more than you need

pizza.

part 2.

hi. so, i froze half of that dough. remember the last time we talked, i had just made a (not enough cheese) kinfolky pizza? ok, i'm not going down that road again.

anyway, i halvzied up the last post and this because i wanted to perform this little experiment. well, today is the day of reckoning, and so here i am to share the good news: this dough froze like a champ (i was going to say that it froze like a mother _ucker, but this is a family show). ribald aside, i defrosted the lump of it on the counter and made it up into a sweet little onion, leek, fontina deal-e-o and man. oh. MAN. can i just tell you that you need to get on this asap. because you can always have pizza. no dough is no excuse. right, it's always the dough that keeps us from making our own pie. and the dough is so easy to make, remember? and now we know that it freezes. seriously. you (meaning 'i') have no excuse now.

im fortunate enough to live close to mozza where i can spend a jackson on a little pie, but while i don't always have a jackson to spare, i always have a can of tomatoes on deck, and i'm never without an onion or a leek (if you are, you ought to be ashamed of yourself), and now with this dough, it's like i have my own personal mario batali hangin' around my kitchen. ok not really, but, you know.

this is serious poor man's pizza. but who would be the wiser, i mean, lookit it. i mean, how much can a red onion cost? and now i'm going to make it my business to keep a slab of this dough in the freezer.

while we were talking just now, i ate half of it. ok, i'm totally lying through my teeth. i ate half plus a wedge. a skinny wedge, but i did go over the line (and i'm totally going for another wedge. i'm not even lying). and the texture and flavor is the same as the first pizza, that is to say crispy and olive oily and delicious.

here are some tips. while the dough is shakin' off its frost, heat the oven for an hour and a half (at 550 degrees, with the stone in there). you heard. all that time makes all the diff in the world. or you can do like my friend aaron and just yank the lever off of your fancy oven, the one that locks the door when it's on the 'cleaning' cycle, because the cleaning cycle cranks the oven up to like a million degrees, but you can't bake/open/close it because of that wretched lock. thank you aaron. security deposits are going all to hell because of your savagery. but i get it. a man's gotta have his pizza.

i'm not going to bother posting the dough formula again. you can just scroll down, because no one is that lazy. but for this pie, here's the scoop:

i finely sliced 1/2 of a medium red onion and a 1/2 of a large leek. it seems like a mountain of allium when you get in onto the dough, but trust me, it all shrinks down, so you want to slice up more than you think you need.

oh, and i rinsed the slivers of leek, then spun them uber dry (along with the red onion) and blotted them with a paper towel. you want them to crisp. if you put them on the pie sopping wet, they will steam instead of caramelize, and that's just gross. i sliced up a large handful of fontina cheese for this pizza. that's what i had on hand, and it was perfect.

now you want to spread all this jazz around on the dough that you've just expertly stretched and shaped.

drizzle with olive oil. bake for like, oh i don't know, whenever it looks brown enough (i showered while it was baking, that should give you an idea of how much time it takes). i sprinkled the finished miracle with fresh oregano and chili flake, but you don't have to. preferences, see.

and that's the long and short of it. see you soon, yeah? enjoy your pie.

this pie feeds one seriously greedy girl, or two, happily, with a salad and a pint of arrogant bastard ale.

to the staff of life!

way more than you need...

(this post was shared with susan T at wild yeast blog)