Pizza Margherita; Wild Mushroom Pizza; and Choco-Nut Martini

     Once again, I skipped over the eggplant recipes, and then I regretted it on Wednesday.  My husband left town for a few days, and we could have had an eggplant pizza with no complaints.  Live and learn.  There will still be a need for eggplant recipes when the summer comes, and we have an abundance.
     I love Pizza Margherita and always look forward to making and eating it.  It's like the mother of all pizzas - a humble beginning for all subsequent pizzas.  It's a simple dish - the basics are mozzarella, tomato, and basil.  It especially great in the summer (how I wish it were summer!), when the tomatoes are at their peak - thick, meaty, juicy tomatoes.  It's simple, but delicious.
     I know I have talked about how this particular item came to be, but it is still worth mentioning again.  It was "invented" in 1889 by a baker named Raffaele Esposito.  The pizzeria he worked was visited by King Umberto and Queen Margherita of Savoy.  He made three pizzas for them to try, and the Queen's favorite was this one, with the toppings corresponding to the three colors of the Italian flag (red, green, and white).  Raffaele then named that pizza after her, and it has been called that ever since.

     From everything I've read about her, she seems like she would have been a cool queen.  She was a mountain climber (unqueenly, isn't it?).  She was very philanthropic - she donated a great deal to the red cross (that's more queenly).  She didn't particularly want to marry her cousin Umberto, but it was arranged for the good of the country, so she was for it.  She was well-educated and loved music and the arts.  Apparently, she was more loved by her countrymen than her husband was, and did more for the unification of Italy than he did, too.  She endured his extra marital affair with Duchess Litta gracefully and still managed to encourage the entire country to honor him in his death.  It seems fitting that a noble pizza would be named after such a noble woman.

PIZZA MARGHERITA

Adapted from The Everything Pizza Cookbook by Belinda Hulin

Crust:

½ cup warm water

1 teaspoon active dry yeast    

¼ teaspoon sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1½ cups bread flour
½ tablespoon (or 1½ teaspoons) olive oil

The rest of the story:
2-4 tablespoons of cornmeal (or as needed to roll out the dough)
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons minced garlic
10 ounces thinly sliced tomatoes
15 ounces fresh mozzarella, sliced
¼ cup basil ribbons

Combine the water, yeast, and sugar in a bowl and set aside for at least 5 minutes.  Combine the salt and flour in a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook.   Add the yeast mixture and 1½ teaspoons of olive oil and stir on a low speed until dough comes together (you may have to scrape the sides a couple of times to get all the ingredients to combine well).  Continue mixing on a low speed until the dough begins to cling to the dough hook and becomes smooth and elastic.  Cover dough with a damp towel or a piece of plastic wrap and store in a warm, dry place for an hour or more to rise.

Preheat the oven to 500º F with a pizza stone inside, if using.  Dust a pizza peel or board with a couple of tablespoons of cornmeal.  Roll or stretch dough to a 14 inch circle, adding cornmeal as necessary to keep the dough from sticking to the board.  Brush the dough all over with a tablespoon of olive oil, getting all the way out to the edges.  Arrange the tomatoes over the dough without overlapping.  Top with the slices of mozzarella and basil ribbons.  Bake for 10-15 minutes or until cheese is melted and crust is starting to brown.  Remove it from the oven and allow it to cool for a few minutes before slicing.


     I debated about the garlic.  The recipe suggested minced garlic, and I was thinking it may be better with thin slices of garlic instead.  However, that would have required some extra work on my part, and I already had pre-minced garlic in a jar.  Maybe I will try it on a more ambitious day.
     Roma tomatoes are the best for this type of pizza.  They have more meat on them than regular beefsteak tomatoes.  They are hearty and flavorful and have less of the goo than regular tomatoes have between the meaty parts of the tomato.  Unfortunately, good Roma tomatoes are hard to find in the winter in Minnesota.  Those found at Cub this week were a sickly orange color and were pocked and bruised.  There were some lovely hothouse beefsteaks that I settled on instead.  I mean, really, it isn't pizza margherita if your only red ingredient is actually orange.

     I started out with a pound of mozzarella, but ended up eating bits of it along the way, so I think I ended up with about 15 ounces of cheese.  Fresh mozzarella is different than the regular block form you can find at any supermarket.  Its soft and almost sweet.  It's very pliable, too.  In fact, some of my slices were a little thicker than I wanted them, and I was able to just flatten them out with my (clean) hands to a thinner, dreamier dimension.

Speaking of the slices, the recipe called for cubes, which I thought to be a little strange.  I, of course, didn't see Rafaelle's version of this recipe, so I don't know what he used, but I have never seen one made that way.  I wasn't about to veer off into cube-land just yet.
     I arranged the stark white slices over the tomatoes, almost completely covering them up.  Jennifer isn't a fan of tomatoes, and I didn't want her to see how many there really were.  After sprinkling the shredded basil over the cheese, my Pizza Margherita was ready for the oven.

WILD MUSHROOM PIZZA

Adapted from All the Best Pizzas by Joie Warner

1/2 cup warm water

1-1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast

1/4 teaspoon sugar

1-1/2 cups bread flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 - 4 tablespoons cornmeal

3 tablespoon olive oil, divided

3 ounces of oyster mushrooms

2-1/2 ounces baby portabella mushrooms

1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
2 tablespoons shredded basil, divided
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
4 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 ounce shredded Asiago cheese

Combine the warm water, yeast, and sugar in a small bowl and set aside for at least five minutes.  In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook, stir together the flour and salt.  Add the yeast mixture and stir to combine.  Continue mixing at a low speed until the ingredients are well-combined and dough begins to cling to the hook.  Mix a little longer until the dough becomes smooth and elastic.  Cover the dough with a damp towel or a sheet of plastic wrap and set aside in a warm, dry place for an hour or until doubled.

Preheat the oven to 500º F with a pizza stone inside, if using.  Dust a pizza peel or board with a couple of tablespoons of cornmeal.  Roll or stretch dough out to a fourteen inch circle, adding cornmeal if necessary to keep the dough from sticking to the board.  Brush the dough all over with one tablespoon of olive oil.  In a large bowl, toss the mushrooms, thyme, 1 tablespoon of shredded basil, and the ground pepper with the remaining two tablespoons of olive oil.  Spread mixture out over the dough, leaving a small untopped border around the edge of the dough.  Sprinkle the mozzarella over the mushrooms.  Distribute the salt, as evenly as possible, over the mozzarella.  Bake for 10-15 minutes or until cheese is browned and bubbly and crust is starting to become golden.  Remove the pizza from the oven and sprinkle with Asiago cheese and the remaining tablespoon of basil.

     I wasn't sure what selections of fresh wild mushrooms Cub would have, especially this time of year, but I didn't want to shop anywhere else this week.  The recipe wasn't specific on the type of mushroom (just "wild" and "fresh"), so I crossed my fingers and marched to their produce section.  My options were regular buttons, oyster mushrooms, or baby portabellas.  I already had baby portabellas at home (thank you, Costco).  Oyster mushrooms won out.  They came in 3.2 ounce packages, and the original recipe called for 5 ounces.  I could hear Jeff in my head, telling me that the recipe people conspire with the grocery people to sell items and quantities that are slow-movers.  with this in mind, I only bought one package and figured I could make up the difference with the baby bellas.

     Oyster mushrooms are strange entities.  When I took the cellophane off the package, I reached into it and grabbed them - or maybe i should say "it", because it was just one big clump of fungi.  They were softer than other mushrooms I have dealt with before.  I wasn't sure if they were really a little delicate or maybe Cub had hung on to them too long before I bought them.  They smelled good, though, so I continued on with the recipe.

     I wasn't sure if I was supposed to cut them up or what.  The original recipe said to remove the stems.  There really wasn't much for stems, and since the original recipe didn't know what kind of mushrooms I was using, how did the author know that the stems shouldn't be included?  I assume that when a recipe calls for removing the stems and discarding them that the reason is that they are tough or inedible.  These didn't seem tough at all, and since I paid $17.45/lb (what???!  more than most cheese!) for them, I didn't want to waste much of them.  The very end of what might be considered a stem was a little tougher than the rest, so I discarded those pieces, but it wasn't much.  I separated the caps from each other, but I was still unsure about whether I should cut them up or leave them "whole".  I decided to toss them with the other ingredients and decide after I put them on the pizza.

     Once I had dumped them on my dough, there weren't enough of them to get even distribution, so I ripped some of the larger caps into pieces and spread them out in between the baby portabellas (also called crimini mushrooms).  I wanted to make sure that each piece got at least a taste of the oyster mushrooms.

     I put the cheese on over the mushrooms (it didn't seem like much cheese after the pound I put on the other pizza).  This one was ready for the oven at this point, too.  However, I didn't want to forget the "post-oven" directions, so I got my Asiago shreds out of the fridge and placed them on the counter next to where I thought I would place the pizza when it was done baking.  The original recipe called for Parmesan, but I wasn't going to buy that when I had Asiago and Romano in my fridge, and they are similar enough to warrant not spending any more money.

     Jen and Grace had arrived by then, and I had her start on shredding the basil for scattering over the cooked pizza while I started to look for the ingredients for our Choco-Nut martinis.  I didn't really think that this drink was going to pair well with our entrees, but I was looking for something different - something other than the fruity martinis we had been having, and I thought I had all of the ingredients for this one.

CHOCO-NUT MARTINI

2 measures vodka

2 measures hazelnut liqueur (such as Frangelico)

1 measure chocolate liqueur

cocoa powder

Combine all ingredients in an ice-filled shaker.  Shake vigorously.  Wet the rim of a cocktail glass with a little liquid from the cocktail shaker.  Pour some cocoa powder in a wide, shallow dish.  Dip the martini glass rim into the cocoa powder to "dust" the rim.  Strain the liquid from the shaker into prepared cocktail glass.

     As I said, I thought I had all of the ingredients for this drink when I picked it out, but it had originally called for creme de cocoa.  I searched high and low for the creme de cocoa I knew I had, but came up empty-handed.  I did find, however, some chocolate liqueur called Chocolat Royal Creme de Chocolat.  I think it is sweeter than creme de cocoa, and it is definitely thicker (and darker).  Knowing this, I reduced the amount to 1 measure instead of the original two.  It was fantastic.

    It was sweet on the first sip, but the slight bitterness of the cocoa powder and the strength of the vodka pulled it back a little.  It definitely wasn't going to go well with our pizzas, but it was tasty.  It wasn't exactly beautiful, though. It was a murky brown color, and the thickness of the Chocolat Royal made it look a little muddy.  I may have to try this again with the creme de cocoa, when I find it, and see which version I like better, but it is definitely a drink to keep on the roster for an easy dessert.

     The mushroom pizza was done baking first.  The cheese had toasted up nicely, and the crust was stiff and golden.  Areas of the crust had bubbled up, adding little domes of brown cheese to the landscape of it.  I pulled it out and added my cheese and basil.  It was beautiful.

     The Pizza Margherita was a little more "rustic".  I had failed to make the edges of the pizza thicker than the center, and the cheese had melted down over the tomatoes, over the edge of the crust, and over the edge of my pizza stone and onto the oven floor.  I wasn't worried so much about the mess on the oven floor as I was worried about the amounts of cheese I wasn't going to get to eat.  Jennifer and I drooled over the crunchy cheese bits that had solidified on the edge of the stone.  Some of it had formed icicle-like protrusions from the bottom of the stone.  We discussed how to get these yummy bits off of there and into our mouths and decided we would have to wait until the stone cooled, so we wouldn't burn our fingers and our tongues.
     I am not sure if fresh mozzarella does get brown in the oven.  I left it in for a few more minutes after we took out the mushroom pizza to see if it would.  I started to panic about burning the crust and losing more cheese, so I pulled it out.

     After we had set the table and brought the pizzas out, I started with the Margherita.  It was even better than I thought it would be.  The fresh mozzarella was buttery and nutty.  The tomatoes were sweet and bold, and the basil and garlic gave it a nice underlying zing.
     The mushroom pizza was delicious, too!  The oyster mushrooms had a sweet, delicate flavor that hinted of the ocean.  The baby portabellas gave it an earthy richness, and the cheese and puffed up areas of crust gave it a warm toasty flavor.  The fresh basil scattered on top gave it that little extra something to balance everything out.  Maybe next time around, I will spring for all oyster mushrooms.  Or, hunt my own...

Return to the top of the page.

Return to the Pizza Margherita recipe.

Return to the Wild Mushroom Pizza recipe.

Return to the Choco-Nut Martini recipe.