I’m not sure if it’s kosher to flat out steal pizza concoctions, but this restaurant has a really neat pizza menu. I’ve tried a few and they are awesome.
Since writing that, I’ve been thinking about Italian meat. I’m a big fan of mortadella, for example, but I don’t know how it would work on pizza. Hmmm, maybe roughly chopped, accompanied by slices of pickled pepperoncini and dots of stracchino.
The ambrosia that fell from the table of the gods, and that they ain’t gonna get back.
I like what I call a “Greek” pizza every so often. Grilled chicken, feta, black olives, spinach. I usually get it with a red sauce, but I’m thinking it could go fine with a white sauce too.
When there were leftovers from breakfast on the weekend in college, they would make a pizza with homefries and breakfast sausage. Everyone was leery of it, until they tried it.
I like feta, broccoli and black olive.
We also make a sauceless pizza with grilled chicken, lots of rosemary, olive oil and Romano cheese.
Spinach, portabello and garlic with white sauce is also quite tasty.
In my experience, white pizza is pizza with cheese, garlic, butter, and maybe a bit of olive oil. No sauce of any kind. One local (DC-area) place used to offer Pizza Bianca del Mare, a white pizza with mozzarella, fontina, shrimp, crab, and clams. Here’s a menu from another local place for ideas. The Polynesian is a nice twist on a Hawaiian.
I make a gringo-thai pizza that’s pretty good: spicy peanut sauce, mozzarella, pineapple, shaved carrot, green onion, red bell pepper, chopped garlic, roasted peanuts, and chunks of chicken sautéd in pineapple juice/ginger/garlic/soy sauce. You can also substitute shrimp for the chicken or make it vegetarian and it’s good either way.
Also, I’ve never made this, but it was one of my favorite things on the menu at my hometown pizza parlour, the burrito pie: refried beans, mozzarella, ground beef, bell peppers, olives, onions, fresh tomatoes, and you got a little cup of salsa to dip it in.
My favorite pizza to make is red sauce, mozzarella, garlic, spinach, anchovies, kalamata olives and red onion. My husband likes pepperoni, sausage, garlic, spinach, and onions.
I also dig white sauce pizzas, I make one with a garlic/asiago sauce and top it with spinach, chicken, anchovies, capers, roasted garlic, and kalamata olives. Did I ever mention we eat a lot of garlic? It’s okay, we stink together.
Mmm… pizza! I think when I have a hundred bajillion dollars, I’m building myself a wood-fired pizza oven.
WOW! I’m totally shocked someone mentioned this. This is my absolutely FAVORITE pizza.
A joint here makes it with an olive oil base, gorgonzola, pears (big round thin slices) candied walnuts, shitake mushrooms, and sometimes asparagus.
Sounds gross, but it’s divine!
There are only two pizzas I order here:
- Rosemary Rustica: Olive oil base with grilled chicken chunks, sliced potatoes and rosemary. And cheese, of course. We get this about once a week.
- Chicken Ranch: just like it sounds, with chicken, real bacon, ranch dressing instead of marinara, and cheese. May have some tomatoes, but it’s hard to tell when your eyes are closed and you’re going ‘mmmmmmmmm’.
I’ll second the suggestion of a Taco Pizza. It’s pretty popular in the rural parts of the upper Mississippi Valley. It’s not remotely gourmet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not tasty. The best examples I’ve had bake crust, beans, onions, taco sauce and meat alone and them sprinkle shredded cheddar cheese, black olives, jalapenos and fresh lettuce and finely diced tomatoes on top just before serving. Gotta make sure the crust is on the extra crisp side because this isn’t a pizza that handles folding or being floppy well at all.
Another option is a Southwest Chicken Pizza. Make it the same as the typical BBQ chicken pizza, but swap the bbq sauce for a slightly spicy roasted chipotle sauce and mix in some fresh cilantro.
I once had an Asian Chicken Pizza once that was great too, but my recollection of the ingredients is spotty. I remember it had a teriyaki glazed chicken on top and some asian hoisin type sauce instead of marinara. Maybe some mandarin oranges or roasted peppers would work with it.
I love spicy sauces but I think this is a bad idea. Jalapeno is the wrong flavor for marinara. If you want a spicy arribata style sauce use roasted red peppers and crushed red pepper flake instead. I think having an arribata style sauce as an alternative is a great idea, for the record, just not with jalapeno.
Tuna and onions between the usual marinara and mozzarella. Delicious, different and cheap to make.
My recent experiments in the pizza department have made me conclude that for a tomato based pizza topping, doing less is more. Right now, I just open a can of crushed tomatoes, dump them into a sieve, add a little salt and wait. You get a much fresher tomato flavour that way.
OK, I’ll try the sliced potatoes on pizza and the pear/gorgonzola combination. I’m doubtful about putting yet another starch on top of pizza crust, but I’ll take your word for it. You guys have come up with some great stuff, and I’m going crazy thinking about all the ways I could try to make them work. It’s going to be a very fun couple of months, I can feel it.
With only one exception*, all of these sound delicious. I love weird food and you guys are hitting right on the money. A lot of these are unfeasible as there’s not a whole lot to do with the leftover ingredients, but I’ll keep in mind if ever I find some lying around.
I’m trying to talk our GM into letting me do a pizza of the day. The head and assistant chefs get to come up with their own specials, so I should be allowed to, too.
Could you describe the dough and size of the pizza? I bring my oven up to 700 degrees, but the crust is more traditional, residing somewhere between hand-tossed and crispy thin, and thus takes about seven minutes to cook. I expect maybe a dry crust with lots of flour and yeast would rise and crisp up quickly enough, but I’m not sure that would be enough time for the cheese to melt and ingredients to absorb enough of that wood smoke. I’m not trying to steal anyone’s recipe, but I am very surprised that someone’s cut down on cooking time by five minutes at only a 100 degree difference.
That sounds really promising. I might have to skimp on a couple of ingredients simply because I don’t have room for them, but I think this could survive on the menu. We have a very large sushi crowd, and this would jive with their tastes quite well. And if it doesn’t, who cares? I’ve got something new to try that I will almost assuredly fall in love with.
We had a chicken wing pizza once. We had some wings left over from a party, so I took the meat off the bone and used the extra wing sauce for a base. I covered it with meat from the wings and some onions, jalapenos, and bacon, and interspersed the mozzarella with pepperjack that just happened to be taking up space in the fridge; then we dipped it in ranch sauce. I threw one up in the window as Waiter Bait and you would have thought it was the second coming of Tickle Me Elmo.
Hmmm, I never thought about putting roasted red peppers in the sauce. That might turn out pretty well. I think that would provide enough flavor in the mid-ground (sorry, I can’t talk technical, I go off of how things ‘feel’ on my tongue) to warrant taking out the bay leaves, something I’ve been thinking of doing.
Aww, what the hell, here’s my marinara. It’s nothing exotic or particularly unique, but it’s a damned sight better than any you’re likely to find on the internet. You guys have certainly helped me out enough. A lot of these measurements are approximations–I don’t really measure them, so a few things could be off by a bit. Experiment and get things where you want them.
1 28 oz can crushed tomatoes
1 28 oz can tomato sauce
1 cup diced onions
5 garlic, minced
3/4 cup olive oil (I usually use 12 oz of clarified butter to save on cost, but olive oil would taste better, IMHO)
2-3 tbsp dried thyme
1/4 cup crushed red pepper (uhh, maybe a bit less. It’s somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4)
2 large bay leaves
1 cup turbinado sugar
1 1/2-2 cups fresh chopped basil (I chiffonade, but cut it however you want)
salt/pepper (for the love of god, don’t use table salt!)
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Sautee the onions in the olive oil until soft (not caramelized), then add garlic and continue to sautee for another minute. Add thyme, red pepper, and bay leaves, and continue to sautee for another 30 seconds. Be sure not to burn your garlic, that’ll ruin everything.
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Add tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes, salt+pepper, and sugar. Let it simmer for at least 20 minutes.
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Remove from heat. Wait five minutes, then add fresh basil. You’ve now got a completely rockin all-purpose marinara.
*Fuck anchovies. I refuse to put them on pizza. In fact, if you request anchovies, I will call over the salad boy from whatever he is doing so that he may ruin my perfectly good pizza with your disgusting slime-thing, while I tightly shut my eyes and pretend everything’s OK. No anchovies. Ever.
Looking at your recipe and the amount of crushed red pepper flake you use I’d call that an Arrabiata Sauce already. One of my faves. Roasted Red Pepper would add an excellent smokiness that would probably compliment the sugar and spice combo nicely. Worth a shot. Though, it probably wouldn’t be dramatically different from your current sauce. Also, I love bay leaves in my sauces, not sure why you’d want to abandon it here.
Heheh.
My wife’s favorite pizza topping back in our New Haven days was onion and bacon. She won’t admit to it now, of course.
(DAMNED good. So were the teensy tender little clams you could get on your pie at Sally’s or Pepe’s.)
I think the combination of bay leaves and thyme in a sweet tomato sauce makes it a bit too earthy. My current sauce is very full flavored, but I want to modify it to to make it a bit more ‘crisp’, where the tomato and basil shine and everything else just accentuates that. I’m just not convinced that can be done with canned tomatoes, though. I’ve tried just about everything.
At least in Florida, good-quality canned plum or roma tomatoes are definitely better than any fresh tomatoes you can buy.
It’s great, I’ve even served it to a few friends who are the antithesis of adventurous eaters, and it rocked their world. You could easily ditch half the toppings and it’s still good.
Mmm… salty little fishies!
For the record, my Sicilian grandfather who makes a marinara I’d commit atrocities for, ranks tomatoes in this order:
Fresh out of his own garden > canned >…[distant third hardly worth considering]… grocery store tomatoes
If he can’t get them out of his own garden, he only and always ever uses canned tomatoes.
I love anchovies. On the side. Cut off a 1/4" square piece, take it with a bite of pizza = heaven.
…very well. You may live.
The potatoes/pesto combination wasn’t my suggestion, so I hope that I’m not out of line here. I think that it is similar to a traditional end of summer Italian dish; pasta is tossed with fresh pesto and al dente sliced new potatoes. As a pasta dish, this is certainly a combination that works. It will be awhile before basil and potatoes are in season, though.