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.

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.

June was a great month here. Thanks to everyone for the friendly features! If you missed any, check out these neighborly mentions:

Anna at Door Sixteen, a fellow WordPress/DreamHost and (!) ad free blog, spent some time transforming her IKEA Frösta stools just like we did back in April. If you read that post, you’ll remember that my project was originally inspired by something I read on D16. Anna took it a step further and gorgeously painted the seats of her stools in deep black. My mind is now on what color I might use if I were to do the same…

Tom was excited to see on both June 25 and June 30 a couple of hellos from James Norton over at The Heavy Table, a food blog here in the Twin Cities. Their regular Morning Roundup part of “The Churn” is a great way to find out what’s happening in local food and food writing. If you haven’t seen Tom’s entries on his Báhn Mì from scratch and taste-testing Red Savoy Pizza, then please—scroll down!

Over the long weekend we’ll be focusing on the theme of travel and filling you in on what’s been going on in our kitchen that we haven’t had a chance to share just yet. As always, there will be plenty of food, projects, and online finds to keep you going. Thanks for visiting!

While watching my alma mater make it into the national championship I was enjoying a treat inspired by many a dinner in Case Hall: Spartan Sausage Bread. It is just regular sausage bread but prepared in a Michigan State cafeteria, or in this case, by a Michigan State fan and alumnus. I’d like to think my making this bread contributed in no small way to tonight’s win, so in the interest of the national championship I wanted to make sure everyone has the recipe for Monday.

Start with a Midwestern-American style pizza dough; I used Peter Reinhart’s from American Pie. Mix together:

• 11 1/4 oz flour
• 1 1/2 T honey
• 1 t salt
• 1 t instant yeast
• 1/8 c vegetable oil
• 1/2 c 2% milk
• 3 oz water

Stir/knead everything together for a few minutes. Allow to rest for five minutes and then knead another two. Divide into two equal balls, place in oiled bags, and refrigerate for as long as possible. You need to have them back on the counter and rising two hours before you want to bake them.

When the dough is ready, pat and roll it out into a large rectangle if you can manage it, but probably more like an oval.

Cover it with 1/2# of your favorite Italian sausage, browned, and shredded cheese (either your favorite cheese or whatever happened to be skulking in the back of your freezer).

At this point, it’s ready to roll. You might want to use a bench scraper to avoid tearing the dough as you roll it into a loaf. When you have done this with both dough balls, hopefully you intuited that you need to have a 375° oven roaring. 

Because this was the Final Four, I decided to get fancy and brush both loaves with egg wash then sprinkle them with salt before baking them for 40 minutes. They came out deep brown:

Now your excitement will be palpable, but they still need to cool. Luckily, a riveting first half kept me glued to the TV so that by the time half time rolled around, my delicious snack was ready.

Go Green! Go White!