Bone Appetite

Palm Beach Island Pizza

I recently was in Palm Beach for a family occasion, and we had pizza while we were there, but it was what I'd call New Jersey standard fare. Judging my the origins of most of the residents, and the complete lack of what I'd call a native trope in architecture, food, or culture, I suspect New Jersey cuisine is as close to "authentic" as one is going to get for this area. I did fall to thinking: what would constitute a native recipe here? (For all I know there may really be a Palm Beach Island Pizza recipe, but I'm taking the pledge and not googling for one before I post this recipe.) South Florida does have an agreeable mish-mosh of immigrant communities from north and south, and there may be a vestige of internal native Floridian cuisine to be had (grits are still on the menu, including at the Indian breakfast place my sister took us out to), but I couldn't put my finger on a South Floridian cuisine that has yet emerged. Not enough time to gad about, I suspect, to find it. In any event, I did notice both a slightly higher than normal incidence of mango about, and I was bemused to hear of a B&B frequented by family friends called the "Mango Inn", and when I started to make a traditional Hawaiian pizza the other day, I discovered we had no pineapple about the place but I did have a nice supply of mangoes. Hence this experiment, which turned out to be a nice enough result that I thought it worth preserving in our recipe files.

I note parenthetically that I am not usually one for the "sweet" pizza, but this turned out to be a very nice blend and my own exception to the rule of preferring savory or tangy 'za.

Palm Beach Island Pizza

Use a thin crust. I used my habitual 2/3 whole wheat 1/2 white flour recipe, divided in half, pre-baking the crust for 5 minutes.

red pizza sauce (mild, almost no spicing)
mozzarella
thin-slivered fresh basil
diced fresh mango (I'm sure frozen will do fine, mango comes out of the freezer unusually well)
pre-cooked black forest ham, diced into tiny cubes
parmiggiano

put down the sauce, top with the cheese, then the ham. Bake @425 for about 10 minutes. Add the mango, basil slivers, and a thin topping of grated parm; return to the oven until the cheeses just start to brown.

 

Christmas Eve Pizza!

Catching up after the fact on neglected holiday postings...

We don't have a particular Christmas Eve tradition in the house, so each year we just pick something different to do. If there's company, of course, a fancy meal is in order of some sort, but otherwise anything that's celebratory sounds like a good idea. This year, I asked the eldest what he wanted, and he answered "Pizza!" which was pretty predictable even if he doesn't actually eat much pizza when we do have pizza. We try to make a vegetarian pizza for the younger and Mrs. Claus, so I frequently make two small to medium pizzas on pizza nights. This time, however, I decided the seasonal design would lend itself well to a half-veggie, half-pepperoni! (That's artichoke, pepper, red bell pepper and cherry tomato on the upper half.)  

Pizza Combo Deal at Red Brick Oven

(obligatory grainy cell phone photo above)

This is not quite what I had envisioned for my first restaurant shout-out in this space, but so it goes. Duncan and I stopped by Red Brick Oven in Del Rey Oaks today for some take out pizza (why there is NO GOOD PIZZA in the Monterey area will be a topic for another day - Pete's Famous in Philly, I miss ya guys) and to our surprise there was a dixieland combo playing there. Turns out they play every Wednesday. It was really great -- bass sax, banjo, trombone, and very small percussion set-up. You have to go between them to get to the bathroom. We'd seen them playing outside before but I didn't realize it was a regular gig. 

Duncan was a little put out by the noise, but I was entranced. It was such a nice little unexpected treat/adventure at the end of a long series of errands and a kind of a hard day.

I miss live music, especially with dining out, and I find it kind of astonishing that such an enjoyable little group was playing RBO, of all places. (One of the reasons we patronize it from time to time is it's usually so dead in there you get the pizza right away. Not so tonight.) So Monterey peeps: every Wednesday. Jazzy dixieland and 'za.

Pizza Pi [sic]

Add this to the list of useless bits of information you are now consigned to carry around in your brain for eternity, wasting otherwise useful brain space: in a 16" home made pizza, the number of 1" pepperoni slices required to fill up the pizza in four concentric circles wherein each pepperoni slice just barely touches the circumference of each adjoining pepperoni slice (yes, we have a 5 year old), is 63. I've done it three times in a row now. If you think I'm some kind of hideous nerd-drone from Planet Getalife for noting this, consider the alternative: I am fairly sure this is provable by trigonometric means, which I have eschewed in favor of empirical evidence in this particular case. So there. [I do note, for the record, there's something about this being a 16" pizza and that the result was ((2^^6th)-1) that is suggestive but which I have restrained myself from investigating.]

I have much to say about homemade pizzas, but tonight I am paying tribute to focaccia for helping me get over a weak part of my pizza game. I have a hard time rolling the dough into a circle. Part of this is the plain fact our counters aren't big enough to roll a 16" pizza. But my basic ineptitude with dough is mostly to blame. However, a few years ago I started making focaccia (in cookie sheets - I don't have a jelly roll pan, whatever that is, which is what the recipe calls for). Focaccia, you put the dough, unrisen, into the cookie pan and press it out to the corners, gradually working it until it gets everywhere. You cover it and let it sit for a while, and you discover the dough has spongily retreated to the middle a bit. You repeat pushing it out to the outside, letting it rest and rise, etc. until you get the dough more or less along the edges in an even crust shape. It's pretty neat and comes out rather satisfyingly.

So my eureka moment was when I discovered all you have to do with pizza dough is over roll it -- beyond the size of the pizza pan -- let it rise a little (I do two risings on my pizza crusts) and then just roll over the edges to form the crust, then push the edge of the crust around in a circle, like focaccia, converging on any "weak" points in the crust that are lower, and lowering any "fat" parts of the crust. Four or five revolutions and you have a pretty even crust even if you haven't started with a perfect circle.

Here's another ingredient I've had a problem with on home-made pizza: fresh basil. I've seen recipes in a couple of otherwise respectable pizza cookbooks that suggest adding snipped basil leaves to the top layer of the pizza for that fresh flavor. I've never ever been able to do this: they always either burn, or come out sort of dessicated and undercooked at the same time, hot and dry. As for putting it in the sauce -- well, a noble idea, but the basil merges in with the taste of the sauce, which becomes tomato-basil pizza sauce more than a pizza that features basil.

So I've experimented here and there with how to get around this, and I think I've finally fallen upon the right spot to put the basil. I lay down the sauce, cook it for a couple of minutes to get it adhering to the crust, take out the pizza from the oven, and layer over the fresh basil (snipped with a scissor - neither put on whole, nor chopped up into tiny pieces), then encase it in cheese and/or the rest of the toppings. It came out wonderful, rich and zesty, cooked but not dry, very basilrific. As we made a vegetarian pizza for 3/4 of us and the pepperoni for the rest of us tonight, we had the opportunity to contrast the same sauce on the same crust with only the difference of the basil by taste-testing the two zas. I'll try it again next time to see if this wasn't a fluke...but if it works for lasagne, it should work for pizza?

Parenthetically, it sure seems this week as if we're on the Americanized Italian plan, so I'm thinking we need to take a turn away from this next week for a little variety. Hmmm.....