Sourdough Series: Artichoke à la mode Pizza

We have a tendency to spend our Friday evenings making homemade pizza. Carry out pizza is awesome when we're super busy. But, there's something about the taste of homemade that can't be duplicated.

Which brings me to yet another handy use for my sourdough starter... pizza dough.

Unlike a sourdough loaf, which requires a longer, slower rise than ordinary bread dough, sourdough pizza dough actually requires far less rising time than average. What this means is that, if I've thought far enough ahead to feed my starter, I can have pizza dough in less than an hour.

This past week, we made one of our absolute favorite pizzas, the artichoke à la mode. We first tasted this pizza at Pizza Man in Milwaukee. And we decided that we had to figure out a way to make it at home. The biggest pitfall seemed to be the fresh artichokes, since we can only get those a few times a year when they're in season. However, thanks to the discovery of fresh frozen artichokes from Trader Joes, we are now able to make this year round.

Now, you're probably curious about how this recipe actually works. So, let's get started.

First, you make the dough (an easy mix of sourdough starter, flour, oil, and salt). Once the dough is mixed up, it needs to rest for about 30-40 minutes. During this time, it rises a bit; but, it doesn't double like a typical dough.
When it's well rested, you can roll the dough out into the desired shape. We like to make oblong pizzas, which fit nicely on my rectangular pizza stone.
This particular pizza was topped with homemade pizza sauce, artichokes, and chunks of cream cheese.
Because you can never have enough cheese, we top that with a good mound of delicious mozzarella.
In the past, we ordinarily topped this pizza with thinly sliced fresh tomatoes (like Pizza Man). But, we found that the flavor was infinitely improved by the addition of some of those little roasted cherry tomatoes we made earlier in the week. So, they'll be a "must have" in the future. After adding the cherry tomatoes, the pizza looks something like this.Thinking that it might taste best if cooked, we put the topped pizza in a 450º oven, and bake it until the cheese is golden and the crust is crispy.
What comes out of the oven is one serious pizza... that smells even better than it looks.

Sourdough Pizza Dough


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Roasted Cherry Tomatoes

This marks a slight departure from my sourdough series, but I think it's for good reason. The bounty has started to fly in from our backyard garden. And I'm in HEAVEN.

I am a huge fan of cherry tomatoes. I love their bright color, their petite size, and their early harvest date. I love the way they explode in my mouth, releasing a mixture of sweet, tangy, seedy delight.

In fact, to me the only thing better than a cherry tomato fresh from the garden is one that's been tortured in the oven for a little while, until it collapses into a little pile of ultra-sweet caramelized tomato-ness. In fact, that's exactly what I did with the very first batch of cherry tomatoes from our garden.

The process is far from difficult, and it has any number of variations. This is what I did this week.

I took the tomatoes and tossed them with some pummeled garlic cloves, some olive oil, a bit of salt, and a sprinkle of red pepper flakes.
Then I threw them on a parchment lined jelly roll pan, and baked them for a while in a fairly slow oven.
When they'd been in the oven for about 35 minutes, they began to do exactly what they should do. They got all browned and crackley...
And soft and explosive.
And when they cooled enough to be handled, I tossed them in a bowl with a bit of fresh basil and enjoyed every last bite. *Slurp*

Roasted Cherry Tomatoes


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