In any case, I was going to make caramels this weekend, since the oven is down. However we've discovered a work around. We can still use the broiler, even if the normal heating element is dead. It heats the oven perfectly, so long as we put something between it and the food to prevent direct heat. TA-DA! Problem solved. And since I still have my sauce and a batch of bread dough in the fridge, making the pizza after all seemed reasonable.
The dough I'm using is the Olive dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. If you don't own this book and have any interest in baking bread, go get it now! It's amazing. Really. It's so much easier to make bread this way. No kneading, little proofing, it stores in the fridge for a week. I can't sing enough praises for it. You basically make a batch and then whenever you feel like it, you cut some off and bake it. And it's delicious, light, fluffy... yum!
I made the batch when I made the sauce last week but I haven't gotten to use any of it because of the oven. With our work-around, though, I figured it would be fine.
There really wasn't much to it.
I prepped my ingredients first since one key to pizza is to bring it all together as quickly as possible. You don't want the dough sitting around while you're shredding cheese. The cheese was whole milk mozzarella from a cheese shop at the Pike Place Market. They also sold pepperoni there for some reason, but it looked good and so that's what I used. It was a quality sausage and had to be peeled first. Then I cut as thin of a set of slices as I could.
I got out the dough and rolled it flat to about 1/8 inch. It was pretty easy to work with, especially coming from the fridge. My daughter loved helping me roll it out, too, so bonus points there!
I spread my sauce out over the middle. I used a pretty thin layer, but made sure it covered everything to within about an inch from the edge.
Then a thick layer of cheese, topped by a grid of pepperoni. It was pretty awesome looking.
Now I ran into a problem, though. I don't have a pizza peel. I did all the work on the bread board, and transferring it to the oven was interesting. In the oven I used a set of uncoated terra cotta floor tiles I picked up for just such an occasion at Home Depot. Transferring a large flat pizza from a breadboard to the grid of 6 tiles was challenging, but I got it done without too much warping.
I cooked it for 8 minutes before checking on it to make sure it was cooking evenly, which it was. I left it in for another couple minutes then slid it out onto a cookie sheet to cool (so the cheese could set.)
Here's the final result:
And it tasted DELICIOUS! I was shocked at how good it is, especially considering all the obstacles I had to overcome to make it. The sauce, week old dough, the oven of doom, no peel... It's a wonder this ever happened.
The sauce was a pleasant surprise. It may have gotten a little better over the the week in the fridge, but really I think that even though I don't think it's awesome, it suits the pizza very well. What flavor it does have is complimentary to the other ingredients.
The dough performed as advertised. My biggest concern was that usually when dough is in the fridge for a week, you're tearing hunks off to make bread during that time so the top is always fresh, but this dough had simply sat there. Well, I tore off the top layer and used what was underneath and it was perfect. It was thick and chewy, but in a good way. Not like over-kneaded bread, just like pizza.
The work-around for the stove worked perfectly. There was a slight bit of scorching of some cheese, but that's all. The stones did their part as well.
Other than the corned beef, this is probably my greatest victory, especially with the obstacles. They just make it taste even sweeter. I can't wait to try again with a sauce I'm happier with. That will just make it even better.
Hmm... I should probably still do those caramels. The 40% milkfat cream I bought won't last forever...
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