My taste in pizza runs strongly to the Neapolitan, and the pizza I make most often at home has a very thin, crisp crust. But I am by no means some kind of Neapolitan absolutist: I keep an open mind about the many styles of pizza in the world. Sometimes I even make a different style at home — like last night, when I got a craving for doughy, pillowy-crusted pizza. Without any dough prepped, I needed a crust that could be assembled and baked within a couple of hours. Focaccia is perfect for this — its flavor might be a little better with an overnight fermentation, but in a pinch it is a great bread to throw together.

As a baker, I happen to think pizza is always mostly about the crust, but with an assertive bread like focaccia as its base this pizza called for the simplest of toppings: some tomatoes, dried oregano, and a sprinkling of mozzarella cheese.

Dough:

• 20 oz all purpose flour
• ½ oz salt (~1 Tbsp)
• ¼ oz instant yeast (~2 tsp)
• .58 oz powdered milk
• .34 oz sugar (~1 Tbsp)
• 1.25 oz olive oil (~5 Tbsp)
• 16 oz water

The first thing to notice about this dough is that its hydration level is 80%: that’s way to wet to knead by hand. You could use the stretch and fold method, but it will greatly increase mixing time and should really involve an overnight rest. If you have a machine at your disposal, this is the time to use it: I combined all the ingredients in the bowl of my stand mixer and mixed — with the paddle to combine then with the dough hook — for about 9 minutes. But this batch was too small for my mixer to handle: the hook was missing a lot of the dough. The next time I make focaccia, I’ll use the food processor. Combine all ingredients in the food processor’s bowl using the steel blade and process until the dough comes together and is smooth, about two minutes.

Allow the dough to rest in an oiled medium mixing bowl for an hour until approximately doubled.

Preheat oven to 425ºF. Line a half-sheet pan with parchment and spread two or three tablespoons of olive oil evenly over the parchment. Pour out dough onto lined pan, top with another couple tablespoons of olive oil, then use your fingertips to spread the dough to fit the pan. It probably won’t fully cover the corners, but get as close as you can. Cover the dough with plastic wrap and allow to rest another hour, until the dough looks bubbly and full.

Toppings:

• 1 (14 oz) can diced tomatoes (I use Muir Glen’s fire-roasted variety and heartily recommend them)
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 4 oz mozzarella cheese, shredded

After dough has risen the second time (in the pan), spread the tomatoes evenly over it and sprinkle with oregano. Distribute the cheese evenly over top. Bake 18-20 minutes, until crust is golden and cheese has started to brown in spots.

May in Minnesota, however mild, is not exactly a month of abundant agricultural production. Plants just haven’t had enough time to shake off the winter chill and start the reproductive cycle that brings us delicious veggies all summer. Given that fresh local produce is hard to come by in this early month, one might question why Martha and I bother to strap on bike helmets every Saturday morning and pedal down to the Midtown Farmers Market. Why not wait till June?

The answer is, of course, that there is more to the market than the vegetables. In addition to talented artists and some intriguing specialty food options, Midtown is boasting a very impressive lineup of prepared food vendors this year. There are the favorites from last season: the Magic Bus Cafe, Crêperie Mala, Taco Taxi, and Fireroast Mountain Cafe (who fill the much-needed tamale niche). But there are also some exciting new vendors: this week brought the debut of Olive Pizza, who are cooking wood-fired pizzas to order at the market.

Olive Pizza is the brainchild of Elizabeth Vossen, who also serves as lead pizzaiola. After a summer spent lugging pizza screens to friends houses to satisfy a seemingly-never ending demand for grilled pizza, Elizabeth and her husband decided it might be fun to try their hand churning out pizzas professionally at the farmers market. Although they loved their grilled pizzas, they figured the seven minutes it took to bake them would be a little too long for a production environment. And so they took the plunge and invested in a very impressive mobile set-up, with a brand new trailer made in Colorado (still boasting a temporary CO license!) and an oven from Forno Bravo.

When I asked Elizabeth if she had any previous food service experience she replied, “Only if you count working at Dairy Queen in high school.” Experienced or not, I was impressed by the professional operation they were running. I ordered, paid for, and received my pizza all within a few minutes, and enjoyed passing the time in between chatting with fellow pizza nerds.

As for the pizzas themselves, they are excellent. With wood-fired pizzas, the crust is paramount, and the Olive Pizza crust is just as it should be: cracker crisp on the edges but soft and slightly chewy throughout and, most importantly, spottily charred—top and bottom. The sauce is bright with acid and just slightly sweet. I ordered the mushroom and Italian sausage pizza and Martha the pesto-tomato. The toppings were great — I am excited to see what they will do with some of the fresh market produce as it begins to arrive in the weeks to come.

Oh, speaking of produce, there’s some of that, too. Gardens of Eagan continues to bring some of the sweetest strawberries I’ve ever had, as well as a variety of lettuces including some artful baby romaine new this week. Rhubarb also made its first appearance, so I made sure to buy way too much of that as well. It’s a small variety of vegetables to be sure, and lacking these early arrivals I’m not sure I’d be able to bring myself to come; but then again, the wood-fired pizza alone might be worth the trip.

Ah, springtime. Its combination of tender green vegetables and temperatures often still cold enough to allow keeping the oven at 500ºF for a few hours make it almost the perfect time to cook pizza. Almost, were it not for the fact that tomatoes are still months away. But tomatoes — while crucial to many pies — do not necessarily a pizza make.

For example, there’s the asparagus pizza from Jim Lahey’s Co. (with detailed directions from Serious Eats). No tomatoes: just olive oil, shaved asparagus, parmesan and tomme de savoie cheese. The predominant flavor is that of the cheese — not quite as funky as it smells, rich and sharp. The asparagus, while not overpowering, is unmistakable as an accent at the end of each bite. And by shaving the asparagus thin using a vegetable peeler, you avoid a common pitfall of asparagus pizzas when the teeth do not bite cleanly through a spear and the asparagus and any number of pizza toppings come sliding toward your face. Shaved asparagus bites off clean.

And how could I let a springtime post go by without including ramps? I used the ramp pesto I made a few weeks ago in place of traditional pesto genovese in one of my all-time favorite (and tomato-less) pizza combinations: pesto with mozzarella and goat cheese. Although it gets mellowed a bit during its stay in the oven, the flavor of the ramp pesto is intense. The goat cheese provides relief with its creaminess. Whole ramps on pizza can behave the same way that asparagus does; grinding them into pesto prevents any undue topping slippage.

I’m not such a seasonal purist that I refuse to eat canned tomatoes; on the night I made these pies I made four others involving tomato sauce. But such tasty — and unique — vegetables that are available for such a short time in the spring really deserve to be highlighted on their own. There will be plenty of time for tomato celebration in August.

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.