Pizza Many Ways

Sometimes nothing will do but pizza. Of course there is the pizza that magically appears on your doorstep when you call that special number. In my area we have a place that’s so fast I hardly put the phone down and buddy shows up at the door. “How did you do that?” I ask, scratching my head. Buddy just smiles. Their pizza is about as good as we can expect from a local delivery outfit, and that’s pretty good (and lots better than corporate pizza for sure).

Then there is the other pizza, the good stuff we make at home. I make a pretty standard crust. There are a squillion pizza dough recipes out there and they’re very similar so I’m not going to lay that out here. At one time I had a sourdough monster growing in a jar on top of the fridge and weekly I would either bake sourdough bread or pizza. If you have a problem with being underweight and want to chunk on a few pounds, I recommend this idea highly. I don’t remember exactly what happened to the monster. I guess life got complicated for a bit and I forgot to feed him, leaving me with an advanced science experiement. One day I’ll start another one. I always make my own dough. I know you can get pizza dough ready to go in some grocery stores and there are various flatbread options available too, but if I’m going to do that I might as well just pick up the phone and have my pizza delivered.

My mom made a fairly unique pizza when I was a kid. When she made pizza, she would make a bunch of them in pie plates and freeze them so we would have them available in the freezer at any time. My parents were of a generation of freezers. They and everyone they knew had big chest freezers and they watched for sales on meat and they prepared food in advance and froze it. I think living through the depression, they were determined their family would never go hungry. I have to admit that my mom’s frozen pizzas were very very tasty.

After rolling out the dough and placing into the pie plate, she would spoon some melted butter on the dough and then with her fingers spread it around and at the same time stretch the dough in the pan over to the edges. Then came the sauce, which was typically her home-made, preserved pasta sauce. She would add pepperoni and then lots of grated parmasian followed by mozzerella cheese. I think it was the butter that gave the pizza a distinctive flavour and texture, the butter and the parmasian.

I don’t put any butter or oil on my pizza dough. I will confess here and now I use store-bought sauce (red or green…sometimes I use pesto). If we have company, I’ll make two or three pizzas, each one different. I do have favourite ingredients. I like zucchini and I like leeks on my pizza, and I try different kinds of sausage and all kinds of different veggies and cheeses.

Tuffy and I have developed a taste for monsterously hot foods. I buy quantities of ripe scotch bonnet chiles, slice them up and dry them in the same dehydrator I use for mushrooms. So if the pizza is just for us, I’ll jazz it up by sprinkling some of these babies on – under the cheese is best in my opinion.

How do you like your pizza? Do you make any unusual or special ones? Now I’m thinking maybe tonight is a pizza night. Har!