Okay, check it out.: pizza paparazzi

I made a pizza the other day and liked it enough that I decided to recreate it today, with some photos, so that I could blog about it.

The idea is basically to direct all the elements of the pizza towards the ideal of a homemade pepperoni pizza -- from the ground up, every part of the pizza is chosen with "hey, this will make a great pepperoni pizza" in mind.

Crust:

This is my standard crust recipe lately, for four pizzas of the size you see here, or two larger (or thicker-crusted) pizzas:

3/4 cup water
1 teaspoon yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup semolina. The one change I made was this time I used a little bit of rye flour instead of some of the semolina. About 1/8 cup rye, the remainder semolina.

Combine, knead, let rise a little, cover with moist towel, and let sit in the refrigerator for at least a day.

A slow rise in the refrigerator leads to a better-tasting crust -- more flavor develops -- and in many cases seems to make the dough easier to handle (once it's brought back to room temp).

Preheat your oven to 500-550, with a pizza stone or overturned cast-iron pan in the hot oven for at least an hour.

Take a piece of dough out of the fridge, keeping it covered with a damp towel, and let it come up to room temp. Stretch it out. Let it rest for 15-20 minutes. Assemble your mise en place.

Sauce:

I've been obsessed with miso lately. That'll be a whole nother blog. It has a crazy umami character that seems to make everything better -- barbecue sauce, rice, Buffalo wings, soup, the other day I even made homemade "Hot Pockets" with ground beef, cheese, and miso in a soft pretzel crust.

This sauce is super-simple: half canned tomatoes (I used San Marzano tomatoes specifically), half roasted peppers, a hefty spoonful of red miso. Blend it up. Taste for saltiness -- if it needs to be a little saltier, add a little more miso. Add a few herbs -- I used pebrella (a wild thyme-like herb) and marjoram -- and a sprinkle of crushed red peppers.

I suspect you could go heavier on the peppers and still have good results, but I happened to be using Spanish piquillo peppers and didn't want to use them up on an experimental pizza. I think peppadews could also be good, in moderation and in combination with other peppers: the peppadews are lightly pickled, after all, and you don't want a ketchup pizza.

Pull the hot pan out of the oven and work quickly: sprinkle it with cornmeal, drape the dough across it, sauce it, top it.

This is an extra-sauce extra-cheese pizza. If I weren't using a pizza "stone" (a pan in this case), I absolutely wouldn't use extra cheese, and would go lighter on the sauce. You want to do everything you can to keep your pizza from needing more than 10-12 minutes to cook (depending on the doneness level you prefer).

Toppings:

The toppings proper are pepperoni and peppadews, both of them torn up (because on the first pizza, the pepperoni rounds kept curling upwards). I happen to be using Vermont Smoke and Cure pepperoni, which I love, though it is milder than the imported brands I like.

For cheeses, I shredded the leftover hunks of clothbound cheddar, super-aged gouda, and 4 year old cheddar that I had, and mixed that up with shredded dry mozzarella. The shredded mix is tossed with chopped onion tops (including a blossom). There's also a careful, moderate amount of locally made fresh mozzarella and some chunks of feta.