Pizza Bianca

After enjoying Pizza Saturday for the last half year I was starting to tire of the tradition.  I decided that I needed to change it up a bit so I reached back for a pizza recipe that we used with great success a number of years ago after seeing it on America's Test Kitchen on our local PBS channel.  This is quite a departure from our normal thinner crust pizza, with the resulting pizza being closer to a pan crust from Pizza Hut.

The dough is much looser for this pizza and closer to liquid than solid really.  After mixing the dough and allowing it to rise you literally pour it out on to a well oiled cookie sheet or jelly roll pan.

Making sure pan is well oiled is key so that the pizza can be removed from the pan without sticking, however it does cause the crust to become a little greasy.  Once the dough is stretched to fill the pan it is pre-baked before any toppings are added.

Another reason I believe I was feeling burnt out on pizza was the lack of delicious toppings that I was using.  In previous weeks I had settled for using whatever was around the house with very mixed results.  This time I searched out some high quality pepperoni that I found at Trader Joe's.  In addition I added some fresh basil to go along with the mozzarella and parmesan cheese.

 I topped the pizza and placed it back in the oven to finish cooking.  For the final few minutes I turned on the broiler to brown the cheese.

This pizza was near perfection.  It could have used a little more pepperoni (or some sausage) but other than that it was exactly what I needed to break me out of the Pizza Saturday rut.