Assembling the Pizza

• Take half the dough recipe (remember, you’ve made twice the amount above, one for the top, one for the bottom) and work it into a ball, then shape into a round pizza about 12-14” around. Lightly flour the ball and your hands as you work.
• Place this onto a wood or metal pizza peel covered with parchment paper (the paper stays under the pizza as you slide it onto your pizza stone).
• Spread some pizza sauce—about ½ cup on the bottom of the first round of dough (you can use jarred or your our recipe). Don’t put any sauce on the last 1” or so of the perimeter, and keep this area free of fillings too.
• Now layer on your fillings… meats first, olives, then onions, etc… top it off with the cheese. Retain some cheese for sprinkling across the top crust. Think “stuffed” but not “over-stuffed”.
• You can drizzle some extra virgin olive oil over the ingredients and sprinkle with oregano or basil.
• Shape the second round of dough to the same size. Lay it over the top of the bottom crust and pinch together top and bottom edges, and fold the dough as you would an apple pie. Make sure your pinching is melding the two halves together.
• When done, put several small knife cuts around the center of the pizza for steam to escape.
• Top off with some of the cheese and perhaps a sprinkling of grated Romano or Parmesan, then some oregano.
• Slide the pizza off the peel onto your pizza stone in the oven and bake for 20 minutes, or until both the bottom and top crusts are well browned.
• Check the pizza as it gets near the end of baking. Lift the bottom with a metal spatula to see if the bottom crust is brown. Make sure the top crust is browning equally. If not, you might have to put the oven onto broil for the last minute or two of baking to finish off the top.
• If the pizza isn’t browning enough on the bottom, increase the baking time a minute or two at a time. (All ovens are different).
• If the top is browning too fast (compared to the bottom), cover with foil for the rest of the baking time. 
• Baking a double crust pie like this is tricky, so you have to use your own judgment depending on the way your oven browns the crust.

Let this pizza cool down for at least 10-15 minutes before cutting slices. Serve with a green salad and nice bottle of Primativo. If you try this recipe, please leave a comment and let me know how it turned out!
 
Buon appetito!

--Jerry Finzi

Have a party to plan for? How about making a bunch of Pizzette--tiny pizzas? They are simple to prepare. Just use any pizza dough recipe, use a round cookie cutter (or a glass) to cut out the small rounds, top with sauce and other favorite toppings (make a lot plain and pepperoni for the kids) and pop them in the oven on large, dark colored sheet pans oiled with light olive oil. Keep a little space between each one. Bake in a preheated 475F oven for 5-7 minutes, or until both the top and bottoms are done.

These little pizzas holdover well. You can make quite a large batch (for a school or church event, for example) and they can even be served Italian style, at room temperature.

--Jerry Finzi

Looking for something different for our Saturday Night Pizza, I thought... "Hold the Sauce!" I'll make a white pizza for Lisa and Lucas--"Grandma style" in my large, square, dark pan, cut into square slices.

I lightly drizzled Extra Virgin Olive Oil on the crust, laid out slices of a Yellow Pineapple and Yellow Plum Roma heirloom tomatoes, spread some shredded Fontina and crushed black olives over the top and dusted with fresh, chopped oregano from our spice garden. Another drizzle of EVO and into the oven!

It was amazing. The only thing I would change is NOT drizzling olive oil under the tomatoes. It made them slide a bit when taking bites. I'd put the cheese on the bottom.

--Jerry Finzi

Now, you all know that I love pizza. I make a different type every week... pan pizza, thin crust, Chicago deep dish style, focaccia, pizza rustica, double-crust, stuffed crust, heart-shaped, New York style, BBQ pizza, white pizza, Philly tomato pie, my special "Thanksgiving Day Pizza" with turkey, cranberries and stuffing... you name it, I've made it (at least, I think I've made them all).  And I've often thought that since pizza is a fairly well balanced food which can be varied a lot by the ingredients you top it with, that I could eat one each day for a year and perhaps lose weight. A home pizza chef can even vary the thickness of the dough--no one wants a heavy pan pizza all the time.

Well, now someone has done it! Brian Northrup from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, ordered and ate one Domino’s pizza for "one leap year"--367 days--and documented the feat on You Tube, Instagram and other social media. And get this: He weighed 6 pounds less than he did when he started! Did he only eat pizza? Apparently, he also chowed down on entire half gallons of ice cream, too.

Honestly, I have an issue with his choice of pizza--Domino's? Ugh. One medium meat-lover's pizza at Domino's is over 2000 calories! If I were to do it I would do eat a wide variety of pizzas... ones that I make at home along with samples from all sorts of pizzerias, restaurants, and perhaps one select fast food chain (I would choose Little Caesar's since they make their dough fresh at each location). I'd enjoy having NY style slices, gourmet individual pizzas at bistros, brick oven pizzas, you name it.

Northrup claims, "I've increased my strength, speed, and (most important to me) my cardiovascular endurance over the course of this endeavor. Also, I haven't been sick for a single day of this experience, nor have I injured myself a single time." Obviously, he worked out at the gym nearly every day and did a lot of cardio workouts. Also obviously, he was not overweight (or over 40) when he started this endeavor.

Although Domino's didn't sponsor his efforts, he did rightfully earn 24 free pizzas during the year from Domino's Loyalty Program. Loyalty indeed!

For more on Brian's adventure with pizza, check out #pizzapocalypse.

--Jerry Finzi

Want to make your own pizza at home? Click HERE.

A few months ago I wrote an article about the history of the Chef Boyardee Pizza Maker kit. To be truthful, I had never even noticed its existence, having come from a family where Mom made her own pan pizza once in a while or we simply ordered fantastic take-out pizza from Cuomo's Pizzeria, located right around the corner from our house. Cuomo's was where I developed my passion about pizza... I helped grind the cheese, mixed the dough, helped making rounds of dough, worked the counter a bit,I delivered pizzas, and folded literally thousands of pizza boxes. I know pizza... but not "kit pizza".

In the Boyardee post, I promised that I would test this kit out when I had the chance. Well, I did more than that. I created a Pizza Crust Kit Challenge between the Chef Boyardee kit and the generic brand of pizza crust in a packet. While the Boyardee Pizza Maker kit comes with cheese and a can of sauce, the generic pizza dough is a packet to make a crust only. Both can make two small or one large pizza.

First, I opened the Boyardee kit...

This is what I found inside: Two packets of flour/yeast mixture, one packet of grated cheese and one can of "Pizza Maker Sauce". First I checked out the cheese by tasting it. This is a blend of Romano and Parmesan with some fillers like rice flour and powdered cellulose, but to my surprise, this tasted a lot better than any of the grated jar cheese that I've tasted. Oddly, as far as I can tell, Boyardee (or its parent company, Conagra) doesn't make a jar grated cheese. They should! I tested just about every major brand of grated cheese a while back and this little packet outdid them all.

I've read that many people have a nostalgic view of the way their Mom's would make this "kit" pizza back in the Fifties or Sixties and actually prefer making it with only this little packet of grated cheese. I'll be adding some grated mozzarella. 

As for the sauce, I thought I might find it acceptable and expected a watery, basic pizza sauce, but what I found was an overly sweet and syrupy sauce that I couldn't even consider putting on a pizza. It tasted like the sauce Boyardee uses in their canned pasta recipes. Personally, since Chef Boyardee (cheese or beef) Ravioli was one of the few meals I started making for myself when I was about 9 years old, I have a nostalgic love of their sauce... but this sauce was much more sweet and inappropriate for a pizza. The ingredients list high fructose corn syrup as the second ingredient. No thanks. Out came my sauce and I poured the can down the drain.

As for the flour packets, it seems that they list yeast in the ingredients along with "leavening", so I supposed the dough would have some decent body to it after it rises.

Next, I read the instructions. I was amazed to see that no where did they mention "kneading". They instruct to mix the flour/years mix and "very warm water" in a bowl with a fork. They forgot to mention that water over 120 F will kill yeast. "Very warm water" seemed vague to me. My temperature was around 115.

OK, so I mixed with a fork and this is what I got...

So I kneaded for a minute or so anyway...

I oiled a bowl (with Extra Virgin Olive Oil, not "Wesson oil" as they directed), covered with plastic wrap and put the dough aside to rise, but not for 5 minutes or 20 minutes ("for a lighter crust") as they directed in the instructions, but for one hour. I know better. At this point, I preheated my oven to 425 F, as per directions.

After the dough had risen, I punched it down, turned it out on my floured board and formed the pizza. I transferred it to a parchment lined wooden peel. Always the rogue, I did not follow their instructions to "spread the dough in a non-stick pizza pan". If I did want to bake this pizza in a pan, I would have oiled the pan with light olive oil anyway (most dough will stick, even in a Teflon pan). I would be baking this pizza directly on my pizza steel with parchment under it. I wanted to get the crispiest crust possible.

I then topped the dough with my own sauce, and then topped with shredded mozzarella and the packet of Parmesan/Romano cheese that was in the kit. Instead of baking for 20-22 minutes as per directions, I baked for 15 minutes on my pizza steel at 425 F and got great results as you can see... The photo on the right shows a nice crusty bottom with all the feel and "fold-ability" as a New York City slice of pizza. Their cheese was a nice compliment to the mozzarella, but I was so glad I used my own sauce.

In the end, I would rate their "kit" only 1 star if I had made it with their sauce and in a pan. The way I made it I rate it a solid 5 out of 5 stars. But in the end, I can't really recommend spending $3.50 on this pizza kit since their can of sauce is not worth using. The only elements I'd recommend using is their cheese and the flour/yeast mix. It's just not worth it when I can make a pizza dough from scratch very easily for very little cost.

My suggestion to Chef Boyardee? Two of the components of the Kit are excellent. Create stand-alone products for each... a jar of your grated cheese and a packet of the pizza crust flour/yeast mix. I would highly recommend both if they existed!

Making the Store Brand Pizza Crust Mix

I tend to shop at either Stop and Shop or Giant supermarkets, which is where I picked up their store brand Pizza Crust Mix. As I said earlier, this is to make a crust only... you provide all the toppings.

Still doing my rogue thing... I didn't use a "greased" a pan, I didn't use "hot tap water", I let the dough rise for one hour, not just 10 minutes.  I did bake at 450 for 5 minutes or so.
I used my own sauce, mozzarella and baked the pizza on top of a parchment sheet on my pizza steel.

The results were... interesting.
As you see below, there wasn't much rise. When I saw "leavening" listed in the ingredients, with no mention of yeast, I expected this result. This is probably a baking powder based leavening.

Good looking pizza, right? Well, the taste was powdery. It was a very thin crust pizza... like a cracker crust. But again, there was nothing tasty about the crust... even a bit metallic tasting. I rate this 1 star out of 5. I like a thin crusty pizza once in a while, but this just didn't cut it.

In the end results, both pizza crust mixes failed as far as I'm concerned. If Boyardee offered their crust as a stand alone product, I might be a customer and would recommend it. The generic? Forget about it.

Please.... make pizza at home. Here's how!

--Jerry Finzi

We just got back from a relaxing week in a fabulous vacation rental house with a private beach on the Calvert Cliffs area of the Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. We dubbed the house the "Glass House" because of the wide panorama of water views afforded by its sheer walls of glass  facing the Bay. It was a wonderful, relaxing vacation spent in the hot tub, combing the beach for 25 million year old shark teeth fossils, and kayaking with my boy Lucas. Lisa finally got away from her stressing workload in her corporate world, and I enjoyed taking pictures and checking out the ospreys, bald eagles and the feeding cownose rays and dolphins in the water below our deck. 

But there was one frustrating development. When we are on vacation, I like to sample and compare local pizzas. I mean, good pizza-making is everywhere in the States. There are Philadelphia tomato pies, Manhattan "slices", small town thin crusts, California style toppings, and various types of deep dish. I expected either a simple, tasty pizza around our Solomons Island home base or something radical like crab cake pizzas. No such luck.

My first taste of pizza was at a place called Ruddy Duck that got great reviews. Yes, duck is a specialty on their menu. When I saw that they had a Peking Duck pizza, I thought I'd try it for adventure's sake. I hadn't had Peking Duck in years since a Chinese photographer friend of mine introduced me to it in New York at one of the best restaurants in China Town. It was delicious.

Well, short story. It wasn't. In fact, while the so-called "Peking Duck" topping just tasted like their BBQ sauce doctored up with some bottled sweet and sour sauce, the pizza under it was even worse! The crust wasn't cooked. It was gummy and yeasty under the overburdened toppings. I sent it back... they tried again... and failed a  second time.

Ok, fast forward to a couple of nights later when we all were getting a craving for pizza. So I called up Google Maps on my Kindle and typed in "pizza". Up popped our only options in the area: Papa John's, Dominoes, Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, Ledo's (a regional chain) and one other called Nicoletti's that didn't deliver and was a 40 minute drive away. Little Ceasar's is the only fast food pizza that my son and I will partake in when we are out on our excursions, because at least their dough is made fresh each day at each of their locations, but we were in the mood for a simple Mom and Pop style pizza.

Ok... solve the problem Babbo.

Which I did. I took out the small sack of King Arthur's bread flour, a jar of 4-C "All Natural" grated parmesan cheese and single packet of yeast I brought along for such a pizza emergency. Without my pizza steel, my temperature-tested ovens, my peel, my stand mixer... I went to work. I grabbed the only large dark pan they had in our rental kitchen, a wooden spoon, a large plastic bowl and within a hour I was putting our emergency pizza into the oven...  topped with black olives and mozzarella.

Crisis averted. The thick, focaccia crust was wonderful and the silence of Lisa and Lucas as they enjoyed their first slice while they watched the views of the Bay was my applause.

There is a huge Navy Air base across the Paxtuxent River from Solomons Island that could  use some real pizza. Poor guys and gals. All they have is fast food pizza? After all they sacrifice for us?

Shame.

--Jerry Finzi

Perhaps this headline should read:
The Most Controversial Man of the Last Century Passed Away...
After all, whenever the subject of Hawaiian Pizza comes up, people either go into a rage or rave about the stuff---they are rarely ambivalent on the subject. Mention this recipe to an Italian and they will more than likely offer some choice hand-gestures, facial expressions and perhaps some choice words to show their contempt for this disgustoso breech of pizza etiquette. 

The Hawaiian Pizza idea was invented by Sam Panopoulos---yes, he was a Greek-Canadian, not Italian. But then again, neither is Hawaiian Pizza. Panopoulos came up with the idea in his restaurant back in 1962.

Personally, I love Hawaiian Pizza. I think the first time I ever had some was in the just-opened Pier 17 food court down at South Street Seaport in Manhattan back in 1983. I loved the way the salty ham, sweet pineapple and tomato sauce married well with each other. The acidity in both the pineapple and tomato sauce make them compatible cousins. And mozzarella on top of pineapple? Well, not exactly... it goes under them, allowing the pineapples to caramelize, bringing out their sweetness a bit further.  The bits of ham (sliced or chunks, I've had it both ways) also go above the cheese to bring out a smokey flavor.

1. Pizza dough recipe (Read my pizza dough primer HERE)
   
2. 1/2 cup pizza sauce (Read Our Secrets to Making a Great Pizza Sauce HERE)
3. 1 -1/2 cups part skim, shredded mozzarella cheese.
4. 1/2 cup (75g) thin sliced baked ham, Canadian bacon (or to make it more "Italian", thick sliced and diced prosciutto).
5. 1 can Dole Pineapple chunks (or 1-1/2 cups fresh, diced)

(Note: I actually prefer using the Dole crushed pineapple, and the sweetness of Virginia ham goes well with pineapple.)

Prepare the dough, form your pizza round, top with sauce, then mozzarella, and finally with the pineapple and ham. Drizzle with a little Extra Virgin olive oil and a dusting of dried basil.

Bake in a 515 F oven for 5-7 minutes, preferably on a pizza stone or baking steel. Your oven may vary... keep an eye on this, ensuring that the crust bottom is done along with the toppings. If your crust is done before the toppings, put the oven on broil for an extra 1/2 minutes.

Panopoulos arrived in Canada with his brothers in 1954, opening several restaurants. He passed away in an Ontario hospital on June 8, not long after he had celebrated his diamond wedding anniversary with his wife Christina. He was said to have an "unforgettable" personality and was known to be up-front and full of humor. He leaves behind his family, friends, former employees and loyal customers. He was 83.

--Jerry Finzi

Hector Boiardi was born in the Emilia-Romagna town of Piacenza in 1897, and working as an apprentice chef at a local hotel before he even reached his teen years. Hector came to America in 1914, and eventually became the head chef of New York’s famed Plaza Hotel. His clientele kept asking for the recipe for his tomato sauce, which caused him to create Chef Boyardee brand, a phonetic spelling of his surname.

In 1955 he started to offer boxed pizza kits which included everything you needed to make a pizza from scratch in your own home kitchen--a revolutionary idea at the time. Nowadays, companies like Blue Apron and others delivering similar complete menu kits to your door owe a nod to the pioneer of this meal marketing concept--Chef Boyardee.

The pizza kit contained a small packet of parsley, a can of sauce, some yeast and flour and a packet of parmesan cheese (no mozzarella). Sausage and pepperoni kits included the meat right in the can of sauce.

Every year, as usual, I'm repulsed by the new offerings from these so-called chain pizza factories. This year, they didn't disappoint... or rather, they did. Two were so disgusting and revolting that I just couldn't make up my mind which was worst, resulting in the first tie ever. The winners are:
Kentucky Fried Chicken's "Chizza" and
Pizza Hut's Grilled Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza

In the case of KFC's 688 calorie Chizza, there is no crust. No, it's not gluten-free. The "crust" is actually an encrusted, deep-fried butterflied double breast of chicken topped by a thick acidic tomato sauce, a phony, grated mozzarella cheese, chunks of rubbery, factory-frozen ham, and chunks of canned pineapple that were picked fresh, Lord-knows how long ago. Oh, to make matters (ugh) worse, they top it off with and KFC’s "special cheese sauce". More than likely "special" as in "this special needs some actual cheese".

It comes in a diminutive imitation personal pizza box.

Cute, no? Ok... no. Oh, and it doesn't come cut in slices like a pizza. It's a bit too small to cut up. You just sort of pick up the chicken "crust" (wash your hands first--and after) and dig in with your choppers. They apparently must have done a lot of committee work and focus groups to come up with their slogan for this mash-up... "All Chicken, No Crust". It's a bit of misnomer since the crust in ON the chicken.

The pièce de résistance is that for an extra couple of bucks, you can get an even bigger meal called the Chizza Box, which comes with one Chizza, one deep fried chicken drumstick (if you're in a really ravenous chicken mood), a cup of whipped potato flakes, and just to balance out the "meal"--and just what you'd expect from this gourmand brand--more potatoes in the form of some deep fried "Potato Winders".  Of course, a Coke is included in the price, just to help all this go down easily.

This got a 9.75 on my Disgust Rating Scale.

Pizza Hut's Grilled Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza is 3200 calories of fake-cheesy, pure evil (that's for a "plain" pizza). Their stuffed crusts have always sickened me before, but this one made me ask, "Who cut the cheese... and why would he do that anyway?"

In addition to the crust being generously stuffed with "cheddar cheese" filling (Cough, "Crap Cheese"), to give it that crumby, grilled cheese mouth-feel, they sprinkle on some garlic flavored, fried buttered-breadcrumbs onto the crust area, and add "garlic-butter sauce" on top of the center of the pizza (I use this term very loosely here). There is often so much breadcrumbs on it, you feel like you're eating breaded... er... bread. The crust winds up tasting more like a fast food, cheesy garlic bread than an All-American grilled cheese, but much, much saltier. This also rated a 9.75 on my scientifically designed Disgust Rating Scale.

All in all, these types of offerings make me cringe. Please don't think they are pizza. Your neighborhood pizzeria more than likely can make pizzas that will always surpass fast food, factory "pizzas". besides, real pizzas--whether home made or from a pizzeria--are a lot healthier and tastier than these award winners will ever be.

If you want the best pizza, try making them in your own kitchen.

(Click HERE to read my three-part series on Making a Great Pizza at Home)

--Jerry Finzi