Pesto pizza

As you can probably tell from this photo, I like pizza that has lots of stuff on it. We had pesto left over from when we made it, and that stuff doesn't stay good forever, so it was time to use it up. I felt that a pizza would be an excellent use for it. We loaded it up with mushrooms, radish greens, caramelized onions, and ricotta, all on top of that delicious pesto.

My pizza dough recipe used to be the King Arthur one, but I've gotten lazy. Now, I put about a cup of warm water into a bowl, add about a tablespoon of both yeast and sugar, pour in a bunch (2-4 tbs?) of olive oil, pour in about a tablespoon of kosher salt, and knead in flour until its not sticky anymore. Then I just let it rest until the toppings are ready and the oven is pre-heated, roll it out, and go. Its probably not ideal, but it does taste good. I recommend going and finding a pizza dough recipe that you love and believe in, and using it. There are a lot of good ones out there. They all taste good, and they're all relatively easy.

The first (and longest-to-prepare) topping I made was the caramelized onions. They weren't totally caramelized, but they were close enough, and since they were cooking on pizza, close enough was as close as they had to be. Its pretty easy to do, and you can get away with not using a ton of oil if you don't care that they're perfect. (I don't). Chop an onion in half and then cut it into slices so that it makes half-rings. Heat about two tablespoons of oil in a pan, and once that shimmers, throw in the onions with a good dose of kosher salt. The salt will help the onions lose their water faster.
After about 5 minutes, they'll look like this, sweated. Keep stirring them.
After 10 minutes or so, they'll be looking more like this. Starting to be a bit brown around the edges.
I generally go another 5-10 minutes, depending on if the other toppings are ready yet and how hungry I am, before I call them done enough. If you taste one, it should taste sweet.


While cooking the onions, I cooked down some mushrooms, in oil, with lots of kosher salt (again, to get rid of water), in a different pan. Here we have a giant oyster mushroom and one or two regular crimini mushrooms. They'll take ~10min to lose most of their water. I don't like putting anything watery onto the pizza, since I like my crusts crispy.

Once the mushrooms were done, I threw in the radish leaves (any dark leafy thing would do here), and just wilted them. We happened to have eaten the radishes the day before, and it turns out radish greens are edible, they're just bitter.

The last topping was the ricotta - this happens to be homemade ricotta. Which is actually really easy to do, and we had some 2% milk that wasn't going to last forever, so I turned it into cheese. Heat 'til almost boiling, add vinegar and water, remove from heat, let sit for an hour or two, put dish towel in colander in a bowl, drain into bowl, let sit another couple hours in the fridge, and done! This one drained for eight hours overnight, so was pretty dry, I didn't need to squeeze it at all. It had the consistency of feta cheese, almost, just less salty, and more ricotta-y tasting.


Finally, assemble your pizza. Sprinkle some coarse cornmeal on the bottom of the pan, put down the rolled-out pizza dough, spread a generous layer of pesto on the bottom, top with all your toppings (more is better), and pop into a 500F oven on the bottom rack. Cook for 10-15min, start checking after about 8min, and take it out when the crust is just starting to look golden and a little browned.

We had enough dough for two pizzas, so the second one got half "regular" and half white pizza. We didn't have any mozzarella cheese, so I put down some basil and cheddar and mushrooms on the tomato-sauce-side, (which, honestly, didn't taste that good, cheddar is just not a pizza cheese), and the white pizza side got olive oil, toasted garlic, a little basil, and cheddar. The cheddar worked very well on the white pizza - it was delicious. Not as good as the pesto pizza, though.