Pizza Day

When it’s so blasted hot, I just can’t get into making pizza. Now that it’s starting to cool off just a little . . VERY little, I’ve been wanting pizza so I today was pizza day. The pizza oven we use is a Pizza Que and if you’re thinking about getting one, this might be the time of year that you can find them on sale. I love it because (1) I can use it outside and not heat up the house and (2) It easily goes way past 700°. For any one getting one, you need a very thin pizza peel because the door/opening to the oven is not very high and a thicker peel means you’re probably going to scrape off half your toppings while putting the pizza in the oven. This is the peel I use and I have two because I’m almost always making more than one pizza and it’s nice to have one ready to slide into the oven as you take one out. I actually “build” my pizza on the peel.

The pizza oven is expensive but if you figure what you’re paying for pizzas if you’re buying them out and what it costs to make one at home, using premium ingredients, I think it makes a pizza oven look like a good investment but, we do eat a lot of pizza and we don’t mind heating up leftover pizza.

Through the years I’ve made many pizzas. We’ve never lived where we had an amazing pizza restaurant and most of the time, we’ve lived where we couldn’t even get pizza delivered so learning to make our own pizza was necessary. For years I’ve been a big fan of Peter Reinhart’s bread making techniques and recipes. Over four years ago, I saw he had a pizza class on Craftsy and I took his class and fell in love with his pizza crust recipes and have used his recipes exclusively since then. Then I found his book, American Pie, and it’s truly an amazing book for those of us who love to make pizza.

You can definitely make pizza without a pizza oven and without Peter Reinhart’s book but if you LOVE making pizza, I highly recommend the oven and the book.

There’s no way I can describe making three different pizzas without it sounding like a lot of trouble and work but it truly isn’t a lot of trouble or work. I stir the dough by hand so I don’t mess up the mixer, I make one batch of dough and divide it. It will actually make five pizzas the size of the ones I made today. We will have at least three more meals from the leftover pizza. Pizza and salad. Pizza and chili. Pizza and gumbo. Pizza and hamburgers. None of it will go to waste.

Since I was making three pizzas and can only make one at a time, I “pre-cooked” two of them so they only needed about 2 or 3 minutes left. I cooked the third one, then stuck the second one back in and when it was done, I stuck the first one back in so we had three hot and yummy pizzas.

On the left is candied fig, candied walnuts, andouille, red onions and goat cheese. On the right is margherita pizza with goat cheese, tomatoes, basil and red onions.

On the left is a regular pizza with red sauce, mozzarella cheese, jalapenos, red onions, pepperoni and ham. Both those pictures were of the pizzas that had been baked til they were almost done.

My favorite . . 

The one with the candied figs, candied walnuts, andouille, goat cheese and red onions. I’m a huge fan of goat cheese. If you don’t like goat cheese, you could use mozzarella and it would probably be ok but dang . . that goat cheese is so good. For a long time I didn’t like it and now I seem to want it on everything!