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Two salmon pizzas

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I’ve been playing around with salmon. Lots of salmon. I returned from Cordova, Alaska with smoked salmon in jars and smoked salmon in vacuum-sealed bags. I was, for a brief moment in time, smoked salmon rich. We ate some straight-up, flaked some and put it on bagels as if it were gravlax. Then I made pizza. Salmon pizza. Two of them.

twosalmonpizzas

The top one is a crust cooked by itself (just a brush of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt), allowed to cool just a bit, slathered with cream cheese (I used that crazy delicious Sierra Nevada cream cheese – I wear a blindfold when I buy it to avoid the sticker shock), and covered with bits of flaked hot-smoked sockeye Copper River salmon, sliced ultra-ripe tomatoes, and minced green onion. I imagined it would be a lot like a bagel and it was.

The bottom one. Oh, that pizza. It was inspired by one I had in Cordova at Harborside Pizza that had smoked salmon and onion and bacon. The problem with that one – despite their awesome wood-burning oven in the back of a trailer – is that the crust was pretty thick and chewy in not a fabulous way and it had a lot of that very American tomato sauce that is, to my palate, quite sweet and then it also had a butt-load of melty cheese that isn’t quite stringy and stretchy but instead just greasy. In the world of typical American-style pizza, theirs was dandy. The problem is that I don’t really like those kind of pizzas. In fact, I thought I hated pizza until I was a teenager and had a different kind of pizza.

So I made a thinner crust, crumbled cooked bacon on it, spread around some onions that I had slivered and then cooked in the bacon fat from the just-mentioned cooked bacon, some flaked smoked salmon, and a grating of mozzarella to coat the whole thing and hold it together with a bit of parmesan grated over that for more salty flavor.

OMG. There is nothing else to say. Make this pizza! That would be something else to say, I suppose. This pizza, it was like crack. That’s another thing to say. Make your favorite pizza dough recipe (mine is below), buy your favorite pizza dough, or buy a Boboli and top it with the stuff I mentioned above.

A few tips for a good result:

  1. Use good bacon – a meaty, porky bacon and cook it almost crisp before draining ti thoroughly.
  2. Save the bacon fat and cook the onions in it. Don’t caramelize them, however. Cook them over medium-high heat until they wilt and look soft and yummy with a bit of browning just starting to happen along the edges (remember, they are going back in the oven). If you caramelize them the whole pizza will become too sweet – you need that tiny sulfuric kick cooked but not caramelized onions still have at their core.
  3. Use good hot-smoked salmon – the kind that seems cooked. No lox or gravlax here (although, quite frankly, they would probably be delicious, but they’re not what I used).
  4. Best case, scenario, you make your own pizza dough and then stretch it (don’t pull it, don’t roll it) into a thin, beautiful crust.

You may well have a pizza dough recipe you like. Please, use that! I bet it’s great. (To quote Elizabeth Zimmerman in Knitting Without Tears, “Mittens. Aha! Many people’s sole activity in the realm of knitting. To them I say skip this section. You are making the very best mittens, keep right on.” Of course, I’m talking about cooking and pizza, not knitting and mittens, but I’m pretty sure my clever readers figured that out all by themselves.) If, however, you don’t have a pizza dough recipe you love, you could use this one.

Pizza Dough

In a large bowl, combine 3 1/2 cups flour (bread is great, but all purpose works fine; also you can substitute up to 1/2 cup of the flour with whole wheat or rye flour for texture and flavor), 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon yeast, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and 1 1/2 cups warm water. Stir together, cover, and let sit overnight in the fridge. (Don’t have that kind of time? Use 2 teaspoons yeast and let sit 1 1/2 to 2 hours at room temperature.)

Divide into 3 balls and let them sit about 30 minutes while you heat your oven to 500. A pizza stone in your oven will help ensure a crispy crust.

Work with one ball of dough at a time. With lightly floured hands on a lightly floured surface, stretch the dough into a very thin disk anywhere from 9 to 12 inches across. Put on a pan or a well-floured peel or back of a baking sheet if you’re using a pizza stone.

Quickly put the toppings on and slide into the oven/onto the pizza stone. Cook until bubbly and crispy and melted and how you like your pizza, anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes depending on your oven, equipment, and taste.


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