pizza my way - part 1

It has been nearly 8 years since I last made pizza. There were a time when I would regularly make pizza from scratch. My first really great pizza experience happened when I first arrived to Portland, Oregon.

Circa early 90s there was this unassuming restaurant called Heathman Bar and Grill. It is not to be confused with Heathman Hotel Restaurant that is inside the Heathman Hotel which still exist today. While it was unclear to me of the true ownership, the name of Heathman Bar and Grill suggested it is related to the Heathman Hotel.

I was looking for a house to buy and I met this great gentleman that would became my real estate agent for decades to come. In one of the meeting with him he suggested Heathman Bar and Grill. The restaurant had a wood burning oven and they made bread and pizza with it. That was when I discovered a pizza made with seafood. They called it Pacific Northwest for a good reason. It has smoked salmon and rock shrimps among other not so common ingredients back in the day when most pizza was very pedestrian.

I would later set out to recreate a similar pizza inspired by it. In addition to great food the restaurant also had their own beer brews that were as good as any great microbrews in the area. Actually that was the time before the microbrew explosion of the Pacific Northwest. They had some of the best breads and often after work I would stop by and pick up for a great loaf of bread on my way home.

Unfortunately the restaurant changed hand in only a few short years and the new restaurant was no longer a bar and grill. In the intervening years it would went through many different changes.

Recently I have some cuttlefish and wild shrimps in my freezer. Together with my home made andouille sausages I though I would make some pizza. Not trusting some very staled yeast in the refrigerator I went to the store and bought a little. I also bought some unbleached flour and corn meal.

In the last two days I made 2 pizza and shared one with my neighbor. The photos are from two sessions.

 there are 2 cups of flour to make a 14-inch pizza

 proving the dough in a bowl

i made the sauce with canned plum tomato

i like very little sauce in my pizza

this is the second proof and the dough is ready for shaping into a pizza - i now know that the best way is never to roll your pizza dough with a rolling pin; just use your hands to gently shape it so not to "kill the airiness" of the dough

I used a diverse ingredients for the topping. All are from what I have on hand at home.

anchovies - they are very salty but packed with umami so you want very tiny bits

i mashed them into tiny bits - this is enough to make many pizza

 for one pizza i thought i would take advantage of my recently purchased tenessee country ham

 like the anchovies a little goes a long way

 home made andouille - i used just one link per pizza

 shrimps and cuttlefish

For the cheese I used Parmesan and Feta. I am not crazy with my pizza oozing with gummy molten Mozzarella cheese. Parmesan and Feta are much better accompaniment to the seafood ingredients I use.

The biggest challenge in making pizza at home is to obtain a good crust because of the limitations of the domestic oven. Long before pizza stone became popular, I bought one and tried it. To me it does not work well and I would never use them again. Eventually I found that using a metal screen give me the best result.

it takes about 12 minutes in the oven

for the home cook making pizza occasionally and with different recipe each time getting the right doneness of the topping and the crust often require some improvisation;  here i used my infra broiler to achieve a nicely finished topping

here you can see the aluminum screen that i used to bake the pizza; the bottom aluminum is only used to cut the pizza after it comes out of the oven

my trick to warm the plates - just 10-15 seconds in the microwave; the moisture in the ceramic make this possible

this is my first pizza and i forgot to add the capers

 for the leftover i would eat it as breakfast the next day

 a cast iron pan is perfect to reheat the leftover pizza

 finish up the top with the infra broiler

 leftover pizza is as tasty as freshly baked

Now that I am back into the pizza making groove guess what I will eat for the next few days?