Potato Pizza

I made pizza dough for the first time yesterday.

I was nervous. But I needn’t have been. It wasn’t too hard. I used recipes from Joy the Baker and Smitten Kitchen.

Here’s what you do:

Get a bowl

Mix 3 cups of flour with 2 teaspoons salt

Add 1 1/2 teaspoons of yeast

Then 1 cup of warm water

And stir in 2 tablespoons of olive oil

Stir that all together. It’s gloppy.

Plop the glop on a floured board. This is the fun part. Mush it around until it becomes a ball. Knead it a little more, just because it’s satisfying.

Ok, stop!

Oil a bowl, with Pam or olive oil or whatever. Drop your ball of dough inside.

Cover with plastic wrap.

Leave alone.

I let mine rise for about 3 hours because that’s what worked for my timing and my life. The recipes say 1 to 2 hours is enough.

I love rising dough, don’t you? It’s so science project.

When the dough has risen, squish it. Take it out of its bowl, and press out the air bubbles. Then put it back in its bowl, cover it back up, and let it rise for a 2nd time, for about 20 minutes.

While the dough is rising, prepare your toppings!

You can put just about anything on a pizza.

I put potatoes on this pizza. Of course.

Potatoes, and spreadable truffle flavored cheese.

And onions.

I sliced my taters super thin, per Smitten Kitchen recipe. I don’t have a mandolin, and I only had fingerling potatoes, but I just sliced carefully with my big knife and all seemed to work out fine.

Then I soaked the potatoes in cold water to get some of the starch off.

G chopped the onions.

Choppity chop. Action shot.

Once everything was sliced and chopped, I tossed the onions and potatoes in 1 tablespoon of olive oil and added some salt and pepper.

I preheated the oven to 450 degrees, and spread my dough out on a baking sheet. It was a little tricky to get it as thin as I wanted, but we managed to shape it into a rough rectangle using our hands and a pint glass as a rolling pin.

Then I spread the truffle flavored fromage blanc from Mt. Townsend Creamery onto the dough, and laid our thinly sliced potatoes atop that.

Into the oven for 23 minutes!

Looks good! Well, it looks kind of yellow, but that’s because I took this photo at night and the flash ruins everything.

Tastes good.

The dough was great, a little thicker than I’ll try for next time, but was fairly crunchy and tasted great. The cheese is of course delicious, and the potatoes crisp up around the edges in a fabulous way.

And now that I know how to make pizza dough, you can bet we’ll be trying out tons of topping combinations in the near future.

That’s an exciting thought!