May 2011 – Open Source Pizza

Serious Eats Pizza Resource

I was reading through the Serious Eats – Slice Pizza blog and boy do they have a lot of posts! The website has a bunch of great resources, articles, recipes, etc. that I will be checking out and contributing to whenever I get a chance. I will have to submit my homemade pizzas to their My Pie Monday feature. For now you can see all my photos by going to the Connect page and clicking the Flickr Photostream link. Most of the pizza reviews are in New York, but I see a few articles about Ohio pizza.

The articles I’m most interested in reading are the ones which describe cooking techniques and variants in ingredients. For example, there’s one on types of mozzarella cheese (whole-milk, low-moisture) and scientific descriptions and explanations of how they are made. I may start experimenting with different cheeses next.

Mozzarella cheese

Pizza Sauce Spices to Grow in Garden

I’m wondering how fresh herbs would taste in the pizza sauce compared to dried. My pizza sauce calls for garlic, oregano, fennel seed, marjoram, basil, thyme, and rosemary. I stopped by the garden center today to pick up a few potted herbs. They were $2.99 each though, so I only got basil and rosemary.

Basil

Rosemary

And of course we always get a few tomato plants. We have tons of little tomato plants coming up in the garden from last year. But I got a couple SuperSteak and BestBoy plants.

Tomato plants

I grew garlic plants last year but was unable to use all of them and it seemed like a lot of work to dig them up each year. I’m not sure if it’s worth it to have fresh garlic.

Here are some images of the other herbs used:

Oregano

Fennel Seed

Marjoram

Thyme

Do you think fresh herbs are better and worth the extra effort to use in pizza sauces?

Barbeque and Chicken Pizza – Roosters on Henderson

We went to the Rooster’s restaurant on Henderson road on Wednesday and I decided to try their personal size barbeque and chicken pizza. It was pretty good! I was a little worried that the ingredients would taste strange together. I think you have to have the right BBQ sauce, cheese, and crust to make it work. Their BBQ sauce is pretty sugary and they used cheddar, mozzarella, and provolone cheeses.

One surprising feature on this pizza was the chicken wing on top. It was covered in the BBQ sauce as well, and although I’m not a fan of bone-in wings, it was a nice addition. Their pizzas are a 9″ personal size which is just the right serving size. I also ordered chicken tenders, so I had plenty of leftovers.