Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Re-visiting CPK's BBQ Chicken Pizza

Pizza night last night. We don't have a regular pizza night, but we should! It was delicious and the dough is darn easy. Speaking of dough, I use a recipe for this pizza that calls for only a 30 minute rise period and it's good. Certainly not the best, but good. I did do one thing differently last night. I wanted to try to make the dough a honey-wheat version, instead of all white flour. It worked really well, I think I got a good combo of ingredients down. Let continue...

Here's the starter for the dough. Yeast, warm water, and something sweet. The recipe calls for sugar, I used 2 teaspoons of honey. Let that sit for a minute or two, then you can start to add the other ingredients, including 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Then add your flour and salt. I substituted in a half of a cup of whole wheat flour, with the white flour. I found this combination just right, for me, of whole wheat nutty flavor and still a good texture for kneading. The recipe is in this post for Deep Dish Pizza.

Once the dough pulls together, I give it a little coating of olive oil, cover with plastic wrap and let sit for 30 minutes.

Divide the dough in half and start to roll out. I can't twirl my dough, so I actually roll it out with a pin. I was able to get this dough down nice and thin. I folded it up and transferred it to a sheet of parchment paper. Thought that would be a good idea, but not! To bake the pizza properly, you'll want to put it on a pizza stone in a 500 degree oven. Parchment paper isn't designed to be used a temperatures that high. Although it didn't bust into flames, I certainly charred up and got very crispy! So, lesson learned, roll out the dough, then transfer to a cornmeal lined baking sheet for easy transfer to the oven and baking stone. Note to self: I need to clean my baking stone, there is some dough that is completely baked on.

Start topping your pizza. In this instance, we did the BBQ Chicken Pizza we did a few weeks ago that was a huge hit. The sauce is BBQ sauce, topped with mozzarella cheese, then pieces of cooked, bbq'ed chicken. Tomatoes and red onions. Give a sprinkle of salt and a few grinds of black pepper. Bake in a 500 degree oven for 12-17 minutes--depending on how thin your crust is. The last time, the dough wasn't as thing and it took longer. Last night, the crust was thinner and only took about 12-15 minutes.

Let the pizza rest for a minute on your cutting board, slice it and sprinkle with fresh chopped cilantro. Very tasty!


1 comment:

DancerInDC said...

This reminds me of reading 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle' where the family did pizza night almost every week. If you make a lot of dough and sauce ahead of time, you'd be set for a month, I would guess. Then top with whatever is seasonal or you happen to have on hand!