Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Pizza

If you've ever met my kids, you'd know they were adventurous. Their favorite restaurant apparently is Ethiopian. They weren't always so willing to try new food, though. Its been an evolution. Like our choices of pizza.

Around the time the kids were born, we bought a pizza stone (best purchase ever!) We tried a number of pizzas to see which we liked or didn't like starting with the version closest to "pizza" for a kid - pasta sauce and cheese - then we branched out. We found out they liked white pizza, spicy chicken and mozzarella, and chicken and cheese pizza. They didn't like potato and onion pizza and fresh tomato and basil. The absolute favorite for a while was a thin pizza using plum sauce as a base and topping it with ground chicken, bean sprouts, and Parmesan.

The pizza stone still gets a lot of use, although the tastes have moved back to sauce and cheese.

Dough (courtesy of the NYTimes Heritage Cookbook) makes two crusts:
2 packages dry yeast
2/3 cup lukewarm water
1/2 cup brown sugar
1Tbsp salt
2 cups milk, warm
~7 cups wheat flour
3 Tbsp melted butter

Topping
1 jar Plum Sauce
1 lb packet ground chicken
1 can/bag bean sprouts
Bag of shredded mozzarella cheese
Parmesan cheese

1) Let the kids drop all the ingredients into a mixer to make dough. Set aside to rise about 15 minutes. Don't overthink this step.

2) Brown chicken. Set aside in a bowl.

3) Preheat over to 500 degrees (remove everything from oven except pizza stone which should be in the middle of the oven) - if you don't have a pizza stone, use a baking sheet dusted with flour (not in the oven when it is preheating) and preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

4) Roll out the dough over a bed of flour as thin as possible. Sprinkle flour on top of dough. Fold dough on itself twice.

5) Moving quickly, take stone out of oven and dust with flour. Unfold dough onto stone (or baking sheet). Spread plum sauce liberally over dough. Add chicken and bean sprouts. Generously add mozzarella and Parmesan cheese.

6) Cook until cheese is golden brown. Leave on stone for 5 minutes (keep an eye on the dog, though!) Cut and serve.

7) Enjoy

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