Pizza Pantalon!

Things have been busy around here and I have some serious catching up to do!

Last weekend included typical but good chaos. On a personal note, I should give some background.  On an average day, the only person here to try out my creations is my boyfriend. However, his two teenage sons spend every other weekend with us. They will definitely be testing out many of the things that will appear on this site.

We had a lot of bread to be made into an unlimited quantity of grilled cheese sandwiches but it was the pizza dough that got everyone’s interest. I had been told that the dough I had made a few days earlier was very similar to a beloved “Pizza Pantalon” from Salerno’s, which is a popular pizzeria in Cali, Colombia, their hometown.  Pizza Pantalon is a Calzone. Not one to shy away from a challenge, I tried to recreate the sauce, got a consensus on what everyone’s preferred filling was and embarked on using the previously tested pizza dough formula to make Pizza Pantalon. I made the same quantity of dough but instead of making two pizzas, I made three calzones and one pizza. The end result was delicious! One had a ham filling, one had a mushroom filling and mine was another Margarita with tomatoes and basil and buffalo mozzarella. One Pizza Pantalon could easily have fed two people but we pretty much devoured our servings the same night, after which everyone was feeling fat and happy.

Buon appetito!

Pizza Night!

I thought it might be a good idea to put all of these dough supplies to good use and make some pizza. Quite frankly, as much as I've been enjoying the bread, I was pretty excited about eating something other than sandwiches this week. Basically this pizza dough was the same as the Italian bread, but with the addition of some oil and sugar.

After mixing the dough and setting it aside to ferment I ran out to the grocery store to pick up toppings (a lot of cheese, ham, tomatoes and basil). Once it was time to roll the dough, it was already pretty late and perhaps I wasn't as lucid as I had hoped. I seem to have made a slight misjudgement. I've made pizzas in the past using various different doughs, but none of them were a "proper" or "traditional" Italian bread pizza dough. In other words, none of them rose quite like this one did. I could easily have made four large personal pizzas with the quantity of dough I had but instead I made two.

The result.

Well, the downside is that I ended up with a pretty thick crust. The upside is that the crust was delicious. They weren't the prettiest pizzas ever but needless to say, they took "midnight snack" to a whole new level.

Coming up next, French baguettes!