Recipe Redux: Tomato Preserves

I often don’t have enough basil on hand to make enough pesto for this, so I may have used a basil-garlic-olive oil mix without making pesto proper (which is much thicker and has nuts and cheese in it, as well as a lot more basil).

I always seed my tomatoes. I use whatever tomatoes I have on hand, but since I don’t like soggy pizza, they are always seeded. If I get enough tomato juice/seeds, I made homemade cream of tomato soup, which is very good.

This is also why I put the cheese down before the tomatoes—the cheese makes a bit of a moisture barrier, so even though the seeded tomatoes continue to leak juices, they don’t sog the crust.

A baking stone really takes pizza to the next level.

So, here’s what I do (and did for the pizza in the picture):

Put your baking stone in the oven and preheat the oven. It takes a while for the stone to preheat. The stone is one of the reasons you can use such a high heat (450)—-it really evens out the heat. I don’t think we’ve ever had a burnt crust with a baking stone, and they’re always much crisper. Also, you will be rolling the dough pretty thin, so it’s not going to take a long time to bake.

Make your dough.

Make pesto/basil oil. (Put whatever basil you have in the food processor, along with as much garlic as you’d like. Turn on the machine and keep drizzling in extra virgin olive oil until it looks right to you. I’ve never had a recipe for this, and I’ve always just winged it. If I can make it up, so can you!)

Grate your cheese and chop and seed the tomatoes (I use everything from yellow sungold cherry tomatoes to brandywines—whatever you have).

Roll your crust out nice and thin; it will “pop” up some in the oven. Actually, I often times just stretch my dough for this; it’s okay if it has lots of irregular bumps and dips, because then it has lots of nice pockets for the basil oil to pool up in.

Cornmeal your peel; slide your crust onto the peel, and then onto the hot baking stone. You want to bake this till it starts getting hard, but is still white (hasn’t started browning yet). I seem to remember that this is about 7 minutes, but I haven’t made this since last year. (With all the cloudy weather, the tomatoes are having a hard time getting red and ripe.) Keep an eye on it.

When it’s ready, pull it out and brush it quite generously with the basil oil, or smear the pesto about. Next the cheese, then tomatoes and whatever other vegetables you want to put on it.

After that, the pizza just needs the cheese melted, the crust browned and the tomatoes heated through—-all of which does not take very long at all. Another reason why I pre-bake the crust is because I don’t like cooked-to-mush tomatos or vegetables. I like my tomatoes just heated through and my vegetables to still have a bit of a crunch. If the vegetables all get cooked for as long as the crust needs to be cooked, they will overcooked. At least in my book.

There is a tomato-less section because, believe it or not, there are those who don’t like tomatoes, or at the very least, not warm ones. Rather than watch in horror as they pick all the wonderful, delightful tomatoes off their pizza—I left some without. More for the rest of us.

It’s an incredible pizza, but also hugely time consuming when you’re making it for a dozen people. (Ask me how I know!) Still, it’s very much worth it, once you have the tomatoes to do it with.

Princess and I love sliced tomatoes on top of our pizza-we just slice into thin rounds and lay them on top of the cheese. i also LOVE broccoli, but you can’t use the frozen, it’s got to be fresh, cut into small florettes and then cooked in a hot oven so they roast a bit. Yum!

I have a “chili sauce” recipe that is Yankee Bill’s grandmothers-it is not spicy, but rather like a thick, sweet chunky ketchup. It has green pepper, a tiny bit of Jalepenos, sugar, vinegar, onion, mace, allspice etc in it. I bet that’s sort of close to what Ma was making. . .

I’m also a big Little House fan. I read my set of books so much as a girl they fell apart. DH and I were just thinking of reading them again.