It’s a new year, and time for another 12 months of pizza lab ideas.  While our last Pizza Lab for 2014 ended pretty disastrously (so disastrously in fact that we couldn’t even work up the motivation to post about it.  But we’ll revisit it someday, don’t worry), the first Pizza Lab for 2015 kicked things off to a good start.

The idea for this pizza came about from my thinking about what kind of pizza we should experiment with next while out on my third cold walk of the day at work.  We agreed we should try to do something wintery for this one.  And what’s more comforting on a cold winter day than a nice warm bowl of chicken noodle soup?  Now obviously we couldn’t just pour chicken noodle soup onto a pizza crust.  That would be very messy, and soggy; we just wanted to capture the flavors of it.

The main substitution here was gravy instead of broth.  Gravy gave the required meaty flavors without soaking the pizza in liquid.  Gravy is much more sauce like in its consistency than broth, so it’s pretty much perfect for a pizza.  Other than that this pizza has all the main components of chicken noodle soup: chicken, noodles, carrots, and onions.  And of course we added cheese on top because, pizza.  Normally chicken noodle soup is made with chicken that’s been roasted or slow cooked in some way.  We didn’t really have time for that, but we wanted the flavor of roasted chicken, so Erik grilled up some chicken breasts on the stovetop using the same seasonings that he would for a roasted chicken.  And it actually worked out surprisingly well!  We also cooked the noodles with some dried soup seasoning mix in the water to try to help infuse them with some added soup flavor.

As already mentioned, we used gravy as the sauce base for this pizza.

Then we added the noodles.  We wanted to make sure the noodles weren’t right on top since we didn’t want them to get too dried out in the oven.

We topped the noodles with the chicken, carrots, and onions, and then topped all of it with mozzarella cheese.

Oh!  Also for this pizza we finally remembered to add a baking soda wash to the outer crust, which gave it a nice golden brown color.  We will be doing this for all our pizzas from now on because, while the other pizzas tasted good, this makes them look even better.

So how did chicken noodle soup in pizza form turn out?  Really good!  It was hearty and filling, just like chicken noodle soup should be.  I think the best comparison I can come up with is that it’s like soup in a bread bowl, but flat.  So obviously, awesome (since soup in a bread bowl is one of the best winter foods ever).  It really captured the essence of chicken noodle soup, just in solid food form.

Rating

Chicken Soup for the Pizza Lover’s Soul