Homemade Pizza

For a while now, I've been dying to try a semi-new restaurant in town called Peel.  The only problem is that it's so good, it's always packed and waiting outside in 100 degree weather for an hour just to get a table didn't really seem worth it to me. But, that being said, over July 4th weekend, we had the perfect opportunity to try this little pizza place out.  It was raining and 5pm so our wait time was only half an hour and our group of four was lucky enough to snag the last four seats at the end of the bar to wait. All the hype was worth it and we so enjoyed our meal, albeit a little pricey. So, this is more of a special occasion place rather than an every weekend place. But, since I did love the food so much, I wanted to try my hand at recreating it (on the cheap).

Peel is known for their wood fired pizzas and though I only have a traditional range, I didn't let that stop me. I made two different pizzas two different nights--one in the oven at 500 degrees and one outside on the grill. It's not that the one cooked in the oven wasn't as good, but heating the oven to that high of a temp in the middle of the summer just adds so much extra heat to the apt that I probably won't be doing that again until winter. Plus, trying to handle a pizza stone that hot is a job in and of itself. I nearly burned my hands even with my mitts so I'm apprehensive to try this method of cooking a pizza for a while.

I really enjoyed the buffalo chicken pizza and the Grecian pizza at Peel so I visited their website to check out the ingredient list. Even though there's no recipe, I figured I could just eye-ball it between the ingredient list, pictures of the pizzas on Yelp, and my memory of the pizzas. To round out our meals, I also tried my hand at recreating their salad and mac n cheese we ate there as well.  Some of the ingredients can be pricey to come by but Aldi has a great deal on shredded, crumbled, and fresh chunks of cheese and I was able to forgo an entire bottle of  kalamata olives and just pick up the amount I needed at Dierberg's olive bar. Also, to save time and money on ingredients, I picked up a bottle of sun dried tomato pesto from Shop n Save rather than taking the time to make it myself. 

After getting all the ingredients home, I realized I had more than enough food for one meal so I decided to only make one pizza that night and to make the other a few days later. So, first up was the Grecian pizza which really wasn't difficult to assemble as the salad called for many of the same toppings. Plus, it's 100% vegetarian so it's a great contender for our "Meatless Mondays."  It was Wednesday, but none the less, I still felt good about cutting some meat from our meals. 

Don't mind the cutting board, I don't currently have a real serving dish large enough for the pizza. 

After rolling out the crust, I brushed on some olive oil and put it in the oven for a few minutes to crisp up. Then, I carefully took it out of the oven and dressed it. I spread a thin layer of sun dried tomato pesto over the crust and then sprinkled some gorgonzola cheese over that. I had meant to pick up feta cheese but somehow ended up with gorgonzola. After a bit of googling however, I found that it's a perfect substitute so all was not lost. Then I added some baby spinach, roasted garlic and pearl onions, a hand full of sliced and pitted kalamata olives and roma tomatoes. Finally, I drizzled a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil over the entire pizza and put it back in the oven for another ten minutes.

In the mean time, I prepared our salads. A few cups of mixed greens with left over gorgonzola cheese, freshly grated mozzarella, (I put the ball in the freezer for fifteen minutes so it would be easy to grate) diced onion and roma tomatoes, and the rest of the kalamata olives. For the dressing, I just used a simple balsalmic vinaigrett recipe I found on Epicurious and drizzled the salads with a few tablespoons. 

And while the mac and cheese was our favorite part of the meal at Peel, it was almost an after thought when I started cooking. As in, I nearly forgot about it. Peel only lists their mac and cheese as a parmesan cream sauce gratin. With that in mind, I did a quick google search of parmesan cream ratios and heated a bit of heavy cream on the stove top and then whisked in some shredded parmesan after the cream came to a bubble. Then, I just poured the sauce over my cooked macaroni noodles in a dish and baked for the twenty or so minutes in the oven while we ate our salads.

Mac n cheese: parmesan cream sauce gratin

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For our next pizza, the buffalo chicken pizza, I decided to prepare more dough but to freeze it for a few days and then defrost it in the frig and roll it out before use. In the future, I will be doing this as the dough was much easier to work with and I was able to roll it a bit thinner than with the Grecian pizza a few nights before. Plus, it cuts down on prep time before the meal which is a big help on week nights. So, we brushed both sides of the rolled out dough with a little olive oil and put it on the pizza stone that had been heating on the grill. I cannot say with certainty the temperature as we used a charcoal grill, but it was quite hot and there were flames coming from the coals. After a few minutes, we then turned the crust, and let it cook for another two minutes. 

Then, we brushed the crust with the sauces. Nothing fancy, just some we had on hand.  I used about a 1/4 a cup of the honey bbq and smoked bbq and then added a few drops of hot sauce for a more traditional buffalo chicken taste. After mixing the sauces together, I brushed the crust with the mixture and spun the cubed chicken pieces in it also for some good bbq flavor. 

stocking stuffer from my mom this year : )

Here's a picture of the pizza, hot off the grill. Again, all I did was brush the sauce on the dough, add the cubed chicken pieces that had been roasted and coated in sauce, sprinkle on some mozzarella cheese I had left over from the other night, and  cover the grill letting the cheese melt. This really only took about four or five minutes. After that time had lapsed, we just removed it from the grill, and added some ranch dressing and fresh basil and cilantro from my little herb garden. The fresh herbs aren't necessary but they do wonders for presentation.