CHICAGO DEEP DISH WITH SPINACH AND RICOTTA
Adapted from The Pizza Bible by Tony Gemignani with Susie Heller and Steve Siegelman
Dough:
1-1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1/4 cup + 4 teaspoons warm water
3-1/8 cups bread flour
3 scant tablespoons medium ground cornmeal
1 tablespoon diastatic malt
1 tablespoon lard, cut into small pebble-sized pieces
1 tablespoon butter, cut into small pebble-sized pieces
3/4 cup cold water
Spinach:
2 tablespoons olive oil
10 ounces fresh baby spinach
2 teaspoons freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
The Rest:
1 tablespoon of butter
1/4 medium ground cornmeal
10 ounces fresh mozzarella, thinly sliced
1/4 cup Asiago cheese
1 tablespoon garlic
8 ounces shredded provolone
5 ounces shredded mozzarella
1-1/2 cups thick tomato-based pasta sauce
1 tablespoon Pecorino cheese
Make the dough: Combine the yeast and warm water in a small bowl. Mix thoroughly and set aside for at least five minutes. Place the flour, cornmeal, and malt in the bowl of a large stand-mixer fitted with a dough hook. Run the mixer at a low speed and add the lard and butter pieces. Continue mixing while adding the cold water and the yeast-water mixture. When the dough starts to come together, add the salt, and continue to mix until the salt is incorporated and the dough begins to cling to the hook. This should only take a minute or so. Knead the dough on a clean surface for about two to three minutes or until the dough ball starts to become smooth. Put the dough in a bowl, cover with a damp towel, and allow it to rest at room temperature for an hour. After it has rested, place the dough on a plate or baking tray and wrap the dough and plate together with plastic wrap. Place in the refrigerator for 1 to 2 days. Take the dough out of the refrigerator and place in a warm, dry place until it becomes room temperature.
Make the spinach: Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Place the washed and dried spinach in the pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and cover with the lid. After about a minute, remove the lid and turn the spinach over. The spinach that was on the bottom should have darkened and shrank a little. Replace the lid and cook for another minute. Remove the lid again, and flip the spinach again. Continue to flip/stir the spinach until the entire batch has wilted. Remove the spinach from the pan and allow it to cook. Squeeze out any excess moisture.
Assemble the pizza: Preheat the oven to 500º F. Sprinkle a pizza peel or board with a couple of tablespoons of cornmeal. Roll or stretch the dough out to about a seventeen inch circle (a couple of inches larger than the pan you are going to use. Butter a cake pan or deep dish pizza pan generously, making sure the butter extends up the sides of the pan and covers the corners of the pan. Carefully place the dough in the pan, pushing the dough into the corners. Press the dough along the top edge of the pan to secure it to the pan (If you are using a stoneware or other thick type of pan, I suggest baking the crust alone for 5-8 minutes at this point, with the top edges of the dough covered with a pie-ring or aluminum foil). Lay the mozzarella slices over the bottom, allowing some of it to curl up the edges of the dough a bit. Spread half of the spinach mixture over the mozzarella slices. Sprinkle the Asiago over the spinach. Cover the spinach and Asiago with the provolone. Bake in the bottom third of the oven for fifteen minutes. Rotate the pan 180º and bake for another 5 minutes or until the cheese is starting to brown. Remove the pizza from the oven and cover it with the shredded mozzarella. Return the pizza to the oven and bake until the cheese has melted and started to brown. Remove the pizza from the oven. Lift it out of the pan onto a cutting board. Cut the pizza into the desired amount of slices (I like 16). Pour the sauce over the top of the pizza. If the remaining spinach is cold, heat it up a little in the microwave. Drizzle the remaining spinach over the sauce and dust the top with the Pecorino. Serve immediately.
The crusts The Pizza Bible all take a couple of days to make. So far, the deep dish crust seems the least involved. The other ones I have made so far require a starter that sits for a day, then a dough that sits for a day, then you "degass" the dough and let it rest for another day. The deep dish only requires a 24-48 hour rest once everything is combined and kneaded.
With this in mind, I had intended to start the dough on Monday but had a case of the unmotivates and simply watched television after work instead. Then, Tuesday came and went, and I didn't end up starting my dough until Wednesday. The instructions say to weigh the dough when you are done and throw away anything over 27 grams, but being the carboholic that I am, I skip this step. In my previous dough adventures, I always skipped the kneading and the "resting" of the dough. I didn't have the patience, and I felt that my Kitchen Aide did a fine job of kneading the dough on its own. I have since recanted this position. I tried it once (I felt I should at least follow the instructions to the letter one time to determine if this was a necessary step), and found that the kneading was somewhat therapeutic. Smashing the dough against itself against the counter, and pummeling it into submission works out a lot of frustrations. I am still not convinced that it does a whole lot for the dough, but I rather enjoy it now.
With my dough resting, I decided to work on some other preparations for the following night. I know from experience that if I leave the kitchen while the dough is resting, I may not come back again until the next morning, and the dough would have exceeded its nap time and started its rise a little early. To occupy the time, I started in on the spinach. The recipe originally called for a pound of spinach. However, I am hard-pressed to find any packages at Cub that would make this amount convenient. They only sell five ounce bags. Sure, I could have sprung for a third bag and gotten really close to the full pound, but it really seemed like a large amount of spinach. I know that it shrinks down, and it is one of the top billed stars of the recipe, but I just didn't want to do it. The recipe suggests that you saute the spinach in a couple of batches, but, again, I am an impatient person and I didn't have as much spinach. I opted to do one batch and just get it done. Once it had shrunk down, it didn't look like very much, and I wondered if I should have gone for the third package.
I looked at the recipe for the sauce, and I looked in my overloaded fridge and immediately focused in on some leftover pasta sauce that was in there. Jeff had suggested over the weekend that I ditch the next recipe idea and make a "leftover" pizza out of items left in our fridge. To make at least a little effort to appease him in that respect, I opted for the leftover commercial pasta sauce instead of making yet another tomato-based something or other to stick back into the fridge. It was a three-cheese generic sauce from Cub. It was a little thick and very flavorful, and there was just the perfect amount left in the jar for my pizza.
The hour resting period wasn't over yet, so I thought I would get started on some of the preparations for the berry pizza. Reading through the instructions, most of the steps could be done in advance, leaving only assembly for Thursday after work.
While the doughs were resting, I started in on the blueberries. I made my syrup. It seemed like a large amount of syrup, but I thought maybe something magical was going to happen when I added it to the mint. It didn't. Once it cooled, I put aluminum foil over the bowl and put it in the refrigerator, hoping that the magic would happen overnight in there.
I bundled up and went out to the grill instead. I should have let it heat up first. I light two of the three burners, laid the two sticks over the visible flame and closed the lid. I checked it about 5 minutes later and nothing had happened to them (other than one end of the skewer was blackening - I knew I should have soaked them first but didn't want to bother with it). I turned off the center burner, turned on the burner furthest away from my skewers, and lined my skewers perpendicular to the grates to maximize flame exposure. I closed the lid and let them bake for another 5 minutes or so. Then, when I flipped them, the berries were starting to soften and there was a little blackening in a couple of spots. I left them on the uncooked side for another 5 minutes, pulled them off and went back inside. I tried pushing the berries off of their skewers with a fork, but it started smashing the berries. I'm not sure why that seemed to make a difference to me, since I was going to mash them in the end anyway, but I decided to wait for them to cool and gently pull them off with my fingers.
When I got home on Thursday after work, I pulled my doughs out of the fridge. I had put them on the same baking sheet, and they had started to grow together, looking like a large albino lady bug or something.
After they had gotten up to room temperature, I slathered my deep-dish stone with butter. There is something about just sticking your hands in the butter and pushing it around the pan that I really like. I think it makes it easier to get into the corners of the pan, you can feel where the butter hadn't covered a space, and it makes your hands really soft.
Once the pan was sufficiently slathered, I rolled out the deep-dish dough. It seems strange that you would roll out a deep-dish dough so thin, but I guess it needs to be to get cooked all the way through, and the deep dish isn't necessarily about the bread, but all the stuff you cram into it, and there was a lot to cram with this recipe.
Jennifer and the kids had arrived by this time. Jonah went straight to the television room and plunked down on the couch for some mindless drivel, and the diligent Gracie sat at the kitchen table and worked on homework while Jen and I worked on the assembly process. I had already slathered the dough for the berry pizza with the sweetened condensed milk. I wasn't sure I was using the right thing, since the recipe did not mention "sweetened". However, I am not aware of any condensed milk that isn't sweetened, so that is what I used. My can was 15 ounces, so I will have to think of some other application for this item (yes, there is yet another thing left over and going into the over-filled fridge).
By the time Jennifer approached the pizza, the sweetened condensed milk had started to drip a little over the edge of the pizza. I figured that was all it was going to do, because it was pretty thick. I told her to go ahead and just leave it that way, but the blueberries still hadn't done anything magical and were just floating on top of the vat of syrup. I told scoop the berries and mint out of the bowl and leave the syrup. As a matter of fact, I hadn't yet decided what we were going to drink, but using mint-berry syrup sounded like the perfect thing! She added the blueberries and mint, mashed the strawberries and added those, and then the milk started running over the counter. I had not built a lip around the edge, so it was just running over the board and onto the counter. We decided to bake it on a jelly roll pan, so the sides of the pan could catch the drips and not the bottom of my oven.
We returned to the deep dish pizza and started in on the first of the four cheeses. Jeff had bought pre-sliced fresh mozzarella, and the recipe said to slice it very thin. The slices that it came with were pretty thick - great for a caprese salad, but not great for covering the bottom of a 15 inch pizza pan. I tried slicing the slices in half, but was not getting good results. The cheese is really soft, so I decided instead to mash the slices down (roll them out like pizza dough) into a larger, thinner slice. It worked for the most part. It didn't have to be beautiful or perfect, because this cheese was going on the bottom of everything. I didn't really have enough to get up the sides of the dough, but I was okay with that, considering that there were five more cheeses to go in there. After the fresh mozzarella, half of the spinach went on. Next to be piled on was the tablespoon of garlic (the recipe called for 1 teaspoon - and Jennifer and I just laughed at that) and the Asiago. Then, the Provolone - this was really a lot of cheese! The ingredients had reached the top of the pan, and we weren't even done yet!
While we were assembling this, we had put a Papa Murphy's Cowboy Pizza in the oven. Jennifer will frequently bring a pizza that she knows her kids will eat, because there is a fifty percent chance that they won't even try the weird ones I make. For this week, I wasn't sure Jeff was going to try the berry pizza. He is allergic to strawberries, but we only put the strawberries on 3/4 of the pizza. The Cowboy had just come out of the oven as we were finishing the initial assembly of the deep dish pizza.
Our deep dish went in for its first stint in the oven. While this was going on, I started mixing up cocktails for us with items I found in the cupboard.
1 part blueberry mint simple syrup (see above)
When we took it out of the oven again, the cheese had melted. We tried to lift the pizza out of the pan with a couple of spatulas. It looked like it was going well, when suddenly, the bottom dropped out of one side of the pie. Thankfully, it landed on the cutting board, and we were able to scooch it back under the pie. In hindsight, we decided that we should have pre-baked the crust a little or used a metal pan which would have conducted heat faster to the dough.
As for the berry pizza, we put it in once we had taken the deep dish pizza out. As we feared, the sweetened condensed milk oozed off of the crust and pooled (and caramelized) on the baking sheet. We didn't want to waste it, so we scraped it up and put it in a bowl to add a little crunchy topping as we ate it.
The deep dish pizza was delicious! I think really should have been called Cheese Pizza with Spinach and Ricotta, since those two items were the smallest percentage of the pizza. They were accents, really, not stars... You could differentiate the creamy, soft mozzarella on the bottom from the tangy, rich provolone. Once you think you have gone to some cheesy gooey overload, you get hit with the tang of the tomato sauce and finish off with another shot of creamy richness from the ricotta.
The berry pizza was good. I'm not sure that the grilling of the strawberries did anything special for them. Jennifer even suggested that they could have been regular frozen strawberries, and it would have tasted the same. I really liked the pop of the blueberries, and the underlying hint of mint that came to the taste buds after the berry was gone. I'm not sure what the cheese did for the concoction other than hold the berries onto the crust. I think if I had made a lip around the pizza and kept the sweetened condensed milk in its place, we wouldn't have needed to add the mozzarella pearls.
The crusts The Pizza Bible all take a couple of days to make. So far, the deep dish crust seems the least involved. The other ones I have made so far require a starter that sits for a day, then a dough that sits for a day, then you "degass" the dough and let it rest for another day. The deep dish only requires a 24-48 hour rest once everything is combined and kneaded.
With this in mind, I had intended to start the dough on Monday but had a case of the unmotivates and simply watched television after work instead. Then, Tuesday came and went, and I didn't end up starting my dough until Wednesday. The instructions say to weigh the dough when you are done and throw away anything over 27 grams, but being the carboholic that I am, I skip this step. In my previous dough adventures, I always skipped the kneading and the "resting" of the dough. I didn't have the patience, and I felt that my Kitchen Aide did a fine job of kneading the dough on its own. I have since recanted this position. I tried it once (I felt I should at least follow the instructions to the letter one time to determine if this was a necessary step), and found that the kneading was somewhat therapeutic. Smashing the dough against itself against the counter, and pummeling it into submission works out a lot of frustrations. I am still not convinced that it does a whole lot for the dough, but I rather enjoy it now.
With my dough resting, I decided to work on some other preparations for the following night. I know from experience that if I leave the kitchen while the dough is resting, I may not come back again until the next morning, and the dough would have exceeded its nap time and started its rise a little early. To occupy the time, I started in on the spinach. The recipe originally called for a pound of spinach. However, I am hard-pressed to find any packages at Cub that would make this amount convenient. They only sell five ounce bags. Sure, I could have sprung for a third bag and gotten really close to the full pound, but it really seemed like a large amount of spinach. I know that it shrinks down, and it is one of the top billed stars of the recipe, but I just didn't want to do it. The recipe suggests that you saute the spinach in a couple of batches, but, again, I am an impatient person and I didn't have as much spinach. I opted to do one batch and just get it done. Once it had shrunk down, it didn't look like very much, and I wondered if I should have gone for the third package.
I looked at the recipe for the sauce, and I looked in my overloaded fridge and immediately focused in on some leftover pasta sauce that was in there. Jeff had suggested over the weekend that I ditch the next recipe idea and make a "leftover" pizza out of items left in our fridge. To make at least a little effort to appease him in that respect, I opted for the leftover commercial pasta sauce instead of making yet another tomato-based something or other to stick back into the fridge. It was a three-cheese generic sauce from Cub. It was a little thick and very flavorful, and there was just the perfect amount left in the jar for my pizza.The hour resting period wasn't over yet, so I thought I would get started on some of the preparations for the berry pizza. Reading through the instructions, most of the steps could be done in advance, leaving only assembly for Thursday after work.
BERRY PIZZA
Adapted from Revolutionary Pizza by Dimitri Syrkin-Nikolau
Dough:
1 cup cold water
2 teaspoons fine sea salt
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
3½ cups bread flour
Toppings:
6 ounces fresh blueberries
2 tablespoons (loosely packed) fresh mint leaves
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
8 ounces strawberries (about 8 medium berries)
7 ounces sweetened condensed milk
4 ounces mozzarella "pearls"
Make the dough: Combine the water, salt, sugar, and oil in the bowl of a large stand mixer. Vigorously whisk this together with a fork or whisk. Place the bowl in position on the stand mixer and fit the mixer with the dough hook. Mix at medium speed until the dough comes together, all of the ingredients are incorporated, and the dough starts to cling to the hook. Remove the dough from the bowl and knead on a clean dry surface for about 2-3 minutes or until the dough becomes smooth. Form into a ball and let rest at room temperature for about an hour. Cut the dough in half. Reshape each piece into a ball. Freeze one ball in a freezer bag or double-wrapped in plastic wrap to use for another recipe. Place the remaining dough ball on a baking sheet or large plate. Wrap plastic wrap around the plate and dough ball, sealing the dough underneath the plate. Refrigerate for 24-48 hours.
Assemble the pizza: Preheat the oven to 500º F with a pizza stone inside, if using. Roll or stretch the dough on a cornmeal dusted peel or board to a 16 inch circle. Pinch around the edges of the circle, creating a lip or raised edge all the way around. Spread the sweetened condensed milk over the dough. Rinse the blueberries and place in a large bowl with the mint leaves. In a medium sauce pan, combine the water and sugar and bring to a boil, stirring often to make sure that the sugar dissolves. Once it has reached a boil, turn the heat off and pour the syrup over the blueberry-mint mixture. Allow to cool. Skewer the strawberries and grill on a preheated grill until they start to blister. Allow them to cool on the skewers. Once cooled, carefully remove the berries from the skewer and mash with a fork. Strain the berries and mint from the syrup, reserving the syrup for another use. Arrange the berries and mint leaves over the pizza. Sprinkle the mozzarella "pearls" over the pizza. Arrange the strawberries among the berries and cheese. Bake in the preheated oven for about 10 minutes or until the cheese has melted. Dust with powdered sugar, if desired, and serve immediately.
I started with the dough. This recipe just has you throwing everything together, mixing, and rising. It seemed wrong to put the salt and yeast in the water together. I always thought that the salt would kill the yeast before it had time to bubble up and cause the dough to rise. Maybe that is what the author of the book had intended - maybe their style of pizza isn't light and fluffy but more cracker-like. I just hoped it wasn't going to be more brick-like. The instructions on this one were to let it rest for two hours. Since I was already a half hour into the resting period for the first dough, I decided to give it an hour and a half. I know, I am a rebel.
While the doughs were resting, I started in on the blueberries. I made my syrup. It seemed like a large amount of syrup, but I thought maybe something magical was going to happen when I added it to the mint. It didn't. Once it cooled, I put aluminum foil over the bowl and put it in the refrigerator, hoping that the magic would happen overnight in there.
I skewered the strawberries and was able to fit four on a skewer. I was originally
thinking I would just hold the skewers over the gas stove flame and "grill" them that way, so I wouldn't have to go outside, but then I had a flash vision of me lighting my sleeve on fire, lighting the skewer on fire, dropping the flaming skewer on our new maple floors and starting the whole place on fire.When I got home on Thursday after work, I pulled my doughs out of the fridge. I had put them on the same baking sheet, and they had started to grow together, looking like a large albino lady bug or something.
After they had gotten up to room temperature, I slathered my deep-dish stone with butter. There is something about just sticking your hands in the butter and pushing it around the pan that I really like. I think it makes it easier to get into the corners of the pan, you can feel where the butter hadn't covered a space, and it makes your hands really soft.
Once the pan was sufficiently slathered, I rolled out the deep-dish dough. It seems strange that you would roll out a deep-dish dough so thin, but I guess it needs to be to get cooked all the way through, and the deep dish isn't necessarily about the bread, but all the stuff you cram into it, and there was a lot to cram with this recipe.
Jennifer and the kids had arrived by this time. Jonah went straight to the television room and plunked down on the couch for some mindless drivel, and the diligent Gracie sat at the kitchen table and worked on homework while Jen and I worked on the assembly process. I had already slathered the dough for the berry pizza with the sweetened condensed milk. I wasn't sure I was using the right thing, since the recipe did not mention "sweetened". However, I am not aware of any condensed milk that isn't sweetened, so that is what I used. My can was 15 ounces, so I will have to think of some other application for this item (yes, there is yet another thing left over and going into the over-filled fridge).
By the time Jennifer approached the pizza, the sweetened condensed milk had started to drip a little over the edge of the pizza. I figured that was all it was going to do, because it was pretty thick. I told her to go ahead and just leave it that way, but the blueberries still hadn't done anything magical and were just floating on top of the vat of syrup. I told scoop the berries and mint out of the bowl and leave the syrup. As a matter of fact, I hadn't yet decided what we were going to drink, but using mint-berry syrup sounded like the perfect thing! She added the blueberries and mint, mashed the strawberries and added those, and then the milk started running over the counter. I had not built a lip around the edge, so it was just running over the board and onto the counter. We decided to bake it on a jelly roll pan, so the sides of the pan could catch the drips and not the bottom of my oven.
We returned to the deep dish pizza and started in on the first of the four cheeses. Jeff had bought pre-sliced fresh mozzarella, and the recipe said to slice it very thin. The slices that it came with were pretty thick - great for a caprese salad, but not great for covering the bottom of a 15 inch pizza pan. I tried slicing the slices in half, but was not getting good results. The cheese is really soft, so I decided instead to mash the slices down (roll them out like pizza dough) into a larger, thinner slice. It worked for the most part. It didn't have to be beautiful or perfect, because this cheese was going on the bottom of everything. I didn't really have enough to get up the sides of the dough, but I was okay with that, considering that there were five more cheeses to go in there. After the fresh mozzarella, half of the spinach went on. Next to be piled on was the tablespoon of garlic (the recipe called for 1 teaspoon - and Jennifer and I just laughed at that) and the Asiago. Then, the Provolone - this was really a lot of cheese! The ingredients had reached the top of the pan, and we weren't even done yet!While we were assembling this, we had put a Papa Murphy's Cowboy Pizza in the oven. Jennifer will frequently bring a pizza that she knows her kids will eat, because there is a fifty percent chance that they won't even try the weird ones I make. For this week, I wasn't sure Jeff was going to try the berry pizza. He is allergic to strawberries, but we only put the strawberries on 3/4 of the pizza. The Cowboy had just come out of the oven as we were finishing the initial assembly of the deep dish pizza.
Our deep dish went in for its first stint in the oven. While this was going on, I started mixing up cocktails for us with items I found in the cupboard.
BLUEBERRY PEACH MINTINI
1 part blueberry mint simple syrup (see above)
2 parts peach vodka
3 parts plain vodka
Add ingredients to a shaker filled with ice. Shake vigorously and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a blueberry or two.
After we had our beverages lined up, we checked on the progress of our deep dish pizza. the dough had risen to a point where it had climbed right out of the pan. It looked a bit like a souffle.
We gave it a half turn and sent it back in. After about half of the suggested time for second baking, we decided it was done (the book said 12 minutes, and it had been about five). It was really pretty with the cheese starting to brown and the crust tall and towering above the cheese, I almost hated to add the second batch of mozzarella. I said almost - I mean it is cheese isn't it? And add it, we did and sent the heavy dish back into the oven for more melting.
When we took it out of the oven again, the cheese had melted. We tried to lift the pizza out of the pan with a couple of spatulas. It looked like it was going well, when suddenly, the bottom dropped out of one side of the pie. Thankfully, it landed on the cutting board, and we were able to scooch it back under the pie. In hindsight, we decided that we should have pre-baked the crust a little or used a metal pan which would have conducted heat faster to the dough.
We bucked the recipe instructions and put the sauce, spinach, ricotta, and pecorino on before we cut it. We decided that may have been a mistake. If the pie is cut before the toppings are added, there may be better coverage of those toppings. Regardless, it was beautiful!
As for the berry pizza, we put it in once we had taken the deep dish pizza out. As we feared, the sweetened condensed milk oozed off of the crust and pooled (and caramelized) on the baking sheet. We didn't want to waste it, so we scraped it up and put it in a bowl to add a little crunchy topping as we ate it.
The deep dish pizza was delicious! I think really should have been called Cheese Pizza with Spinach and Ricotta, since those two items were the smallest percentage of the pizza. They were accents, really, not stars... You could differentiate the creamy, soft mozzarella on the bottom from the tangy, rich provolone. Once you think you have gone to some cheesy gooey overload, you get hit with the tang of the tomato sauce and finish off with another shot of creamy richness from the ricotta.
The berry pizza was good. I'm not sure that the grilling of the strawberries did anything special for them. Jennifer even suggested that they could have been regular frozen strawberries, and it would have tasted the same. I really liked the pop of the blueberries, and the underlying hint of mint that came to the taste buds after the berry was gone. I'm not sure what the cheese did for the concoction other than hold the berries onto the crust. I think if I had made a lip around the pizza and kept the sweetened condensed milk in its place, we wouldn't have needed to add the mozzarella pearls.
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