Pizza Night

Call me crazy, but regardless of the summer heat, I crank up the oven at least once a week for homemade pizza (confession: it's more than once a week for the oven...I'm still roasting chickens). Fortunately for us, the heat tends to stay in the kitchen while the rest of the apartment remains at a comfortable level of coolness.

One of our standards is a BBQ Chicken Pizza. This is one of Jason's favorites, but I was skeptical in the beginning as I am not a huge fan of BBQ flavor (unless it's Smokey Joe's in Darien, GA. If you're in the GA coastal area, it is well-worth a stop. Right off I-95.).

On the locality scale, this meal ranks at about 30%. The chicken is from Springer Mountain Farms in north Georgia, the sage and the onion are from Moore Farms, the cheeses are different brands from Publix, the BBQ sauce is from Trader Joe's (a store I will be phasing out due to their humane rating), and the dough made from King Arthur flour. It could be better. Cheese is something I would really like to find a good local source for.

Before we really got into our weekly pizza tradition, I was intimidated by the homemade dough/crust. Should I toss it? No. Should I just pull it? No. Ah, rolling pin. Fabulous. Then there was the baking...For a while I was using a cookie sheet, laying out the rolled dough and building the toppings on the cookie sheet. I then, very wisely, purchased a pizza stone and things have only gotten better. I wish I had pictures of my first pizza stone pizza. I attempted to first build the pizza and then transport it to the stone. That particular pizza turned into more of a wrap-calzone-popover as it was pretty difficult to move a loaded, floppy dough disc without folding it completely in half. I now roll out my crust and pre-bake it for about five minutes before topping it. Much safer! And it seems to make for a better pizza all around when the dough has been crisped all over.

The pizza dough takes a little bit of time to make, but I usually make a batch on a day when I have plenty of time and then freeze half. The recipe is very easy and makes four eight-ish-inch pizzas. I usually cut the whole batch in half to make two fourteen-ish-inch pies. The crust is pretty thin this way. If you like a thicker crust, you can roll it into a smaller rounds or use the whole batch. I leave out the food processor as I would much rather work out my arm stirring than wash the food processor! Lazy in one way, but industrious in another.

I have a recipe for this pizza, but, as is often the case, I make alterations and adjustments depending on our tastes and what's in the fridge. This week I substituted fresh sage for the fresh cilantro we usually use. I have recently taken to using shredded chicken from the week's roasted chicken rather than cooking chicken breasts.














Here's the recipe:

1 boneless, skinless chicken breast, cooked (when we used chicken breasts, we cut it into bite-sized pieces and then sauteed it in BBQ sauce until mostly done)
1 cup BBQ sauce ( I lightly coat the pre-baked crust with the sauce)
1 cup shredded Gouda (I use a mixture of smoked Gouda and colby jack)
1 cup thinly sliced red onion (I use enough to sprinkle lightly over the whole pizza, but frequently, we have enough left over to use in the next morning's scrambled eggs)
fresh cilantro chopped (use to taste; the day after, we often have scrambled eggs with cilantro and onion! This week I used three sage leaves, thinly sliced. It was a delicious change!)