Category Archives: Pizza Lab
Pizza Lab #32: Nacho Pizza
I think we can all agree that nachos (real nachos, not the kind from 7-11 that are just chips with fake cheese poured over them) are delicious. But they can be a bit messy to eat. Your hands can get dirty, and you can drop toppings anywhere along the trip between the plate to your mouth. Well, what if I told you that we have found a way to make nachos less messy to eat, but still just as delicious? Impossible you say? Nothing is impossible with the power of…pizza! That’s right. We combined nachos and pizza and came up with both the neatest nachos you’ve ever eaten, and also one of the yummiest pizzas.
We’ve been on a bit of a nacho kick lately here at PCFG headquarters ever since we discovered how easy it is to make homemade tortilla chips. That’s mainly where the inspiration for this pizza came from. There are some challenges, and always some risk when combining a food that stands on its own with another (lest we forget the Chinese food pizza, which to this day is probably our least successful pizza lab). But after some careful planning we decided on the best approach to this pizza, and it ended up working really well!
Pizza Lab #31: Tres Leches Pizza
We’ve come up with some crazy crossovers for our pizzas before. This pizza maybe one of the strangest. But strange doesn’t mean bad! The inspiration for this pizza was tres leches cake. “Tres leches” means “three milks” in Spanish, so as you can imagine, three milks are involved in the making of the cake. Traditional tres leches cake is composed of a sponge cake soaked in a combination of evaporated milk, condensed milk, and heavy cream after baking. Yet despite this, when done correctly the cake is still light and airy, not soggy. I’m not entirely sure of the origins of the cake, but I imagine someone dipping cookies into milk was involved somewhere, since it’s a similar concept.
How we came up with the idea for this pizza I’m not entirely sure; this was mostly Erik’s idea. But we both brainstormed out the details and execution. Obviously we couldn’t just have a mostly naked pizza that’d been soaked in milk. A pizza needs toppings. The original plan was to top it with dulce de leche. Dulce de leche is a caramel like sauce made from condensed milk. This plan eventually changed though, because despite the fact that pre-made, canned dulce de leche is a thing that exists, we could not find any in stores near us. And making it from scratch takes at least 2 hours, and quite frankly, we just didn’t have the time to babysit cans of milk for that long. So we ultimately ended up on plan B, which was to use our go-to caramel sauce recipe, which takes about 5 minutes to make. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though…
Pizza Lab #30 : Breakfast Pizza
I’m sure I’m not the only one who still remembers the jingle that Bagel Bites used to use in their commercials: “Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, pizza at supper time. When pizza’s on a bagel you can have pizza any time.” But I think we can all agree that pizza doesn’t have to be on a bagel to be eaten any time of day. I fully own up to having eaten cold pizza for breakfast on occasion, and I know there’s others out there like me. I suppose that means that any pizza could be a breakfast pizza if you eat it for breakfast. But! This month’s pizza lab is not just a pizza that you happened to eat for breakfast. It is a breakfast pizza.
We’ve seen breakfast pizzas other places before but they’re not really breakfast food pizzas. They’re more like brunch pizzas at best. Most are more like flatbreads with some greens and cheese and maybe eggs on them. We wanted to make a breakfast pizza that was actually inspired by breakfast foods. Not stuff people pretend to like to eat for breakfast (spinach? No thank you…) but stuff people actually eat for breakfast (helloooo bacon).
Pizza Lab #29: Cheesecake Pizza
Okay folks, let’s talk cheesecake. It’s a cake, sorta… but it’s filled with cheese. Cream cheese, to be specific. And it’s quite a delectable-ass dessert. When you think of just the name alone, it does sound kind of silly though. Most people default the idea of cheese to old favorites like cheddar, swiss, limburger, etc… Few people hear the word cheese and go “Oh yeah! Mascarpone!” On the flipside, one thing we do think of when cheese comes up, is obviously pizza.
Whoa, shit, do you know what this means?!
It’s exactly what it looks like.
Pizza Lab #27: Irish Flag Pizza
Let’s talk St. Patrick’s Day. We wanted to do some sort of Irish-themed pizza for Pizza Lab this month. And yes, I guess I have to ask ‘what foods do you think of when it’s St. Patrick’s Day?’ Yeah, yeah, everyone’s gonna say corned beef and cabbage to which I reply, if I can conjure my best 90s teen-girl, a whole-hearted “What-everrrrr.” Aside from not actually being a traditional Irish dish, corned beef just plain sucks. Sure I’m a little biased on account of my not eating red meats, but how good can a meal be if 99% of the people in the country it’s most popular in only eat it for about two weeks out of the year? Yeah, screw that. Not to mention native Ireland essentially makes fun of Americans for their obsessive and erroneous association with it to Irish cuisine.
Instead Meg and I decided to put together something a bit more whimsical, trying our best to create a pizza inspired by the colors of the Irish flag. This presented an interesting concept since generally foods don’t get grouped together by color, as colors don’t generally represent flavor. It also was a unique challenge since it required some careful brainstorming on what foods work well together, while keeping in the color theme.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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