I don't know what to say about this, some one must have been asleep at the wheel.

Today I made a 3 cheese spinach pizza. This is constructed just a little bit different from other pizzas. Normally the sauce goes on the crust first. With the spinach, which I have mixed with Ricotta, needs to be spread on the crust before the sauce otherwise it would push the sauce off.

I have taken 1/2 of the dough I made yesterday and removed it from the fridge a couple of hours ago so it can warm up to room temp. About 1/2 hour before I got started on assembly of the pizza, I placed my baking stone on the top rack in the oven and pre heated it to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

The first thing to do is clean the spinach. Take a bunch and dunk it in a plain water bath, keep doing that until no dirt or sand is present. Then dry it as best you can, you don't want a wet spinach for this. A salad spinner works great. Then course chop it. Since I don't want any water, I like to cook it in an open non stick skillet.



Cook it down over medium low heat and then add a quarter cup of Ricotta.



Remove from heat, stir it together and season with some fresh ground black pepper. Set it aside.



Put the dough on a floured board and roll it out to about a 12 inch circle. The dough is a sticky dough so don't be stingy on the flour.





I like to transfer it to the peel on a piece of parchment paper. Check your parchment to make sure it can take the high temp it's going to bake at, not all parchment can. If you don't use parchment then you have to liberally dust the peel with either corn meal or semolina.



Spread the Ricotta Spinach mixture over the crust. Be gentle, you don't want to tear the crust.



Top with sauce and Italian style herbs. Not too much, you don't want the pizza turning into soup.



Top with some mozzarella (I like to use about 4 ounces) and some Parmesan.



Carefully move the pizza on the parchment to the baking stone which has been preheated for at least 30 minutes. After 4 minutes I like to slide the parchment out (the crust will be set up enough at this point to let you do that) and continue baking for about 5 additional minutes.

Use a peel to remove the pizza.



Wait a few minutes and enjoy. It goes nice with a simple salad.

Alright, what if you don't have a baking stone and peel? You can make it in a pan. But, instead of baking at the top rack, you must bake it on the bottom rack, or if you can, on the oven floor. This is the reason why. With a pre heated baking stone the crust is going to bake up nicely no matter where in the oven you place it. But you want the cheese to brown up at the same moment the crust is done. So you bake it on the top rack so the heat that radiates off the oven ceiling will do the job for the cheese. When baking in a pan, you risk an under done crust unless you bake it on the bottom of the oven. The baking time will be a little longer, you will have to judge it.

I hope you enjoyed this blog as much as I enjoyed making the pizza.

The first thing to think about when making a pizza is the crust. Anything is only as good as it’s weakest component so it’s vital to get it right. A common problem with homemade pizza is a crust that bubbles up. This method will eliminate that.

I like to use a combination of semolina flour, white bread flour and whole wheat. You can use all white if you want to but the semolina makes the dough easier to handle and both the whole wheat and semolina add an additional layer of character to the crust.

Use cold water, I use water from the fridge, and just a small amount of yeast. The cold water and small measure of yeast will limit the yeast activity which is what will prevent the crust from bubbling up while baking.

This method requires you to make the dough at least a day ahead of time. The dough can stay in the fridge for up to 3 or 4 days. If you have leftover dough that you are not going to use within 3 or 4 days form it into a ball, flatten it, wrap it in lightly oiled plastic wrap and then a freezer bag and freeze it.

This dough will be somewhat sticky so it’s best to make it with a mixer. A food processor can also be used.

This recipe will make 2 thin crust or 1 thicker crust pizza.

Lets get started.

Measure by weight, 3 ounces semolina, 4 ounces whole wheat, 3 ounces white bread flour, 6 5/8 ounces cold water. Measure by volume, 1/4 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon yeast, 2 teaspoons olive oil (or any vegetable oil) and 1 teaspoon honey (or sugar).




Put all ingredients in the mixer bowl and start it up.



When it comes together cover it and let it rest 20 minutes.



Knead it for 8 minutes. If you are using a food processor it only takes a minute or two. Remove the dough from the mixer bowl, put into a very lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 24 hours.

On the day you make the pizza, remove the dough from the fridge an hour or two ahead of time so it can come up to room temp.

Part 2 will be in tomorrows blog.

My cable box died. They're going to send someone over to look at it. I know they'll probably replace it. But my box is also a DVR so that means I'll lose what I have on it. Most of it I can live without or replace but I have 2 classics on it that don't get shown too often, Eating Raoul and Spider Babe. Spider
Babe is about a young woman who gets bit by a radioactive spider and it turns her into a super hero. And it makes her super horny. And makes her largely a Lesbian. *sigh*

In the meantime I hooked up an antenna to the TV. Do you know what's on broadcast TV? Not much.

My neighbor and me both have a peach tree. They're not good peach trees, the peaches are real small, real small. But this year both our trees are loaded. Well, my tree was loaded. This morning I went out there and found every single peach is gone. Even the ones that had fallen on the ground are gone. I wonder who got them. I know it's an animal or animals. No human thief would pick the insect bit ones off the ground. I looked over the fence at my neighbors tree and see his is still loaded. Why was my tree cleaned off and not his?

I'm talking about GD. I think NN is extremely tolerant. If I were running the site I'd be booting people left and right, lol.

On a more positive note, status is generally a fun place.

I found some of my pics reposted on another site. I put a comment on them that they are stolen, they disappeared later. But who the f*ck steals pics of guys to repost? What's so hard about getting naked and pulling out your own camera and snap off a few? I'll be pasting my name on my pics from now on.

I think this was staged but it's cute.

I left a beer on the kitchen counter and when I came back I found a fly on it. Damn fly is now "drowning" his sorrows in said beer. Good thing I have another beer in the fridge.

Last week a guy from Minnesota travels to Chicago with his girlfriend and they go to a ball game at historic Wrigley Field. Unknown to her, her young man has made arrangements with the good folks at the ball park to flash "Erica, will you marry me?" on the electronic message display on the scoreboard. I don't know if he knew just when the message would come up but the announcers in the broadcast booth knew and so did the camera crew. The message comes up and the announcers tell the television viewers what is about to happen and the camera shows the message and then shows the couple, except there was no couple, just the guy sitting there next to an empty seat looking bummed. The message goes off and in a few moments later she is seen returning to her seat with the beers. Yup, she made a beer run and missed the proposal!

All's well that ends well though. At the end of the inning the message comes back up, this time the guy makes sure she is at her seat, he points to it, gets on his knees and offers her the ring.