Tonight's dinner was a bit more adventurous. I've always been a huge fan of good pizzas (well, huge fan of good food in general), with certain fancies for Chicago style deep-dish pizzas like Zachary's of Berkeley, and I'm beginning to become more partial towards the pan pizzas that help to define New York, like Enzo's. This said, it's been more of a goal of mine to learn how to make my own pizza from scratch, just for the sake of being able to taste my own blood, sweat, and tears. My beloved sister and brother-in-law (the younger ones), in all their infinite wisdom, were clever enough to buy me a pizza stone set. It's basically a pizza cutter, a little serving tray, and a stone circle that you bake your pizza on.
Rei and I stopped by Whole Foods on the way back from lunch, and bought our ingredients. I had already bought some raw garlic and herb pizza dough from Trader Joe's on Sunday and had some leftover boneless chicken thighs and sliced mushrooms. We grabbed some tomato sauce, shredded mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes, baby spinach, and hot link sausages to round out the pie. Preparing the ingredients was the easy part really, just diced the chicken and the sausage into more manageable pieces before grilling them in a pan (can you really call cooking meat in a pan grilling?). The real trickster of the evening was working the dough. I have a new-found respect for people who work in pizzerias. It's harder than you think to get the dough nice and even all over, and I actually gave up on one dough because the flour I put on the stone made it so the dough couldn't stick together anymore (don't worry, there is redemption involved). I opened a new package and had a bit more success, but not without a good amount of effort involved. Anyway, I drizzled a bit of olive oil on the dough and added the tomato sauce and mozzarella and all the other ingredients on top. I finished the pie with an extra layer of tomato sauce and a generous amount of basil and garlic powder. Popped that baby in the oven and looked for a way to salvage the first pile of dough, along with a good amount of extra chicken.
Rei came up with the idea of making little garlic balls, like the ones you would find at C&O's. He got to work on ripping the over-floured dough and rolling them into little balls, while I decided to try my hand on making some soul food. You know where this is going: Fried chicken. I took the remaining pieces of chicken and rolled them around in a good amount of flour and spice. After we were both done with our task, we added a little oil to a hot pan and went to work on frying my mistakes. After all that was done, we tasted to see how it turned out. Our garlic balls were surprisingly good, just a little less salt and they would be perfect. As for the attempt at southern fried chicken, I was a little disappointed. It tasted just fine, except for the fact that it tasted like the crispy chicken you would find at a pearl milk tea place. Oh well, live and learn right? I did a little searching and found a promising low fat oven-fried chicken recipe, so I'm gonna try that out soon when I get the chance.
The pizza itself was great, and only a few little adjustments need to be made before I would deem the crafted pizza date-worthy (hello ladies!). All in all, a fun (and amazingly tedious) experience and I really hope that the Trader Joe's in Westwood opens soon so I can get my hands on some more dough. The picture is a bit fuzzy but that's the finished product. Notice the second layer of tomato sauce added on top: That was my attempt to make my pizza more like a deep-dish, and it was almost overpowering the rest of the toppings so next time it will look much cleaner and be much less...saucayyyyy.
