It’s a cruel irony that heat of the late summer sun that produces perfect tomatoes and fragrant basil also makes our homes so hot that the thought of even turning on the oven — let alone cranking it up all the way for perfect pizzas margherita — is unbearable.  By the time I’m willing to endure the 500 degrees blasting away for over an hour necessary for decent pizza crust, the tomatoes are long rotten on the vine and the basil withered or brought indoors. Of course there are always canned tomatoes and greenhouse basil, but if you want to eat more in-season, you have to get a little more creative with your toppings (and loose with your definition of “pizza”).

Potato-Leek Pizza. This classic soup combination works reasonably well for pizza. The potatoes present a bit of a problem since the pizza only spends ten minutes in the oven; they need to be parcooked or sliced extremely thin. I opted for the latter and utilized a mandoline to make slices so thin that the skin of each slice could be seen through the flesh of the potato slice layered above it. A generous shower of olive oil combined with the blazing temperature of the oven slightly fries the potato slices. A sprinkling of leeks and a few cubes of feta completed a pizza of which Martha claimed, “tastes like soup.” In a good way, I think.

Butternut squash-gorgonzola-walnut Pizza. After a well deserved period of squash abstinence, I decided to get back into it by combining one of my least favorite foods — said squash — with one of my favorites: pizza. After sauteeing cubes of butternut squash until tender, I mashed them with butter and enough milk to make the mixture spread easily, then aggressively salted and peppered the mix. To offset the bland sweetness of squash, I used musty, tangy gorgonzola cheese. Both butternut squash and gorgonzola are well complemented by nuts, so I sprinkled on toasted walnuts after baking the pie.

A word of caution to anyone attempting squash pizza: that squash can retain a whole lot of oven heat for a long time. Give yourself extra cooling time before taking a bite! When the pizza did cool down to a reasonable tasting temperature, my taste buds that had not been burned away told me that this was a winning combination, at least as far as anything involving squash can be. Although the gorgonzola tended to overpower the squash, I had applied it with a light hand, so the cheese was well balanced by zones of pure squash. The walnuts were the pepperoni of this pizza, providing spots of excitement amongst the more uniform cheese and crust.

I enjoyed both of these pizzas. They’re not about to replace pizza margherita in my heart, but as a way to use those last late-season farmers’ market veggies — and enjoy a sustained heatwave issuing forth from your oven in the chilly fall — they were pretty good.

As far as trendy foodie obsessions go, I am more of a pizza guy than a hamburger guy. I’m not as die-hard as some, but I have observed a number of the pizza-nerd pieties: I’ve eaten D.O.C. Pizza Margherita at Antica Pizzeria dell’Arte. I’ve waited two hours in line to try Roman pizza at Da Baffetto. During a short trip to New Haven, I ate at both Frank Pepe and Modern Apizza. I once walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in 100° weather and spent all the cash in my wallet to eat at Grimaldi’s. I have also spent a significant amount of time trying to perfect Neapolitan pizza in my home oven; some of these efforts are documented on this very blog.

Minneapolis, my home of one and a half years, is not known as a pizza city, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the pizza available here. First and foremost there is Punch Pizza, which makes the best pizza I have ever had outside of Italy—possibly even inside of Italy. I have eaten at Punch more times than anywhere else;we are very lucky in the Twin Cities to have not just one  great Neapolitan pizzeria, but a whole chain of them. I have also tried and enjoyed Galactic Pizza, which has the advantage of being close to my house and delivered in electric cars by superheroes.

My preferences in pizza run strongly Italian, but I’m definitely not one of those jerks who doesn’t consider deep-dish to be real pizza (in fact I strongly recommend the deep dish from Little Star in San Francisco). I like to keep an open mind; Dara’s pizza personality test classified me as ANCS-The Different Drummer. Apparently my  ideal Twin Cities pizza comes from Crescent Moon. I have yet to take the Afghan pizza plunge, I do like to try as many different kinds of pizza as I can. With that attitude of openness and thirst for discovery, this afternoon I tried for the first time what I have heard referred to as “Minnesota-style” pizza, courtesy of Red’s Savoy Pizza.

I’ll admit that my decision to try Red’s was largely a matter of convenience; I had been somewhat intrigued by the restaurant after reading a review on Slice, but it was not until they opened a location in the Golooney’s space only a few blocks from my apartment that I decided I would go and try it. I walked there, ordered a sausage pie (for control purposes, when tasting a new non-Neapolitan pizza I order sausage or pepproni, for Neapolitan pizzas Margherita) and after waiting a while I eagerly walked home with a piping hot pie.

Opening the box, I made two observations: one, this pizza was cut into squares. Apparently, that is a Minnesota thing—maybe they wanted make pizza more like bars. The problem with cutting a pizza into squares is that it creates awkward little corner pieces and a number of pieces that don’t have any crust to serve as a handle, necessitating the use of a fork. I was also surprised to see the giant brown spots in the center of the pizza; at first I thought they were some unrequested topping but then realized it was just huge swaths browned cheese.

Crust. If I had to compare the crust of Red’s Savoy’s pizza to any, I’d say it reminded me most of cheap frozen pizza crust. That is not a bad thing; I like cheap frozen pizza. And I’m not saying that it was actually frozen: I saw them tossing the fresh dough. Whatever is in that dough, it produces no puffy cornicione; rather, the crust is cracker thin and quite crispy and burnt on the edge. As one approaches the center, the crust becomes soggier, chewier and more cardboard-like.  Charring was limited to the edge, with the rest of the crust a pale brown. The crust was more of a vehicle for the toppings than an end in itself, but I did really enjoy the crispiness of the edges. I also thought it was overfloured, but I can forgive that because I am myself often guilty of using ample flour to ensure smooth separation of the dough from the peel. Still, raw flour isn’t especially tasty.

Sauce. This pizza is heavily sauced, so much so  that great pools of the stuff are visible on the edges and spill onto the pizza box. That’s okay since the sauce is delicious; very thick and meaty, like a red sauce you would eat on spaghetti rather than a pizza sauce. Its texture at times was almost squishy. It had good flavor: a little cooked-tasting but pleasantly spicy.

Cheese. The first thing to be said about cheese on this pizza is that there is a lot of it. I mean a lot of it. There is so much cheese that it bonds with the box and slips off of the crust as you try to pull a piece a way. There is so much cheese that it forms its own super-layer that is independent of the rest of the pizza. In fact, if there is one thing that seemed to distinguish this style of pizza it is the amount of cheese. As long as the cheese remained warm and gooey it was good and comforting but it became a bit disconcerting as it started to congeal. Must eat faster!

Sausage. The sausage was spicy and had the right amount of grease, which is to say plenty of grease. Red’s puts toppings on top of the sauce and covers the whole thing with cheese, rather than putting toppings on top of the cheese. I favor the latter approach since I think it actually binds the toppings in better (the cheese bubbles up around them). As it was, it was hard to keep the toppings and cheese on top of the crust without using a fork.

From the breakdown above you might get the idea that I didn’t like Red’s Savoy pizza, but actually I thought it was pretty good; definitely a case where the experience of eating it makes it more than the sum of its parts. Red’s Savoy probably won’t unseat Punch in terms of my favorite pizza in the Twin Cities, but I would eat it again. Particularly if I had been drinking. Based on this experience, my overall impression of ‘Minnesota’ pizza is: cracker thin crust, lots of sauce and even more cheese, and squares.

Here are four pizzas I made recently. I remembered to move the pizza stone to the oven floor so I got a nice char on the crust. In all of them but the first, the cheese blend is asiago, fontina, and mozzarella. For my tomato sauce, I take a can of tomatoes and pulse them a bit in the food processor, then mix in red pepper flakes, dried oregano, salt, black pepper, some kind of acid (lemon juice or red wine vinegar) and sometimes sugar if the tomatoes need the help.

Pizza Margherita

Not much to say about this classic combination: basil, sauce, mozzarella.

Hot Italian sausage and fennel. This is an idea I got after eating it at La Rinata. It’s a great pairing since the sausage already has fennel seeds in it.

The Wedge has really great fire roasted tomatoes that are in the refrigerated case across from the butcher. They are quite sweet and intensely flavored as you would expect fire-roasted tomatoes to be. I also got marinated artichoke hearts in a jar from the Wedge but they were nothing special. It’s the tomatoes that made this pizza a nice treat in February.

This last pizza had shiitake mushrooms, ham and taleggio cheese, in addition to the usual sauce and cheese blend. I sauteed the shiitakes before starting the pizzas to get rid of their extra moisture and brown them. The ham was Black Forest ham that we had in the fridge and needed using up. The nicest surprise for me in this pizza was the taleggio cheese. I saw a recipe for a pizza that was just crust stuffed with taleggio a few years ago (on Emeril Live I am afraid to say) and was intrigued, but could never find taleggio. When I saw it in the dairy case at the Wedge I knew I needed to buy it, even if I didn’t have an idea for how to use it. When I got home I inspected further: the cheese has a very funky cheese smell but its flavor is actually pretty mild, creamy like brie but more surprising in its flavor. I thought it would go pretty well with the rich ham and mushrooms and I was right. If they still have taleggio next time I am at the Wedge and thinking of pizza, I will have to try a cheese and dough pie.

Since I make pizza regularly, I am always trying to come up with new ideas for toppings to keep things interesting. I also have been trying to buy food that is local and in season. Those two concepts intersected recently to result in: the beetza.

Beets are not, strictly speaking, in season since everything here is dead, but these beets were local and probably have been stored away somewhere since the fall—as seasonal as I’m going to get in January in Minnesota. To accompany the beets, I thought I’d aim for the classic combination with basil and goat cheese. I bought basil but since I already had feta so I decided to use that in place of goat cheese (I defy you to find a difference between sheep and goats). Almost all the beets I’ve ever eaten have been roasted, but I figured with 9 minutes in a 500 degree oven thin matchsticks of raw beets would be fine. As it turned out, the beets were still pretty crunchy, which I didn’t mind, but some probably would. This was a good pizza, although the beet flavor wasn’t especially strong. The color of the beet juice bleeding out from the beet pieces made it very visually striking; it was probably worth it just to see that.

I also made a couple of other pizzas which were somewhat less exciting. Here’s a marinara pie with capers and rosemary added:

And a pizza with mushrooms and brie (on a side note, I’m pretty sick of brie): 

I did not get the crust on these pizzas as dark as I usually do and I couldn’t figure out why at the time. Same oven, same maximum heat, same crust (Peter Reinhart’s napoletana dough from American Pie). It was only the next day when I remembered that I had my pizza stone set up on a rack in the lowest position, rather than on the floor of the oven. Putting it on the floor gets the stone a lot hotter since the gas burns just below the floor. In fact, it gets too hot for bread, burning the crust before the inside is cooked, which is why the stone was on a rack in the first place. But for pizza, you want everything as hot as it can get, so I have to remember to move the stone. Those 2″ make a big difference!