Extreme Cooking Blog

Check out this little video I just made. It was more about testing out some new video stuff, but it shows exactly how I make sauce. Best in HD.

The challenge was to build a breakfast pizza that I had never made before. Yes, I’ve done the obvious – pizza with an egg on top, pizza benedict, pizza frittata, etc. Never done this one before, a riff on French toast. Really delicious.

- Eggs beaten with vanilla extract and orange oil spread on 48-hour room-temp dough
- Sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and drizzled with melted butter

Not “Russian” in terms of the toppings, but the crust is made with my sourdough starter from Russia. This is a very powerful starter which I normally reserve for whole grain doughs to keep them from being too dense. But it made a sensational pizza. My Italian starter cultures may end up sleeping in the back of the fridge for a while.

This month’s challenge at pizzamaking.com was to make a pizza without dough. Without dough? That sure isn’t anything I would ever call a pizza, but I decided to give it a try.

My “crust” was made from sticks of sweet potato soaked in slaked lime (calcium hydroxide).

These sticks were then combined with a binder/batter of rice and tapioca flours and fried into a disk in peanut oil:

Then topped with shrimp, mint leaves, cilantro, roasted peanuts, red onion and a sauce made of lime juice, fish sauce, garlic, sugar, and thai chiles.

Eaten wrapped in lettuce leaf.

Had some smoked turkey leftover from the weekend. Wanted to try a white pizza using a recipe I like for the legendary Big Bob Gibson’s White BBQ Sauce. Shredded the turkey, mix in the leftover stuffing and gravy. This was more of an attempt to make use of leftovers rather than create something delicious. Surprise! It was very delicious.

There was enough residual heat in the WFO to make calzones today with the leftovers of the leftovers:

Left-over pizza dough + leftover toppings + hot wood-fired oven = panouzzo.

I love burrata. When I saw some at Trader Joe’s, I was excited. When I got home and tried it, I was bummed. No flavor. Yucky texture. Pizza was OK, but I won’t be buying this stuff again:

Topped with manchego cheese and piquillo peppers (peppers not shown here – ran out).

After baking, topped with serrano ham, arugula, olive oil, and vinegar.

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