Friday, August 1, 2008

Pizza dough issues

From time to time I get a craving for pizza made from scratch. Now I am the biggest fan of Papa John's pineapple pizza, and will certainly eat it cold for breakfast the morning after we've ordered it, but there's something about homemade dough with the exact toppings you're craving that's wonderful. Except when it all goes wrong. I usually have pretty good success with the Barefoot Contessa pizza dough recipe, especially when I don't use as much flour and add an extra TB of olive oil, but last night it ended poorly. Most of that is my fault, I had a phone call interrupt my dough making for about 40 minutes and spilled in more flour than I meant to, but it was not at all forgiving. The recipe also calls for the pizzas to be cooked in a 500 degree oven for 15 minutes. I usually only turn the oven up to 450, but for some reason last night I choose to go with 500 degrees. Poor decision. The edges of the pizzas were burned before the middle had cooked and it all happened in 8 minutes. Matt's poor pizza also got a huge air bubble in the dough that took up almost half the top of his pizza. Thankfully he had opted for a white pizza so it didn't make too big of a mess, but it was a little bananas. My caramelized onion, red pepper, yellow tomato, and goat cheese pizza had a great flavor combo, but the middle was pretty raw.
Overall the evening's dinner was disappointing, but there were bright spots. I think every homemade pizza I make from now on will have to have caramelized onions. I also should make twice as much caramelized onion as I think I will need because Matt stole some to munch on and then stole half to put on his pizza. Topping thief.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, carmelized onions have grown on me. I blame Cheesetique.

Jeff Boisvert said...

I am going to call Matt 'The OT' from now on.

Alicia said...

I'm sure he'll appreciate that. I know that I do.