I?ve said it before and I?ll say it again: like a good Justin Timberlake video, pizza gets me all hot and bothered and leaves wanting a cigarette afterwards. And I don’t even smoke. This time, I made my new favorite pizza and turned my favorite sandwich into a pizza, all using fresh pizza dough I bought at the Central Market (yup, still no time to make it on my own-but come on. It was $3). Oh, and I tried using less dough per pizza and managed to stretch the dough thin enough that it got nice and crispy. I like to rub the dough with olive oil before I bake it, and I bake both sides before topping it and baking to melt/heat the toppings, because I dig a super crisp pizza. The first one was a Hawaiian pizza?you see, a few weeks ago, we ordered one from Pizza Hut (in a moment of hungover weakness, I swear!) and it looked so pathetic. Little strips of ham you could barely taste, hardly any pineapple?and strangely enough, a single slice of jalape¤o on one of my slices. Sort of like the onion ring you get at the bottom of a box of fries from Burger King. Score.
And I liked it! Something about the salty-sweet-hot combo really worked for me. So I set out to make a pizza that would kick Pizza Hut?s ass with a pair of soccer cleats. I originally had fresh pineapple, but it was really sour, so I used canned instead (I used 45 cents worth of a 90 cent can). Then I got smoked country ham from Barossa(65 cents for 25 grams worth, more than enough for one pizza), shaved really thin so they would crisp up and get all bacon-y (mmmmm, bacon!) and a big old jar of jalapenos (used maybe 10-20 cents worth of a $4 jar). Combined with tomato sauce (I’m not gonna get exact with this, I made it from scratch and the spice amounts were too minute to add up to more than 5 cents worth…but I did use 50 cents worth of a $2 can of tomatoes). Hea-ven in dough form, people. I am a Hawaiian pizza convert. And not counting the carbon footprint my pizza pie made (unlike the Madeater , I can’t even begin to fathom how fat my footprint must be!)I spent around $2.85. Pizza Hut’s price evades me now, but I am pretty sure it was $12.
The other pizza was spread with herbed and garlic cream cheese, cracked black pepper, caramelized onions, parmesan and a nice rare steak (I used filet mignon, but only because it was on sale and had bacon wrapped around it!).
Let me just end by saying this?pizza this good should be illegal. Or at least fetch $50 a pie. Damn, I?m good. ~LTG
