Cooking Italy: Pizza

So this week's Cooking Italy Challenge using Marcella Hazan's wonderful book "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking"  involved cranberry beans.

I took the easy way out (I thought) and went with the optional Pizza Dough recipe.

Now this would have been accomplished a lot earlier in the week had there not been the great Sunday dough crisis that involved getting a nice dough worked up and sitting in a bowl to rise.

A plastic bowl.

On an oven while I was baking cookies.

It was not pretty. Poor little dough. The bottom of the bowl had melted, presumably into the dough, which was also baked 3/4 of the way through. So I threw it out, mourned my dough, ate several macaroon cookies to console myself and shoved this aside for a few days.

Now I did choose the easy way of making the dough by using the food processor as I was short on time after work. Also, I ended up letting it rise overnight as I didn't want to stay up too late so by the next morning I had a nice risen dough that slept for the day in the fridge until I got home.

Since I didn't have a round pizza sheet (something had happened to my other one and I honestly intended to get around to getting a new one about a year ago) I went with a square cookie sheet, rolled the dough out into a rectangular and crimped the edges around. So far, not so bad.

I wanted to recreate one of my favorite pizzas, garlic alfredo chicken. So in the interests of saving time and money, I went with a bottled alfredo sauce, and mixed in some chicken, red onions, and roasted minced garlic. Now I went a little overboard with the sauce, but overall, the pizza turned out great. The dough was crisp and cooked through perfectly. The sauce made things a little messy in some areas but the flavor was fabulous.

Definitely am loving Marcella's book.