consider that the pizza slice in question could very well end up in the hands of a child. (Hint: you might want to cut that slice in half to make a child-sized portion.)

My mission was to construct a pizza with much lower values, write up the results and present them side-by-side with the DiGiorno figures for the kids to analyze. Then we would go right ahead and put some of the healthier pizzas in the oven for a taste test.

What I used for this experiment was our tried-and-true pizza dough recipe, calling for 2 cups each of bread flour and white whole wheat flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons fine table salt, yeast (one packet, or 2 1/4 teaspoons), 1 3/4 cups water and 2 tablespoons olive oil. This dough, which we normally mix in the Cuisinart at home, but assembled by hand at school, will make four thin-crusted, medium-sized pies.

For the topping, I prescribed for each pie about 2 cups (or a little less) of cooked broccoli spears, about 2 ounces grated fresh mozzarella, a drizzle of olive oil and a good dusting of Parmesan cheese.

It took me about an hour to tease out the nutrition values for this pizza, and these did come in a good deal lighter than DiGiorno. Granted, a slice of my pizza probably weighed less than the competition and therefore might be less filling. This is a pretty inexact comparison. But that's partly the point: When you make your own, you have complete control over the ingredients. Compared to the DiGiorno pizza, a child could probably have two slices of our pizza without overindulging.

Here were the nutrition values for one slice: 117 calories, 30 of them from fat. Three grams of fat, compared to 15, with 1.5 grams saturated, or one-fourth the DiGiorno. My pizza had somewhat less than one-fourth the cholesterol, and just 17 percent of the sodium (it's mind boggling how much salt is in the processed brand). The two pizzas had equal amounts of dietary fiber: 3 grams.

It became very clear to the kids that pizza dough is calorie-dense, no matter what kind of flour you use. And you're bound to end up with some fat if you put cheese on the pie. But they also learned that you can do without the meat and thus reduce some of the saturated fat, and that industrial pizza for some reason comes with a truckload of sodium.

Finally, our pizza had just six easily-recognized ingredients--definitely not the chemistry experiment you get in the frozen food section.

So while they pounded away on the dough, I used the batch I'd made at home to start constructing pies. Some of the kids laid on the broccoli, I grated the cheese, and within minutes we had some great pizza fresh from the oven, all warm and yeasty and made by us from scratch.

Green Tomato Pizza

Last night was pizza night, mainly because we've been collecting fresh mozzarella in the fridge and you don't want that to go bad before you can use it.



For one of the toppings, my wife made a trip to the garden and came back with a big green tomato. It sliced up nicely and made an astounding presentation. It was even better after it had cooked in the oven.



I may have mentioned that my wife makes the world's best pizza crust. It's part whole wheat. She was in a bit of a hurry tonight so she put the dough in the oven to rise. Then she rolls out a pie and cooks it in the oven till it's almost done without any topping. On go the toppings and cheese and back into the oven it goes until the cheese is adequately melted and gooey.



It's a fairly thin crust and that's the way I prefer it. I do not like bready pizza crusts. The green tomato pizza came out of the oven with just a bit of tang. The green tomatoes are surprisingly good, even after just a few minutes baking. We grated lots of Pecorino cheese over the whole thing.



There was a pepperoni pizza as well for my daughter (no green tomatoes for her) and finally a "white" pizza, meaning just the crust and cheese.



I'm looking forward to more green tomato's this fall. I grew so many tomato seedlings and I couldn't bear to throw any away. So I made cages for most of them and planted them all over the garden. The earliest have already got the wilt but are still producing. The youngest tomatoes are just now setting out fruit and the foliage is very robust, with big healthy leaves. I'm thinking we will have pickled green tomatoes and possibly more green tomato chutney this year.


Maybe even another green tomato pizza.

Summer Pizza

A break in the weather here in the District of Columbia dropped temperatures low enough to consider a rare summer event: pizza.


We try not to use the oven when it's sizzling outside. So this was our chance to put some of the summer bounty on a crust.



How do you like your pizza? Me, I'm a thin crust kind of guy. And I think it's safe to say my wife makes the best pizza crust anywhere. Thin, chewy, just enough flex with golden bits of flavor around the edges.


She uses a two-step process to cook the pizza. After the dough has risen and she's rolled a piece into a pie shape, she slathers on a sauce and transfers the pie to a pizza stone at the bottom of an extremely hot oven. When the pie is cooked through but not quite done, she removes it and then lays on the toppings and the cheese. Then the pie goes back into the oven to finish, notably when the mozzarella has completely melted into a pool of deliciousness and the dough has baked to a golden crispness.



This time of year we are looking for pizzas to show off our produce. A favorite is a pesto pizza topped with "Nectarine" variety of tomatoes. Grate some mozzarella over the tomatoes, then a healthy shaving of parmesan after it comes out of the oven. Another delicious pizza is caramelized onions with gorgonzola cheese. The pungency of the cheese is a perfect foil for the sweetness of the onions.


But you could also top your pizza with cooked greens or broccoli or peppers--whatever vegetables happen to be ripe and ready for harvest.


My wife is the baker in the family and she's spent quite a long time studying pizza crusts and searching for the perfect recipe. Her favorite is the one from The New Best Recipe cookbook, from the editors of Cook's Illustrated magazine.


This recipe calls for some whole wheat flour in the dough, which gives the finished pizza extra chew and flavor. Bread flour gives the dough its crispness, but all-purpose flour can be used as a last resort.


Measure 1/2 cup warm (110 degrees) water in a measuring cup and sprinkle in 1 envelope (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) instant yeast. Let stand until the yeast dissolves and swells, about 5 minutes. Combine with a mixture of 1 1/4 cups room-temperature water and 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

In a food processor, process 2 cups (22 ounces) bread flour with an equal amount of whole wheat flour and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Continue pulsing while pouring in all but a few tablespoon-fulls of the liquid ingredients through the feed tube. If the dough does not readily form into a ball, add the remaining liquid until a ball forms. Process about 30 seconds more, or until the dough is smooth and elastic.


Using a rubber spatula, turn the dough onto a floured work surface and knead by hand a few strokes to form a smooth, round ball. Place the ball in a deep, oiled bowl, cover with plastic and allow to rise until it has doubled in size, up to 2 hours. Press the dough to deflate and proceed to make your pizza pies.

To finish the pies, divide the dough into four pieces. Roll each piece to your desired thickness (we shoot for about 1/8-inch). The pies don't have to be perfectly round. In fact, we like them better on the rustic side. To bake, follow the steps described above, brushing your sauce on the dough first, then laying on the other toppings and cheese after the dough is cooked through, then baking the pizza briefly a second time. We turn our oven up as high as it will go, around 550 degrees. But hotter would be even better.

Why the two-step baking process? My wife swears this prevents the cheese and other toppings from draining liquid onto the dough before the pie has a chance to cook. Nobody likes a soggy pizza.