Pizza is traditionally a food a people make to get rid of leftovers they have sitting around, and who would I be were I to break with tradition? Last night I was able to mix errant leftovers into a tasty pie, the tastiness of which was greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Ingredients:

Just Over a Cup of Leftover Tomato Sauce (recipe coming soon)
1 Juicy Tomato
Fresh Basil
Heaps of Grated Mozarella
1/2 Can of Olives
Prosciutto Sliced Into 1 Inch Squares
Trader Joe’s Garlic Herb Pizza Dough

I made a big sauce a while back so I needed to get rid of some sauce, the last tomato I bought last week from the farmer’s market was getting soft, same with the basil I got there, also I was going to Crystal’s house and she has a pizza stone. It was a perfect storm.

I can’t give you my sauce recipe yet, but if you make a big sauce that takes days to eat you can switch things up by cooking it down into a thick pizza sauce. I cooked it down till it was pretty darn thick before applying liberally to the pizza dough. Make sure to pre-heat the oven AND the pizza stone while you are cooking down the sauce.

First, fold the dough into itself to make sure there aren’t any bubbles in it and roll it into a circle on a well floured surface. Feeling adventurous, don’t hesitate to toss it in the air. It’s easier than you think.

Poke holes into the dough with a fork before you put on the sauce. Why? Jen asked me why and I couldn’t tell her other than tradition. Again, who am I to break with tradition?

Actually, It doesn’t take much to make a good pizza. I learned this working at Upper Crust pizza in Santa Cruz. The key is fresh ingredients and treating them right.

Jen knows this, which is why she started asking about my prosciutto method before I started anything. Look at the picture above. Notice the prosciutto is going on the pie after just a little bit of mozarella.

If you want the perfect pie you have to spread your sauce on the dough, lay out a thin bed of mozarella then add the prosciutto and the rest of the cheese. Don’t add the prosciutto on top of the cheese or it will dry out. The whole point of prosciutto is the texture and the tenderness, don’t waste it by laying it out on top of the pizza. Please.

Once you have all the mozarella down, spread the sliced tomatoes out and cover with olives. Again, you have to exercise some self-restraint here and hold back on the basil.

You don’t add the fresh basil until after the pizza is done. If you do, the basil just withers up into flaky tasteless crap, and you don’t want that now do you.

Cook the pizza until it’s done. That’s right, until it’s done. I’m not going to tell you when that is because I’m not you. I assume you eat pizza at least semi-regularly and that you have a strong opinion about when pizza is cooked enough, so I’m not going to push the point with you. You’ll know when the time is right.

Sprinkle on the fresh basil after you pull the pizza out of the oven and take a good look at the masterpiece you’ve created. JLW!

This particular pizza was perfect. No pizza place will ever use a sauce that cooks for as many hours as mine does- let alone a meat sauce made with sausage. Even nice pizza places use cheap sauces that taste sweet and skimp on everything from cheese to the tomatoes.

Making a pizza at home makes you realize just how you are getting ripped off by not cooking up a pie yourself. It’s just not that difficult to do. The dough from Trader Joe’s is cheap and pretty darned good. Don’t feel guilty, use it. It’s not Boboli after all.

If you can’t borrow Crystal’s pizza stone, I do suggest pre-heating it for a few minutes before topping. Also, if you don’t have a rolling pin you can just cover a large can in plastic wrap, flour it up, and roll away like I do.

Jen suggests chocolate milk as the perfect pairing for this pizza. I think the pizza tastes good enough to stand alone. And the best part is the leftover pizza the next day.

• Festivus Gastronomicus Rating: Crapicus

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 1:30 am and is filed under Chez Moi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.