Saturday, July 16, 2011

Put it on the Pizza: The Sequel

All right, I know I've been slacking on the blogging, but I've just been distracted by summertime and all that comes with it. There's lots to catch up on foodwise from the past couple months, and what's a better place to start than pizza? A few months ago I reported about putting it on the pizza, and you may recall that the pizza was absolutely delicious. But when Rob's friends Rob and Rob came to town in early June, we knew we needed to put it on the pizza once again. 


This time Rob made the dough from scratch. I'm not sure of the recipe she used for the dough, but it sure was damn tasty.



We definitely put it on the sauce (in the sauce?) as well--tomatoes, red wine, spices, herbs, and even a strawberry. Making homemade tomato sauce is easier than one would suspect. It can really be as simple or as complex as you want. We just pureed some tomatoes (if you want to be hardcore you can peel and seed the tomatoes as well) and let them simmer on the stove with the other random ingredients we decided to throw in. When it was thick enough to our liking (that's what she said) we spread it on the delicious dough that Rob had prepared..




What is that sprinkled across the dough beneath the sauce? you may ask. It's some roasted garlic! To prepare the roasted garlic we just wrapped some whole cloves of garlic with olive oil in foil and popped it in the oven until it turned golden brown. Then we smashed the cloves, chopped them up, and spread them all over the pizza for some garlicky goodness.



After the garlic and sauce, we topped the pizza with tasty caramelized onions, fresh basil, mozzarella, and cracked black pepper.

To caramelize onions, thinly slice an onion and add the slices to a pan with olive oil and butter. If you are using a sweet onion I don't think you really need to add any sugar, but I tend to sprinkle in a little salt and sugar when I use a regular yellow onion. Cook the onion slices on low heat, stirring occasionally, until they turn a lovely brown color, but just be careful that they don't burn and stick to the pan. We couldn't get enough of the caramelized onions as they filled the kitchen with a delicious aroma and transformed from white to transparent to a luscious caramel color. I think we even added a little bit of beer to our onions as they simmered away, but then again, when Rob is the kitchen anything goes.  










After we put it all on the pizza, we placed it on a hot grill (with a piece of tinfoil between the grates and the pizza) and let the dough crisp up and the cheese melt into deliciousness. When it was done we were floating in pizza heaven...



If you still haven't put it on the pizza then be sure to check out the video below...



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