We tried a veggie pizza last night on a home-made crust and washed it down with Il Valore San Giovese, a dirt-cheap wine now featured at Trader Joe's. The pizza crust was based on the neo-Neopolitan pizza dough recipe in Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads. I might normally provide a link, but one of the main online book sellers has severed their relationship with we California writers because they don't think they should collect sales tax.
About the veggie nature of the pizza: I don't normally do this. I'm pretty much a purist; a pizza Margherita is just fine with me, although I bake it in the tradition of New York pizzas: crust, marinara sauce, mozzarella, romano, and parmesan cheese. This is summer, though, and we have an abundance of zucchini, so the topping was tomatoes, cheese, zucchini, mushrooms, red onion, and sliced olives. My nod to California, I guess.
The pizza dough was just a little too wet. The trick to these "no-knead" recipes is to find the right balance between flour and water, that "tacky but not sticky" state of hydration. I had a feeling that this one leaned too much toward the sticky side of things, but it still made a nice pizza. It was just a little harder to work with.
The wine, though, was spectacular for a $2.99 bottle of wine. Maybe even spectacular for a $7.99 bottle.
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