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!