Buffalo Chicken Pizza

Buffalo wings have run deliciously amok. What started out as a simple bar snack, has since become everything from pasta to dip to casserole to pizza, and gone through some interesting ingredient iterations: some folks swap out the blue cheese dressing for ranch, and some even switch the chicken with cauliflower. The configurations seem endless, and that's good news for those of us who love our hot sauce oriented food.

This particular pizza is a pretty stripped down version of the classic combination of Frank's Red Hot sauce, chicken, and blue cheese dressing. Because it's pizza, I've added a final layer of shredded mozzarella, just to tie it all together. I've dispensed with the traditional carrot and celery sticks, although you could either serve them alongside (which would be appropriate) or dice them finely and use them as a topping - but I think they would be a bit of a distraction there. So.

Buffalo Chicken Pizza

1 Standard pizza

! batch pizza crust dough (see below)
125 mL (1/2 cup) creamy blue cheese dressing (or more to taste)
350 grams cooked, shredded chicken
60 mL (1/4 cup) Frank's Red Hot sauce (original)
1 tablespoon butter
200 grams shredded mozzarella

Dough

3/4 cup warm water (not hot)
1-2 teaspoons active dry yeast (use 1 tablespoon if you don't have the time to let it rise)
1 tablespoon olive oil
Approximately 2 cups of all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon coarse salt

Test the water by sticking your impeccably clean finger in it. If it's pleasantly warm, but not hot, you're good to go. If not, adjust as needed. Pour warm water into a medium sized mixing bowl. Sprinkle sugar and yeast over the water and let stand for about five minutes. The yeast will soften, and gradually start to foam up to the top of the water. This usually only takes a few minutes, but if your water is quite cool it might take a little longer. Once the yeast has gotten foamy, stir in the olive oil (or canola, if you don't have olive oil) and 1/2 cup of the flour.

Stir until combined into a sort of paste, and then beat vigorously for 100 strokes all in the same direction. It sounds silly, but this is the basis for a very smooth dough, and it doesn't actually take very long at all. A wooden spoon is ideal for the job. Once your mixture is smooth and silky-looking, add the salt and 1 cup of flour. Stir until the flour is mostly incorporated - it gets very stiff very quickly - and then turn out onto a clean counter to knead. Add more flour as you need it, if the dough seems sticky or wet.

Knead the dough briskly for about five minutes, or until it comes together in a satiny ball and is no longer sticky. Let the dough rest on the counter while you wash out the bowl that you started it in. Wash and dry the bowl, and spritz with a little oil. Place your dough into the bowl (turn it over once so that a little oil gets on the top) and cover with a towel while you prepare your toppings. The dough doesn't need to rise double in size (although it's fine if it does) but it should show some signs of life when you get back to it - be softer and a little risen.

Turn the oven on to preheat to 220°C / 450°F, with the rack placed in the middle. Prepare a pizza pan by sprinkling a generous amount of cornmeal in a thin layer over it, or lightly oiling.

Toppings

In a small skillet, heat the butter and hot sauce together and stir well to integrate (a whisk might help). Add the shredded chicken and toss/stir to thoroughly coat.

Press the dough out evenly on your pan. If the dough is still a bit tense, it might take a little longer, but this amount of dough will fit a full sized pizza pan. Just be patient and keep pressing it out, even if it tries to spring back, or let it rest for 5 minutes and try again. Once the dough is stretched to the full size of the pan, spread the blue cheese (or ranch, if you must) dressing evenly over it, leaving a little uncovered around the edge. Use a big spoon or your fingers to distribute the sauced up chicken over the dressing, and then add your mozzarella.



Slide the pan into your preheated oven and bake for at least 12 - 15 minutes (depending on your oven, maybe a little more), or until the crust is golden and delicious.

Slide pizza onto cutting board and pretend you're going to share. Put the rest of the bottle of Frank's Red Hot on the table...and try not to burn your mouth from devouring everything too quickly.

Note about foil: If you have cleverly put down a layer of foil in the bottom of your oven to protect it from drips, know that this is going to have a negative impact on the cooking time and browning of your pizza - especially the bottoms thereof. Put a baking sheet down there if you must, but foil really screws with the heat flow in an oven, and things take much longer to cook (and don't brown evenly). It might not affect other recipes, but it's terrible for pizza and pie crusts.



I added an extra perimeter of cheese and popped mine back in the oven for a couple of minutes, because it seemed like a good idea. It was. If you have some nice, mild, crumbly Danish blue cheese, that would go perfectly here.

Pizza Bianca

Oh, how I do love my pizza. We have it at least once a month, sometimes more, and we always make it from scratch. Palle is especially fond of non-tomato sauced pizzas, although he's generally pretty happy with any homemade pizza, including old faithful - pepperoni and mushroom with a classic, oregano-laden sauce. In the interests of keeping our pizza consumption from being monotonous, I like to try new things, from time to time. A recent effort involved miso gravy for the sauce, and shabu-shabu thin cut beef dressed with sesame oil and soy sauce. It went over rather well, and I'll certainly be keeping that in mind the next time I have leftover miso gravy lurking in the fridge.

But this one really wowed me. It's not even a recipe (excepting the crust, which is my usual recipe (expired link removed, please see comments below for recipe) using a three-hour rise and a fraction of the yeast) I was particularly pleased to be able to make it entirely out of things that I already had on hand, repurposing leftover roasted chicken and roasted fennel from the previous night's lemon risotto dinner, and using up the tail end of bocconcini which we had after making Messy Giuseppes (Palle's rather Italianate Sloppy Joes). Even the parsley was leftover from garnishing the risotto!

I chopped up the fennel, which had been roasted in thick wedges. I used the tenderest bits of fennel and scattered them over the crust - no sauce, I simply depended upon the olive oil that had been used to roast the fennel to get the party started. Next, meat from the roasted thighs and legs and back of the roast chicken. I generally pull the meat off the bones after dinner, while it is still warm, and plate it up for easy use later, and so it certainly stood me in good stead here. I chopped up the larger pieces, and tore some with my fingers, to get nice distribution. Finally, I dotted the small amount of bocconcini around the perimeter, sprinkled the whole thing with the already-chopped parsley, and bashed it into the oven until the crust started to turn gold. Once out of the oven, we grated some long strands of parmesan over it, and watched them melt artistically onto the pizza.

This was really a triumph of keeping things simple, too. I resisted the urge to add peppers or mushrooms or anything else, didn't overload on the cheese, and ended up with a very satisfying pizza that was very different from the taco pizza, vegetarian pizzas, or buffalo-wing pizzas that I've shared before.

There's a lot more things I want to try, pizza-wise, but for the record, I have no objection to any particular style of pizza. I like thick crust, thin crust, wood-fired, grilled, red-sauced, mustard-sauced, no-sauce at all. Best of all, I like my pizzas homemade.

Taco Pizza

If you think we eat a lot of pizza at our house, you'd be right.

When I left home at eighteen, I made leftovers into soup. In my twenties, I learned that I could make pizza out of almost any kind of leftover imaginable, and I did; my rampage through leftover chile con carne, curry, flank steak and mushrooms, baked bean and cheese, and whatever-was-in-the-crisper eventually led to the now-legendary Lapin Dijon Pizza of 1996 (sadly, no photo).

In my thirties, I relegated leftovers to quesadillas (including the surprisingly tasty Aloo Gobi quesadilla), and pursued more classic (ahem) forms of the pizza, that is, if you can include "cheeseburger" as a classic pizza option.

Nowadays, I just make pizza whenever I want pizza, and I still make it sometimes to use up ingredients. Sometimes, it takes on strange new territory (there was a mushroom-sauced roast beef pizza a couple of weeks ago that I completely forgot to take pictures of), the trendy (buffalo wing pizza with blue cheese sauce) or the time-honoured traditional (pepperoni from the deli counter, maybe mushrooms, maybe peppers, tomato sauce, cheese).

Pizza is a go-to dinner for a few of reasons:
1) It can be on the plate in an hour, even making the crust from scratch.
2) I almost always have the ingredients for making crust, some manner of sauce, and cheese
3) It can help me use up whatever is lurking in the fridge.

The leftover factor might be subtle, it needs to be said. The Taco pizza above was constructed out of a need to use up some black olives and a red pepper that wasn't going to put up with much more fridge time. Since I had some ground buffalo in the freezer (and I usually do), it was pretty easy to fry up the meat, season it up as if I were making tacos (chiles, onions, garlic, cumin - loads of cumin!) and spread it over the pressed-out crust.

For the crust, I substituted about a quarter of a cup of the flour with yellow cornmeal, just to give it a complementary flavour, a slight corniness, you might say. I also use cornmeal for dusting the pizza pan, to make sure the crust comes away nicely, so I already had the cornmeal out. (Expired link removed, please see comments below for recipe).

In this, somewhat rare incidence, I didn't use any sort of sauce at all, but made sure that the taco meat was fairly "saucy" or wet before spreading it in an even layer on the unbaked crust. Top with olives, confetti of red pepper, and cheddar cheese, and you have yourself a taco-flavoured pizza. Serve with a little drizzle of sour cream, if you like, or a side of guacamole.

Ersatz Pizza, with lamb

I needed to use up the tortillas. They were lingering in the fridge a little longer than was ideal, and had gotten stale. If I was going to use them, it was going to have to be immediate, and something over high heat to crisp back some semblance of personality into them.

Fortunately for me, my corner grocery has a small, fresh meat section, and a butcher who comes in for a few hours in the morning to set up the various and sundry cuts necessary in the preparation of Vietnamese and Filipino dishes. This includes very thinly sliced raw lamb rounds which, it turns out, fry up blazingly fast. It's the same place that I get my thinly sliced beef for the Sesame Beef. They do a very nice thinly sliced meat.

In the interests of both creating a nicely sturdy surface to play on, and my desire to use up maximum tortillas, I chose to glue two tortillas together with freshly grated parmesan. After that, a thin smear of spinach pesto, followed by the seared lamb slices, some pine nuts that were also in need of being eaten, and some feta cheese. The lower right side also had a drizzle of pomegranate molasses, which I was initially unsure of, but it turned out delicious. The loaded tortillas were then shoved onto a baking sheet and slid under the broiler just long enough to crisp up the edges of the tortillas, and toast the pine nuts.

The final stage was performed post-broiler: a friend had given me a whole-spice blend called "Grains of Desire" which turned out to be a wonderfully fragrant mixture of black peppercorns, nutmeg (not whole, obviously), cloves, orange rind, rose petals, ginseng, and grains of paradise. The combined aroma reminded me a little of ras el hanout, a justly famous Moroccan spice blend, and indeed, shares an overlap of ingredients (although a good ras el hanout might have upwards of 40 spices within), most notably the rose petals and the grains of paradise.

I had been searching for the perfect dish to crack the seal on the spice mixture, and this was a good call. Lamb provided a beautiful backdrop for the flavours, and tied the whole impromptu dish together in a way that I could not have really predicted.

It's not really pizza, but I really don't know what else to call it. I know I'd love to have it again.

Vegetarian Pizzas

I don't have any revelations about vegetarian pizza, really. I haven't found some new, hitherto undiscovered topping that requires me to shout from the rooftops. I've just been reminded that sometimes the simple things are really, really good.

The pizza above has those most classic of vegetarian pizza toppings: artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, good black olives, and cheese (in this case, a nice Monterey Jack), and a slightly spicy, garlicky tomato sauce. I refrained from adding more and more and more toppings, which used to be my pizza downfall, and let the combined flavours hum along in harmony.

The pizza below, is a very, very simple pie based on my memories of post-nightclubbing slices devoured at a long-departed establishment that stayed open until 3:00am downtown. The deceptively simple pesto pizza. Really, all you need is a good, home-made crust (expired link removed, please see comments below for recipe), and a good, home-made pesto, and the cheese of your choice. No tomatoes. No chunky bits. Just you and the pesto and the crust. For cheese, I opted to use some of the Jack (as above), and some parmesan, which is simply a component of the pesto. You don't need a lot of cheese - and you will need to shore up the edges of your crust a little to avoid spill-age if your crusts get any oven-spring lift to them. Just smear the pesto on, sprinkle the cheese, and ignore the pang of sadness that you feel when the beautifully bright pesto turns dark, olivey green from the heat of the oven.

I've learned a thing or three about pizza crust, in the years that I've been, ahem, studying.

1) Don't add too much flour. A looser dough has better texture
2) It doesn't matter if you forget to add salt to the crust, just sprinkle a little on the dough before you add the toppings (or use salty toppings, like feta).
3) The longer and slower the rise, the better the crust - airy, chewy, complex and delicious.

The two pizzas above were made with a batch of dough that was stirred up just before heading out to meet some friends for drinks. I only used a small amount of yeast (1 teaspoon for a double batch of dough, whereas many recipes - including my master recipe - use up to a tablespoon per pie). Three hours, on the counter, later, the dough was well-risen, soft, pliable, and ready to be stretched into shape. I can actually toss pizza crust, but generally I just pat it back and forth in my hands, like a chapatti, until it is big and round, and then flop it on a cornmeal-lined pizza pan and finish pressing it out to the edge.

I'm definitely going to try the low-yeast, slow rise thing again - it has wonderful schedule flexibility potential, and I feel the urge to experiment a little. Next time, maybe some other classics: pepperoni mushroom, perhaps (always a favourite), spinach and feta, or my personal guilty-pleasure - the cheeseburger pizza.

Road Rage and Buffalo Wing Pizza

I don't believe in road rage. I resent the terminology, in fact, because I think that it leads to people shrugging off inexcusable behaviour and poor self-control with a "what are you going to do?" shrug based on a faux-scientific term.

Today, on my lovely walk home across the bridge, I was startled off my stride by crazed yelling two lanes over from the sidewalk. A couple of guys had jumped out of their convertible and were screaming at the driver of another car to get out of his car, and punctuating their yells with full-shoulder punches to the roof of the car in question - whose driver was huddled over the steering wheel in a flinching posture. I suspect, based on the slight angle of the car being assaulted, that the issue may have been as simple as the convertible being cut off by the other car. The punches looked comic-book, as though they could punch through the roof to reach their target, who quite sensibly stayed put. I'm glad they weren't punching the windows.

I don't know what happened to create this situation, but I'm fairly sure that there wasn't any contact between the two cars. I was that close that I would have heard it. Traffic had stopped, snarled helplessly , while these two adult men tried to wrench open the door of the car. I screamed at them. No one else seemed to be doing anything, so I screamed. "Stop that right now!" This flew out of my mouth before I could even gauge how unwise it might be to yell at angry, aggresive men only a few feet away. "Get back in your car!" I yelled. "Get off of the bridge! Do it now! Stop that right now!" I remember the exact litany, because I repeated it twice until they retreated to their convertible and traffic started to move again. By this time, there was another woman standing beside me, also yelling "Stop it!" and she had the presence of mind to note down the license plate. I asked if she had a cell phone. She said that she was almost home and was going to report the incident, and I gave her my card in case they needed another witness.

When I got home, she had already left me a message to let me know that a number of other people had already phoned in the information from their cell phones, and that the police were dispatched to locate the car. I was relieved to know that I wasn't as alone out there as I had suddenly felt, yelling at a couple of thugs.

I got home, adrenalin still rushing through my veins, my head sort of swimming.

I shook the last of my indignation at society away and started to make dinner. I still had some lovely Tiger Blue cheese from Poplar Grove in the fridge, and my spidey-sense was telling me that it should be used, and pronto. Buffalo wing pizza seemed the easy answer of the day.

I make this pizza a little different, every time I make it. Basically, all you need is a crust (expired link removed, please see comments below for recipe), a little blue cheese dressing, some chicken breast that has been sauteed in a little hot sauce - classic style, please, this is not really the place for funky pineapple or even a nice smokey chipotle - and a good scattering of small chunks of blue cheese. Sometimes, I add a little mozzarella, just to make it pretty.

Today, I was running low on all-purpose flour, so I use half whole-wheat, giving me the pretext of it being healthy food. This is, however, without a doubt the least healthy pizza in my repertoire. No vegetables (have some celery sticks on the side to play up the "wing" factor) and a rich, rich sauce. For some reason, whole wheat never really browns nicely in my oven, unless I use an egg wash - which I was far too lazy to do here. So, if the crust looks a little pale, it is. It's also cooked through, however, and has a little colour in spots. It is delicious.

In fact, all of my buffalo wing pizza variations have been tasty. It's a killer combination of ingredients, really. Tangy, creamy, and satisfying. I like Trappey's Red Devil sauce, which you can't buy in this town (along with grits and California wine, Red Devil is my principal import from Bellingham), but any hot sauce that's good for wings will do. Frank's would probably be fine, if that's what you like. I've never tried it, but I hear it's good.

I'm feeling calmer, now. I've had a couple of slices, and a beer, and I'm no longer convinced that society is falling to shreds before my very eyes. Yet.

Pizza pizza!

It’s probably some sort of sin to use delicious, expensive, Bleu d’Auvernge in this fashion, but I’m desperately craving a “buffalo wing” pizza. And, since I have a chicken breast in the fridge that could easily be sautéed up in a little hot sauce, and a lump of the Bleu leftover from Bunny Night, I think I know what I’m making for dinner.

Heck, I’ve even got celery to serve as sticks on the side. I suppose that, in keeping with the fancy cheese, I should use the most expensive hot sauce my collection offers, but I think I’ll go with the comparatively mild Red Devil, as the flavours should work together better.