Somehow we let the month of June slip by us without doing a Pizza Lab.  We’re still not entirely sure what happened, but it did; we let you and ourselves down.  So we definitely couldn’t let another month go by.  We were going to stay on top of things and get it done early in the month!  We had ideas of doing a red, white, and blue pizza for the 4^th of July.  Yet somehow we ended up just getting around to doing Pizza Lab last week.  Where does the time keep going?  We decided too much time had passed since the 4^th of July for red, white, and blue pizza to be relevant, so we opted instead for a summery pizza.

There are many classic summer-time foods.  One such food is corn on the cob.  Sure you can get frozen or canned corn year round, but good corn for eating off the cob is only available from around the 4^th of July until Columbus Day.  Perhaps these dates are shifted a little in other parts of the country, but here on Long Island at least, that’s the time to hit up the farm stands and get yourself some local corn.  Erik is currently in the throes of his annual grilled corn obsession, so it’s no surprise we ended up featuring it on a pizza.  It took a lot of brainstorming to figure out what else to put on the pizza other than corn though.

Since corn is really a staple of South American cuisine we decided to take a vaguely Mexican theme for the pizza.  We contemplated grilling the corn Mexican street-food style with chili powder and cheese and whatnot, but ultimately decided to just stick to the basic way.  Since you obviously can’t just stick a cob of corn on top of a slice of pizza we sadly had to cut it off.  It took away some of the fun, but it was still super yummy.

For the sauce we wanted something along the lines of a mole sauce, but we didn’t have time to put together a traditional mole sauce since they can take a lot of time.  They’re delicious sure, but time consuming.  So we tossed together a kind of knockoff mole sauce using some dried peppers I bought Erik as a present.  If I can ever figure out what peppers it is we used, we’ll post it as a Cheat Code post.  It had the main elements of mole sauce though – tomato, pepper, chocolate (yes, chocolate!).

We kept it simple with the chicken and just used some rotisserie chicken.  We didn’t want too many different flavors on the pizza because we didn’t want to overpower the flavor of the corn.

Then came the corn, followed by Mexican blend cheese, and some crushed corn chips.  The corn chips both upped the corniness of the pizza and provided some crunch.

This isn’t just a grilled corn pizza but also a grilled corn pizza.  So after par baking the crust in the oven (to make sure it wouldn’t fall through the barbeque grates) we loaded it up with the toppings and tossed it onto the grill.  Once the crust was finished cooking and the cheese was nice and melted it was time to bring it back in to cool a bit.

Just put on the grill

Time to take it off

Finally it was time to eat it.  So, how does a grilled corn pizza taste?  Pretty darn yummy!  The sauce provided a nice base flavor for the pizza, but you could still taste the delicious grilled corn flavor too.  We wanted to make a nice summery pizza, and we did!  Everything worked together really well.  The corn chips ended up being a bit unnecessary for crunch since the grilled crust got crisper than just baked crust, but they still helped up the corn factor.  Overall it was another successful Pizza Lab.

Pizza Rating:

A Corny Slice of Summer