Clam & Shiso Pizza

Pizza Dough: This is something I’m still working out.  Sometime, someday, I’m going to be able to make a perfect (thin) pizza crust each and every time I make a pizza.  Then, after that, I’m going to start working out the exponentially more difficult Chicago style pizza dough, because Chicago pizzas really are the better…  Here is where I’m at so far with thin style pizza:

• Mix: 3½ cups flour and 1 tsp salt on a large board or countertop.
• Drizzle 1 tbsp olive oil into the flour and work it in with your hands until there aren’t any notable clumps.
• Stir 1 tbsp honey into ¾ cup warm water
• Stir 1 tbsp dry yeast into the honey water until it dissolves, then let it proof.
  
• Arrange the dry ingredients into a doughnut shape – i.e. a circular dam – then slowly pour the yeast water into the center, deftly and carefully incorporating wet & dry without letting a flood of yeast water escape and make a really nasty mess.  This takes a some finesse, sure, but I still prefer it to starting in a bowl.
• Once those things are worked together enough that all parts of the almost-dough are approximately the same consistency, add ¼ cup of milk and work it in.
• Knead the dough for several minutes, adding water or flour as needed in order to get a dough that is dry enough to provide a bit of resistance to kneading, but wet enough to be workable and rollable.
• Allow the dough to rise for 30 minutes or so.
• When you’re ready, use a rolling pin to make the dough into a big flat shape that is a little more than a ¼ inch thick.

The Toppings:

• First, I rubbed a thin coat of olive oil over the top of the rolled out dough.
• Then, I sprinkled it with a little tiny amount of salt.
• Seasoned with pepper.
• I arranged coarsely chopped shiso leaves over the dough so that all of them laid flat and covered almost all of the dough.
• I threw on a few pinches of red pepper flakes
• The day before, I bought some incredibly sweet and delicious orange colored cherry tomatoes at a farmers market that is apparently in the parking lot of Blockbuster on the weekends (who knew?).  So, I cut quite a few cherry tomatoes into quarters and arranged them over the shiso leaves.
• Next, I put on a fair amount of thawed out, previously frozen clams (littlenecks, perhaps?).
• Finally, I covered it with (cheap, block variety) grated mozzarella cheese.  (I’m not a big fan of the pre-grated stuff, and the real stuff is a little pricey for a regular night’s dinner.)

Cooking the Pizza: This is another thing I’m trying to work out – getting a great crust in a normal old landlord-provided oven without having a pizza stone, celebrity chef style wood-fired brick construction, or any usable tool for sliding a big floppy pizza dough covered with wet toppings into an oven.  The first thing is that I put my double-burner style cast iron grill/skillet on the bottom rack of the oven.  It acts as a heat sink that slows down the heating/cooling cycle of the oven.  This time, I preheated the oven to 400ºF (For a while I was cooking at 425º, to get crispness.  But, things can also burn fast.)  Then, after past experiences of not being able to slide my pizza into the oven onto the cast iron skillet-turned-pizza-(um)-stone; and other bad experiences watching fresh pizza dough droop between the bars of an oven rack to make the pizza really hard to remove, this time I covered an entire pizza rack with aluminum foil.  I put the rolled out pizza dough on the foil rack (which allows for a very large pizza) then arranged the toppings on the in place pizza.  My theory was that the foil would heat through faster than a pizza pan would, producing a crispier crust.  I took the entire rack out of the oven along with the pizza when the cheese was the exact level of melted-just-barely-starting-to-brown that I like.

What I liked: One of the things I really enjoy about late summer and early autumn is that every year I remember just how delicious fruits and vegetables are when they’re in season as if it’s a surprise.  And, my flower pot herb garden is in full swing.  It all means that cooking doesn’t require much effort.  This pizza was sweet, light and full of mild seafoody goodness.  (Un)frozen clams do well on a pizza, and come out pretty soft.  Then, perfectly ripe, quality cherry tomatoes are just so sweet that they more than make up for the relative unsweetness of frozen clams as compared to their fresh (or raw) clam brothers.  And, now that my shiso plants are veritable shiso bushes, I’ve found that shiso goes with just about everything.  I’m guessing now that it could stand in as a twist on either basil or fresh parsely in a lot of dishes.

Other Stuff: Well, covering an oven rack with aluminum foil and using it as a pizza pan turned out to be the same as, well, a really big pizza pan.  The pizza was more cooked on the edges than in the center (just a little).  I think I’ll go back to making mini pizzas that I can managably slide from a large cutting board onto the cast iron grill/skillet (skillet side of course) that is acting as a pre-heated pizza stone.