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Sicilian Pizza |
1 bag white bread dough
Commercial spaghetti sauce Pizza toppings, as desired Grated cheese
Begin with a 9" or 12" pie pan. Never wash this pan! Wipe it out and keep it aside as your pizza pan. If that offends your housekeeping standards, remember your favorite pizza restaurant does the same. The light coating of oil and carbon helps raw dough stick just enough during shaping, but not after cooking.
Take one half to one third of the raw dough, assuming a one-pound bag of supermarket white bread dough. It's easier to work at room temperature. Flatten and stretch it by hand into a largish circle (you can toss it over your head if you like, but that's an excellent way to make a hat). Then press it into the bottom of the pan, shaping it out toward the edges, until a small roll of extra dough is pressed out around the rim. The crust will rise quite a bit in the oven, so judge accordingly. Cook by itself in a 400° to 450° oven for about ten minutes, until the crust just begins to brown. You may have to press the center down where it has risen during cooking. This partially-cooked dough can be stored in the refrigerator for use later. |
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When you're ready for pizza, spread a light layer of your favorite spaghetti sauce over the dough. Spaghetti sauce is slightly thicker and chunkier than pizza sauce, but the ingredients are the same. The taste difference isn't worth
the inconvenience of keeping separate sauces. I add a bit of black pepper, since nothing commercial is ever peppery enough for my taste. Toppings go on next, under the cheese. This pizza goes in a very hot oven, and meat and veg fare better cooking in the pie.
Cook the result for at least ten minutes at 450°, longer if you like your cheese browned (toasted cheese has a totally different flavor, have you ever noticed?). One last detail: getting your pizza onto the cutting board. Hover over the cutting board, slip a spatula or large knife under the crust, and slide the pan from under the pizza. If you try pulling the pizza away from the pan, you're likely to whip it across the kitchen. |
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The thing is, all the ingredients are off-the-shelf. Dough can be frozen, so can shredded cheese, and the sauce comes in a jar. Making a pizza thusly is really just as easy as heating up a commercial frozen pizza, and this is the real deal. How do I know? I'm a pizza professional! An award winning pizza professional. Well, okay, it wasn't an award, it was a write-up in People magazine. And I think we got it because some silly cow of a movie actress blew through town and ate one of our pizzas. And I didn't work there by that time. But, anyhow, we made a splendid pie. Which was a great revelation. Italian food in the South was inedible crap. Sweet, thin, mushy, horrible Chef Boy-Ar-Dee crap. I never ate a real pie until I made them for a living. And, lo, it was good. We baked crusts in the morning, before opening time, and refrigerated them in stacks. Pre-cooking the crusts avoids squishy pizza. The dough itself was the one component we didn't make on-site - it came in bags from a local bakery, and it was the exact same stuff they sold as raw bread dough to supermarkets.
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Incidentally, you can make a bang-up calzone with the same ingredients. Take a ball of dough, roll it into a sheet, put some cheese (ricotta, mozzarella and chedder) and pepperoni on it (our best-seller), stretch the dough around the ingredients and seal it all into a neat package. Pierce to let the steam escape and cook for about twenty minutes at 450°, until brown.
The sauce was made in a giant Tupperware bin from giant cans of tomato and giant quantities of spice. It is an awesome feeling of power and responsibility to hold an entire cup of ground black pepper in your hands. I have no idea if there was anything the slightest bit Sicilian about any of this. Or what component was supposed to make it so (the deep dish? The cheese over the toppings?). Sicilian is what it said on the sign, so I'm sticking with it. All the employees were white-bread middle-American college students, typically bereft of clue. We worked out soon enough that it didn't affect us all that much if the restaurant made or lost money, but a cranky customer could make life a living heck.
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So we heaped stuff on our pizzas. They were gigantic. The veggy special had to be crushed to fit on an oven shelf (where it cooked down to a sloppy, cheesy stew). The boss must've wept over his accounts book, and periodically
he tried to initiate us into the Way of the Measuring Device, with little result. These days lots of restaurants make pretentious pie, but we pioneered putting weird crap like carrots and walnuts on pizza (And raisins. They swell up in the oven like engorged ticks. Brrrr). But the ham and mushroom...the meat-lover's special...the sausage and onion...those were great pizzas. Classics. When a customer asked to see me (for I was Night Manager), I always made sure I carried the giant, curved scimitar we cut pizzas with. I was hoping it and my tomato-splattered apron would make potential complainers think "Lizzie Borden" and keep it civil. More likely, they thought, "good lord! Did that filthy creature touch my food?!" Either way, they seldom complained.
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Over this, a half-inch layer of cheese. Restaurant pizza cheese is usually half cheddar and half mozzarella, but any cheese will do. Experiment madly.