Homemade-ish Vegetarian Pizza

Pi day post?

Pizza Hut had been serving us adequately for a minute, but when it was time to cash in the free large pizza, there was something seriously wrong with it.  Like the pineapples had been shipped in antifreeze, I don’t fucking know.  It’s not like me to throw out leftover pizza but that wasn’t cool.  I used to work at that Pizza Hut.  Top Ten Anime Betrayals, in the parlance of our times.

So we decided to do a homemade pizza to make up for it.  Since I was a young adult and first able to customize my toppings, I’ve favored pepperoni, black olive, and pineapple.  We did this.  It turned out quite nice.  I would have preferred real pepperoni, but the fake kind weren’t too offensive.  I wonder that there might be a way to get them crispier, like pan fried for a moment?  But let’s just describe this recipe as it happened.  First draft was good enough.

Ingredients
Wad of uncooked pizza dough from WinCo deli area, idk, like a pound?
Pinch of flour.
Half a bottle of Botticelli brand Vodka Spaghetti Sauce.
Shredded mozzarella cheese, maybe 12 to 15 ounces.
Maybe a third of a bag of Trader Joes Vegan Pepperoni.
One small can of black olives, two-ish ounces.
A lil less than half a small can of pineapple chunks, three-ish ounces.
Maybe a tablespoon or two of mayonnaise.
Trader Joes Aglio Olio seasoning.
Garlic Salt.

Tools
Oven.
Very broad cookie sheet or pizza sheet.
Ladle, any material.
Smallish spoon.
Oven mitt or two depending on if you’re strong enough to one hand it.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  I got that instruction off the pizza dough package and it worked well.

I put a lil flour on the cooking sheet, probably cold have done a bit more.  This helps it come off the sheet without sticking, and I did lose a wee bit of crust on there.  When stretching the dough, ideally the side facing down will have just enough flour to easily come free, but not enough to be noticeable on the end product.

Stretch that dough.  Spin it, roll it, smush it with your hands, but be mindful to aim for an even thickness, avoid areas too thin.  Make it thinner than you might imagine; it will puff up.  I didn’t know if I was making it too thin, but it ended up being just right, flattened to about one foot diameter.

Pizza sauce.  Any tomato sauce is probably fine.  I think this is usually marinara, and that might have come off more classically pizza-ish than my vodka sauce, but I’d sweeten marinara a bit.  I find it too bitter sometimes.  The biggest risk of a pizza is that our natural tendency is to plop all ingredients in the middle, then smooth them out – resulting in a thicker pile at the center, which is the most likely spot to not cook thoroughly.  Doughy pizza fucking sucks.  The sauce is the first ingredient where you want to think about this, but the same principle applies to all layers:  Try to distribute all toppings evenly, but let them be thinnest in the middle.  Use the bottom of a ladle to push it around.

Mozzarella.  Buy shredded if you don’t want to be cooking for hours and hours.  I made this whole recipe in maybe a lil over a half hour; shredding would have added several minutes.  On that even distribution principle, I’d pour it in kind of a donut shape, breaking it up as I drop it onto the pizza with one hand.  Same as before, have some in the middle but not as thick.  Regarding mozzarella, you know practically no franchise pizza place uses pure mozz anymore?  They all used to have mozzarella, so now when you taste a slice with a reasonably thick amount of the stuff, it’s nostalgia city.  It’s not the most remarkable taste, but it feels gourmet when the most recent pie you had before this one was botched fast food.  So good I had to write about it.  Use mozzarella or don’t even bother.

Vegan pepperoni.  Leave some space between them to put on your other ingredients.  The pepperoni should be reasonably clear on top of each slice, for reasons I’ll get to later, so don’t bury them.

Sliced black olives.  Like the shredding, it ain’t worth it to do your own slicing.  Pat them dry with paper towel, or a thin non- terry cloth dish towel if you wanna be environmentally conscious but not leave lint all over your pizza.  Distribute between the pepperonis.

Pineapple chunks.  I was hoping to get the thinner slices like they have on most fast food pizza, but most of the cans have thick chunks.  Do avoid crushed.  The big rings could get sloppy too.  I took the thick chunks and sliced them into thirds, so they’d have a similar thickness to the olives and not come off more dominant in the final taste.  Even more important than the olives to dry these.  A lot of fluid on the pizza risks doughiness, and this flavor is better in little bursts rather than suffusing the whole with a vague fruitiness.

Mayonnaise!  Vegan pepperoni are de-vegan’d but much improved by wiping a thin bit of mayo on top of each slice!  More convincingly pepperoni-oid, tastes more tolerable.  I also put a thin bit of mayo all around the outside of the crust, to help seasonings adhere to it, and make it richer.  This isn’t mayo as thick white condiment; it’s mayo as a more easily controlled and thin layer of cooking oil.  Again, bottom of a ladle is a good tool, but for tighter control I used the bottom of a spoon.

Sprinkle the aglio olio on the pizza’s topping area.

Sprinkle the garlic salt on the outer crust only.

I forgot to, but putting a very thin amount of mozz on top could help hold it all together.

Cook for twenty minutes.  Outer crust should be golden brown, the center might look squishy but that’s the melted cheese.  If you did everything right, it should not be doughy.  Serve immediately.  Might burn an incautious mouth, but the outer crust in particular gets less nice fast when it cools.

It’s a shame this takes so much work, but it will taste great.  It makes Pizza Hut look like grotty scumbags slingin’ reheated garbage out of the back of a rusty white van in rural Arkansas.  They have a pizza oven; I don’t.  They should be able to make something so much better, but crapitalism gotta max that profit at the expense of quality, every time.

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Slices of You

Things are easier to cook when they’re thin.  You don’t have to cook them as long, so there’s less risk of overcooking if you watch what you’re doing.  And more importantly, less risk of some shit being burnt on the outside and raw or cold on the inside, which is an absolutely vile result.  I’m willing to bake or nuke something that comes with simple instructions, but otherwise it’s slicin’ and using a frying pan.

It’s also cool because you can get more of that crisp element of frying.  The outer edges and surface get crisp, and the thinner what you’re cooking is, the more of each bite that will posses that quality.  If it’s a vegetable I’m cooking, thin slices.  I don’t like the crunch of veggies, and thin veggies get soft faster in the pan.  Soft veggies for flavor, crisp meat or cheese… That’s the goods.

Even when cooking isn’t a consideration, I cut thin.  I got the idea from David Lynch.  Not to sound like a freak; feel like I’ve been mentioning him too much recently.  Some years ago I was watching an episode of Twin Peaks where Joan Chen was being tormented by (spoiler), losing her mind in the kitchen.  Her mental state was illustrated by having her slice an apple.  In America we almost always slice apples in wedges of roughly equal dimensions, but she was slicing it thin, like cheese or deli meat.

The scene had a sensuous quality, but maybe I just imagine that because Joan Chen is too beautiful.  Surely, she wasn’t supposed to be seen as erotic or romantic in that moment, not exactly.  But she can thin slice me any day, I tell you whut.

There’s an Electric Six song called Slices of You, and it’s not one of their best.  It’s fine.  But I think of this part from the breakdown, sometimes when I’m joanchenning an apple: “Everywhere I go, people ask me Valentine, what’s your recipe for love?  And I always tell them the same thing.  Cook the hell out of it, and SLICE IT.”

Anyway, I think about this often enough that I wondered if I’d already written a blog post on the subject, and I searched the archive here.  You know how many occurrences of the word “slice” there are on this blog?  I haven’t written about this exact subject before, but I’m starting to wonder if I have a problem here.

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Skillet Pepperoni Sandwich

A recipe.  I hate cooking, but this is very rewarding tastewise and – while a little fiddly – it does not take amazing skillz.  There’s a place in town with awesome pepperoni grinders, but last time I went to get one, I was like, this is not as indulgent and wonderful as I remember it being.  Close, but not quite.  I thought to myself, I could recreate what I like about this at home.

The important thing is that the pepperoni gets hot enough to start leaking that red sauce on your bread, because when toasted up, it’s the thing that sets this apart from any ol’ sandwich.  It’s very nice.  I don’t have a pizza oven and I didn’t want to take the time to do this in my regular oven.  Also not keen for the experimentation involved in getting it right; I find skillet experiments easier to track than oven science.

I don’t often have pepperoni in the house; I’m minimizing meat preservatives in my diet, due to colon cancer history.  But my brother visited to officiate my wedding and left some behind, which is why I had occasion to do this recently.

Ingredients:

  • Some bullshit-ass store pepperoni.  Gotta be the cheap non-turkey stuff for a proper amount of fat.
  • Sliced bread.  I used franz “classic french” flavor; slightly less worse than the cheapest white bread.
  • A wee bit of sliced black olives, enough to cover the bread lightly, shouldn’t be piled overlapping.
  • A wee bit of salted butter.  I just take a stick and melt directly onto the pan what I need.
  • Enough sliced provolone or mozzarella to cover your sandwiches one deep.
  • A wee bit of mayo.
  • Optional:  A leaf or two of lettuce.

Tools:

  • Stove.
  • Non-stick frying pan in very good condition.  Ones with flaking nonstick material are probably giving you cancer, chuck that shit.  I don’t know where my roommate got this new one, but it’s primo.
  • Spatula:  Don’t use metal spatulas on non-stick pans.

Steps:

Lay out your bread, as many sandwiches as will fit in your skillet.  I used three bisected slices to make three half-sandwiches, which is as much as reasonably fits in my little pan.

Start the pan heating on low-medium.  Those knobs that go 1-10, I’d say 3.5-4.  Lay out your pepperoni inside the pan, about two deep and roughly in the shapes of your sandwiches.

Open your sandwiches and lay down enough olives to sparsely cover one side.  Over the top of those olives, lay down your cheese, one layer deep.  Feel free to adjust anything.  I don’t care, but sometimes a minimal amount of what you need produces a classier taste, and a less sloppy bite than a big pile of ingredients.

Once the pepperoni has released its red stuff and looks sweaty, flip it to cook the other side.  If the pieces are sticking together, great, makes flipping while maintaining your sandwich shapes easier.  If not, you can just scoop ’em on the sandwiches sloppy style later.

You’re not cooking to get the pepperoni crisp, just to release a modest amount of the fat in it.  Takes a very short time.  Then put it on the sandwiches, on top of the cheese side.

Melt a little butter in the pan, just enough to lightly soak the outer surface of a bread slice.  If it mixes with residual pepperoni fat, great, that tastes awesome.

Take the top slices of your sandwiches and invert them into the pan to get a little butter on them – they should only be in the pan close to an instant – then take them back out and put them butter-side up on the sandwiches again.  You now have sandwiches with no butter on the bottom, just on the top.

Melt a little more butter in the pan, with the same kind of aim – not to drench the bread, just oil it so it doesn’t scorch and so it tastes nice.

Put your sandwiches in the pan, non-buttered side down.  Now you have sandwiches with butter on both sides.

Cover the pan so the cheese will melt better, and put a timer on for 3-4 minutes.  Times surely vary with how big of a pan you’re using, etc.

Uncover and flip the sandwiches.  Hopefully the cheese will be melted enough to keep them from flying to pieces.

Cook uncovered another 3-4 minutes or until cheese looks reasonably melted, mindful not to burn the sandwich.

Take the nearly complete sandwiches off the pan, onto the plate you will use to serve them.  Open up the pepperoni side.  Remember our layers are olives-cheese-pepperoni.  Ideally the olive side will be hard to open because glued down with cheese; the pepperoni side will open right up.  You will see orange-red staining your bread.  Good!

Put a thin layer of mayo on that stained bread.  If you’re using lettuce, put it on the pepperoni side, and when you’re done, close it up and serve immediately.

This is very fatty food, which is why it’s good to not go gonzo with any of the ingredients.  Beware if you have gall trouble.  When you eat it warm, crisp on the outside, warm on the inside, that shit is bomb.  If you eat it quick enough that the lettuce and mayo are still cold while everything else is still hot, it’s kinda like having hot fudge on ice cream – a narrow window of time in which the food is dee-luxe.

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