Blog Archives
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).
Food 101: How To Make Tomato Sauce (or “Red Sauce” if you will…)
Tomato sauce, it’s everywhere. For Italians, it’s on and in everything, to the point that there probably isn’t a single human being in Italy over the age of 7 who doesn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge on how to prepare a pot of sauce. The majority of my family’s heritage is Italian. I grew up in a household where it got tossed on everything from pork to pasta to pizza. Every Sunday was time for everyone to head on over to my aunt’s house for a big-ass Italian dinner with pasta and antipasti and bread and etc… You get the picture. And yet, I have a confession to make, I actually don’t really like tomato sauce all that much.
DUN-DUN!!
Yes I know, I know, blasphemy. But in all honesty I felt like the fact tomato sauce had to be thrown onto every edible item on planet Earth kind of made me sick of it by the time I hit my teen years. Now, I don’t necessarily hate it, but it just feels overused and homogenous to me. That may not be a popular opinion, but I feel like many in Italian-American families simply don’t have the guts to actually come forth and say that, for fear of ridicule and mafioso style ” ‘ey, come on.” half-slaps on the cheek.
That all being said, I ironically am a staunch opponent of jar sauces, both because I’m pro-from-scratch on the food front and also because despite my relative lack of enthusiasm for it, I know what a good tomato sauce tastes like. And jar sauce tastes like shit, frankly. Rather, I will admit objectively that having a good tomato sauce technique in the back of your head is a vital skill for most cooks, if for at very least making pizzas.
Because, well, pizza.
Food 101: How to Make a Pizza
As you may have guessed by now if you’ve spent any time on the blog at all, we’re big fans of pizza. Pizza is one of the most perfect foods around. It’s delicious, it’s portable, and it’s relatively cheap both to buy and make. Specialty slices are great, but nothing beats a really good regular cheese slice. The sauce, the cheese, the crust…they all just go perfectly together. In my opinion pizza is comfort food at its finest. There’s no problem pizza can’t solve.
It can even double as a Frisbee!
Now we make a lot of specialty pizzas (at least one per month),and we’re all for people experimenting with their own fun pizzas, but with all things you should master the basics before moving on to the advanced. So this post will go over the basic pizza making techniques for those who may be less familiar with pizza making than we are (and there’s nothing wrong with that!).
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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