Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Smörgåsbord Pizza: Confirmed good.

Don't have any mozzarella cheese? Is your significant other craving some food and you want to oblige their needs? Going on a vacation and need to clean out the fridge? Sounds like you need to make yourself a Smörgåsbord-style pizza.

Ingredients used (but certainly not limited to):
For the dough(inspired by Ruth's pizza dough):

2 cups regular flour
1 tsp. Sea salt
1 tsp. Oregano
1 tsp. Thyme
1 tsp. Garlic salt
1 - 2 tsp. Active yeast (1 used for this recipe.)
1 1/2 c. Warm water
Small splash of olive oil

Combine all ingredients except water and olive oil. Pour water in last. I like to add around 1/2 cup of water at a time so I get the perfect dough consistency. Too much water and you have too add more flour. Too little and your dough will be anti-dough. Knead with your hands or a strong metal spoon until you have a smooth dough. Add olive oil, Knead and get the olive oil into every pore of the dough. Finally, I like to drizzle olive oil over the top of the dough and get the entire outside covered in a nice shine.

For best results, let dough sit overnight in fridge. For better than good results, let sit out for 3-4 hours in a covered bowl. For very quick and still decent results, microwave dough for 30 seconds (not too long or parts of the dough will actually cook through and get hard, not fun to work with, and generally just bad bad bad) and let sit out for 30 minutes. For instant results, microwave for 30 seconds and on an oiled stone/pan roll out dough while it is still warm. I found that if you use this last method, it works best to just roll it out once, it can get tough if you put it back into a ball.

Pre-heat oven to 500 degrees farenheit. Once you have dough rolled out onto stone or pan, put the stone and dough (no ingredients) into an oven of at least 300 degrees. Pre-cook this dough for 3-5 minutes. If air bubbles form, pop them with a long barbeque fork or other poker. Pre-cooking your dough gives you a crunchy bottom and ensures the dough cooks all the way through without burning your toppings.

Toppings(subjective, Smörgåsbord inspired):
Pesto (I used some straight ahead Pesto. Basil or fire roasted tomatoes Pesto is also tastey and unique.)
1/2 bag of shredded Swiss cheese
1/2 bag of Mexican cheese (aka mixed)
1/2 to 1 White Onion chopped into small squares (not restricted to squares, consider onion art?)
1 red bell pepper chopped
1 tomato sliced (or chopped if you don't like huge, awesome, borderline Sacred slices of tomato)
Ricotta cheese

Optional ingredients not used here:
Toss some baby spinach leaves on top of the pizza with 2-3 minutes left to cook, or as soon as you take it out. Don't let these cook too long or else they can get bitter.
Small pieces of Bacon, pre-cooked a little. Think crunchy Bacon crumbs.
Especially good with Bacon is to serve your pizza with slices of avocado and just put it on top cold. I think it accents any pizza ingredient well and brings out a lot of flavors you might've missed or overlooked.

Prepping the pizza(lolwut? put ingredients on duh):

With a spoon, spoon out chunks of Pesto and spread it evenly on your pre-cooked pizza crust. If you are running low on Pesto, I like to add olive oil in the jar and mix it around, this makes the Pesto go further.

Add Swiss and mixed cheeses.

Take small (like 1/2 to 1 tablespoon size) blobs of ricotta and place accordingly.

Then throw the rest of your ingredients on top. You win if a) 10% or more of the ingredients end up on the floor or b) someone laughs at the pattern you made on the pizza.

Cook at 500 degrees farenheit for 15-18 minutes.

Confirmed this recipe actually tastes good.


2 comments:

  1. Wow. I am impressed. No seriously, this is really impressive!!!!!! We are definitely going to try this soon.

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  2. I just added ricotta to my grocery list

    ReplyDelete