Pizza Updates!

Since my last pizza post, I've been making more pizzas and experimenting. My first batch of pizzas were pesto, goat cheese and grape tomatoes as toppings (occasionally with some stray olives) and a scattering of cheddar cheese over it all. It was getting to be a bit much to be making pesto all the time though (mostly bc basil just doesn't stay fresh that long in my fridge) so I started experimenting with tomato sauce pizzas. Started with store-bought pizza sauce and then scattered anything from chopped mushrooms to chopped bell peppers to italian sausage crumbles to all of the above. They were pretty heavily laden pizzas and totally tasty. At some point, I started making my own pizza sauce using the recipe I found here and things were good.

Recently, I found myself without pizza sauce or any tomato paste so I decided to experiment with sauce-less pizzas. My first attempt was better in theory than in practice. See below, the apple and zucchini pizza, before cheese and before cooking. Cheese topping was a mix of gruyere and cheddar (leftover from mac n cheese making).

I envisioned a some sort of flatbread-ish affair with sweet bites of crunchy apple. Unfortunately, my golden delicious slices dissolved to practically nothing and I could barely tell they were there. The zucchini slices were good though, but I wished there was more layers. So for my second attempt (each pizza dough recipe makes two pizzas), I added two layers of thinly sliced zucchini, another layer of chopped bell pepper and topped it all with crumbled italian sausage and scattered the gruyere and cheddar. This time, it was just divine. I'm not saying I'll never use sauce again, but it's nice to know that it's not always necessary. (where is the picture of this second pizza you ask? be grateful I had any pictures at all!).