Pizza Making
adam June 9th, 2009
Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun cooking and eating beets. They are best roasted, I think, but last Friday I was looking for a different technique. I came across a Mark Bittman recipe that is essentially a beet pancake. Grated beets are mixed with herbs, salt and flour and cooked in butter. I made a giant pancake because I was following Bittman’s instructions, but in the future I’ll make them smaller and use less butter. These pictures look a little weird but the result was fantastic and almost shockingly sweet (beets have an unusually high sugar content). I shared this beet pancake with my mom, and she said it was so sweet she could imagine eating it with ice cream as a dessert.
These grated beets look like worms, above, or a giant burger, below. I call it a beet pancake.
Two days later I hosted a pizza party. I made tomato sauce and five batches of dough. The various toppings from my garden included broccoli raab, roasted Chioggia beets and basil. Other local toppings: Gravity Hill spinach and garlic scapes, Cherry Grove sausage, Valley Shepard mozzarella.
This pizza (uncooked above, cooked below) was superb. Roasted Chioggia beet, goat cheese and rosemary.
I had never made pizza before this party. In retrospect, it was a little crazy to invite ten friends over to eat pizza I didn’t know how to make. But it worked out great. Pizza is actually very simple. I’ve wanted to start making my own for awhile, so I considered the party a crash course in pizza making. Beside the beet pie, my favorite was probably broccoli raab, sausage, garlic scape, mozzarella and red pepper flakes.
