(Pizza of) Brotherly Love or Bomb Crater Pie

I struggled with what to call this pie. It uses cream cheese, and almost included Lox except I didn't have any around. I had bacon, though, which is also a salty protein, albeit the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of lipids.

And I had a green bell pepper, that's always good on pizza, right?



And I had about six ounces of cream cheese left from an 8 oz. package Em discovered in the fridge last night and made two wraps with.

Caramelize some onion, throw in a small portobello mushroom (on sale for $3.99/lb., about a four ounce shroom), and next thing you know it's a pizza. Not sure if it's really related to Philadelphia, but that is a brand of cream cheese and I toyed at one point with the idea of a cheesesteak pizza (didn't have the 'steak' part for that, though).



And the most memorable part of the Vonnegut novel Breakfast of Champions, for me, is the part where Kilgore Trout is hitchhiking and enters Philadelphia where he sees a sign 'You Are Now Entering the City of Brotherly Love.' Vonnegut follows that with, "As a younger man, Trout would have sneered at the sight of a sign about brotherhood—posted on the rim of a bomb crater, as anyone could see."

So, cutting the shuck and jive and getting to something like a recipe:

Brotherly Love / Bomb Crater Pie
1 medium vidalia onion
2 tbsp. butter
2 bay leaves
1 tsp. dried fenugreek
3 tbsp. olive oil
1 smallish portobello mushroom, sliced
1/2 green bell pepper sliced
4 strips thick-cut applewood smoked bacon cut into 1/2" pieces, crisped
6 oz. cream cheese
Caramelize the onion in the butter with bay leaves and fenugreek, remove bay leaves and add the olive oil and mushrooms, toss to coat, leave in pan until ready to use. Crisp up the bacon, drain on a paper towel. Spread onions and shrooms first, then add pepper strips, bacon, and cream cheese (get it into small pieces and distribute it evenly). Bake on 550ºF stone for seven minutes.

I thought the cream cheese would spread out more than it did. I've had a cream cheese based pizza from Wheat State, but apparently theirs uses mozzarella in addition to the cream cheese.



As far as taste goes, this is one of my best efforts to date. Even if I did overcook the bacon a little bit.

I tore the first dough from the latest batch and couldn't get it to heal. I made a loaf of bread out of it and made another batch of dough adding back the wheat gluten I omitted in #8. I think the extra gluten probably helps avoid tears when stretching the dough. And it seems yogurt works better than simple sugar at providing some fermentables to the yeast without getting things crazy (dough popping bags in the fridge, for instance).



Number Nine
3 cups flour
3 tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. wheat gluten
1/4 cup natural plain yogurt
1 tbsp. active dry yeast rehydrated in
1-3/4 cup warm water (ten minutes)
Beat like hell in the KitchenAid for six minutes, divide, coat with pan spray and allow to rise in covered bowls for three hours, punch down, bag and stick in the fridge for 1 to 6 days.