Jumbo Za

I've been making smaller, thinner pizzas lately, stretching the dough to see-through and topping them sparsely for the most part. Though a couple, like the Shrimp Scampi were laden with enough toppings that the thin crust presented a problem: gotta eat it with a fork because when you pick up the slice, it folds downward.



I had in mind a grilled chicken & bacon pie with cream cheese, bleu cheese, maybe some figs, and I thought, you're going to get too heavy for those window-pane thin crusts pretty quick with toppings like that.




Bacon's not so bad, I don't use that much and I cook it in little bits so I can scatter it lightly. But cream cheese and chicken...



I toyed with throwing some capers on, and maybe that would have been good but I think jalapeños would have been even better. I thought the bite of the bleu cheese and the Gruyère (I had a tiny sliver of it left from the smallest piece I found at Price Chopper: that stuff is expensive) would balance out the cream cheese, and it did, but not as well as some heat on top of that. I added some crushed red pepper at the table, which was good but not as good as canned jalapeños that have been baked on. That brine adds a flavor as it cooks out of the pepper slices.



I still stretched the dough pretty thin, was millimeters from being too big for my pizza stone (which is what got me cutting my 1-1/3 cup flour dough batches in half to begin with, then I proceeded to stretch them to the size of the stone).



I find myself apologizing for this pizza, making excuses, and then I realize this pizza is so much better than any I made three years ago. I don't think I'm wrong to pick at it a bit, think of what might be better next time, because that kind of thinking is what got me to making better pizzas.



I count among my friends and acquaintances some of the finest musicians in the world, and none of them think of themselves as 'great.' They got good at what they do by always finding where they had room for improvement and then doing what it took to get there. I'm not putting my pizza making on a par with what they do musically, I'm a dilettante playing at the culinary arts in my free time. I'm just saying the key to making sure bachelor cooking doesn't have to suck is being willing to criticize the results and come up with better methods and recipes.