The Lazy Genius Podcast - #105 - The Lazy Genius Makes Pizza Part 2

Episode Date: April 22, 2019

We’re continuing our pizza conversation this week by talking about cheese, toppings, sauce, tools, and how you bake it. If last week’s episode on pizza dough didn’t convince you I’m a nerd over pizza, this one will. I’m realizing I have so much to say that I could have an entire series or even whole separate podcast on pizza. I love it so much and keep learning every time I make it. I hope the more you make it, the more you’ll learn and love it, too! Links You May Find Helpful Jump over to listen to The Lazy Genius Makes Pizza (Part One) if you haven’t listened to that yet. If you want to take cues from my pizza sauce recipe, you can find it on the blog. Thinking about trying caramelized onions on your pizza? Here’s a recipe to make them in the crock pot and on the stovetop (I usually leave out the balsamic vinegar, but that’s just me). Since I make pizza almost every week, it’s important to me to have a pan I love. I use this cast iron pizza pan. My friend Michael believes his pizza steel is best, and my cooking sister Bri McKoy uses a pizza stone. Use whatever makes you happy. Having a pizza peel handy also makes pizza assembly a breeze. I use this wooden one (and store it with my cutting boards). They also make aluminum ones, so again, find what works best for you if you want to invest in one. And as I said last week, a bench scraper is one of the best tools to have in your kitchen. Amen. Bonus tip from Michael — how to make hot honey: Warm up honey in a little pan, add in chopped dried chiles, and warm that together for about 15 minutes on the stove. Then let it cool and put it back in a bottle. He drizzles that on pizzas when they come out of the oven or by the slice and swears by it. Download the transcript of this episode. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone. You are listening to The Lazy Genius podcast. I'm Kendra and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today we're talking about pizza. It's episode 105. The Lazy Genius Makes Pizza Part 2, which means we had part one last week. We talked all about dough. I went a little deeper than I expected, if I'm honest. But the truth is, I am really passionate about baking and dough and pizza and all the things. I surprised myself. with how much I had to say. I hope it wasn't super annoying. But be that as it may, we are going to dive into the next part of making pizza, cheese and toppings, sauce, tools, how you bake it, all the things. I am realizing I have so much to say that I could have like an entire series or even in a, like a whole separate podcast on pizza. I love it so much. And I keep learning every time I make it, the more you make it, the more you'll learn too, which I think is a huge part of the fun. Maybe you'll become a pizza nerd like I am. So we are going to talk. sauce, cheese, toppings, tools, baking, and then time savers in that order.

Let's start with sauce. You can buy pizza sauce from a store and be in great shape. There's no shame in not making your homemade pizza completely from scratch. Actually, when I say homemade, I really just mean that you like assemble it and bake it at home. Your dough could be from like a cool local pizza place. The sauce is from a jar. The toppings were already cooked from like a, a little deli or a grocery store salad bar you picked up. It's still homemade because you made it at home.

So you don't have to make your own sauce. Now, if you want to, if you want to make red sauce, I will put kind of my recipe, it's a loose word, but I will put it in the show notes. It's basically tomato paste. Trader Joe's has my favorite. I've tried a lot of tomato paste. It's a good one, but Whole Foods is also good. Tomato sauce, garlic, olive oil, and some seasonings. It's like pretty basic but I put it in a jar keep in the fridge till you need it so great and the longer it sits the more the flavors become friends a little fun so I will usually try and make a big batch on a Thursday so that I have some the next day it's been sitting around for like a day getting happy and then I have plenty for the week after too I only have to make it once every couple weeks

it definitely lasts a good couple of weeks depending on like the freshness of your tomato products It is also a really great dipping sauce if you have leftover crust or breadsticks or whatever else. Again, I will put the recipe in the show notes. It's super easy. Okay. Some pizza sauces are made with like whole tomatoes from a can that you drain and you crush, you know, like San Marzano tomatoes. And if you want to go like hardcore authentic and do that, you go to town.

It is a delicious way to sauce pizza. Personally, I prefer my sauce simply because it's easy. and I also like a sauce that's thicker and with a lot of flavor, especially since our toppings are usually pretty basic. So it's nice for the sauce to have a pop. And sometimes those like whole tomato crushed tomato sauces are a little more wet. And, you know, we've talked, we talked on Instagram about like that pool of, we'll talk about it again, but that pool of liquid on the top of your pizza. Some of that might come from that like really watery tomato sauce. So I usually stick with this thick red sauce that I make that you can find in the show notes.

Okay, so some of you have asked for sauce ideas other than like a classic red sauce. A couple of ideas are pesto or topanod. That's like an olive situation. Those are both like full flavor and only need toppings of cheese, maybe like one roasted vegetable or one type of meat. Like you don't need anything crazy. Super delicious. really easy to spread right from a jar.

You might have strong feelings about barbecue pizza, but you could use barbecue sauce as your sauce. Use mozzarella and like cheddar cheese and then some leftover rotisserie or grilled chicken and you have like barbecue pizza. It's basically zero effort. A lot of you might like cream sauces, like Alfredo sauce.

Now you can use, hold on tight. You can use alfredo sauce from a jar that you put on pasta. Like you could use that for pizza. That goes for any jarred pasta sauce. You could use it as a pizza sauce. It's sometimes like a little bit more runny, but not a ton. And it's worth you're having pizza in a pinch rather than not having any at all.

So homemade sauce, jarred pasta sauce, jarred pizza sauce, pesto, top of knot, barbecue sauce, anything else that sparks your curiosity now that you see all the possibilities. Okay, onto cheese. One of the reasons that you have a lot of liquid, that big pool of liquid, on the top of your pizza, other than maybe a watery tomato sauce, is it might be from those balls of fresh mozzarella that seems so fun. And they are, but they also release a lot of water. That water combined with like any grease from the pepperoni or the water from the sauce

or whatever else, it makes the center of your pizza like a molten pool of sadness. It can also make your crust soggy, which is a bummer. So a way to counteract that is to use less fresh mozzarella cheese. If you really want to use fresh mozzarella, that kind that comes in a ball, Aldi sells it. If you really like that cheese, just use less. Cut thinner slices and use less. So, like, don't cover the entire pizza, but only put a few slices on. Like, you see the fancy pizza places.

Other options are to just use a grated mozzarella from a bag because it has less water, less flavor too, but that's fine, I guess. Another great option, though, if you want more flavor, is aged mozzarella. It has basically no moisture in it, but fantastic flavor. provolone is also another great cheese option that doesn't give off a lot of water. I actually will use packages of sliced mozzarella and provolone like you'd buy for sandwiches and I put those on my pizza when I'm in a pinch. I don't like to buy cheese that's already grated because they usually coat it with something to keep the pieces from sticking together. I would rather take the time to grate or slice the cheese myself. But when I don't have that time, package

of sliced cheese for sandwiches are so incredibly easy. They don't have that coating. And you're also guaranteed like full even cheese coverage, which is really nice. We also like to use grated Parmesan and or Asiago and or what's the R1 Romano. Any of those like super salty dry cheeses are a great addition to your pizza before it goes in the oven or even right when it comes out. And then any combination of those five cheeses, mozzarella, provolone, Parmesan, Asiago, or Romano, they're going to taste great. Like, those are kind of your classic go-to cheeses.

There are some other favorite cheese options. One in our house, especially, and that is fresh ricotta. Have you ever had ricotta on a pizza? That's so good. You could totally use the tub of cheese that you get at the store to make lasagna. But I love to splurge on fresh. And I mean like literally, freshly made ricotta from this little Italian deli by my house. Now, you might think like, oh, I want an Italian deli.

You might actually have one. A lot of times we don't notice places that we're not looking for. So Google it. You might just have an Italian deli in your town. So I will go there for fresh ricotta, like just a dollop, you know, just a scoop to dollop on a pizza. It depends on my mood. If I do it before the pizza goes in the oven or after, both are. great. And then I will also at this little deli sometimes get like maybe a sausage or two to cook as a

topping since Italian deli sausages are like legit freshly made. And I will also get something from their prepared little food case like sauteed broccoli rob or their house roasted red peppers, something like that. It's maybe like you guys, it's like $8 maybe for like all of that and worth every penny to take my pizza to like a shockingly delicious. level for hardly any work. So seek out an Italian deli. They often have like really great cheese too. So you could buy, you know, like just your mozzarella at home. And then from the deli, you could not at home. You don't buy it at home, but you buy it at the store. You know what I mean? Just average mozzarella. But then you could buy like a little bit of like legit, hardcore, freshly grated parmesan from real actual

Italy to put on your pizza when it comes out of the oven and your life will be changed. It's so great. Okay, back to actual cheese, though. We'll walk away from the Italian deli. You can also use like cheddar, jack cheese, really anything can work as long as it goes with your toppings. And here's the thing. No pizza is terrible pizza. Like, it's hard to put together a combination of cheese and sauce and toppings that's nasty. It might not be your favorite, but like you can't really make a horrible pizza.

Like it's, it might be fine, but it's not going to be disgusting. And then once you try, you'll know whether or not to try that combination again. So just try stuff. It doesn't have to be perfect every time. And then a final note about cheese, don't feel like you have to add so much. I know the whole like extra cheese thing at takeout places is really fun, but you will often lose the impact of your crust and you will also maybe affect the way the pizza bakes if it's too bogged down by cheese and toppings.

Less is sometimes more, usually. Less is more. you could always make a pizza and then put like a little less cheese on half just to see how you feel about it just to see how the ratios stack up and you can taste those two pizzas side by side you might be surprised okay next toppings on an average pizza Friday we do pepperoni and then some with both pepperoni and sausage i know we're like so edgy there aren't a lot of vegetables to be seen mostly because my husband and i like different vegetables on our pizza generally speaking and then the kids don't want any.

And I can't blame them and I don't hold it against them. Pepperoni pizza is a delight. Now, when we have people over, I do try some different things. When we have friends over for dinner for the first time, I always make pizza. That's like my go-to first friends dinner because it's easy for me. It's fun. It feels a little special without it being fancy. We're just having pizza, but it feels special.

And then it also gives us something to do as we talk, especially if it's like brand-new friends that we don't know. Because we're just like waiting for the next pizza. We're just like, it's a really nice rhythm, you know? We're just sitting around the kitchen, waiting for another pizza to cook, just chatting around piles of cheese and pepperoni. It's great. So my favorite topping combos when we're going like outside of just pepperoni are number one,

sausage, broccoli, or that sauteed broccoli rob from the Italian deli, red sauce, sauce, mozzarella, maybe some parmesan, and then fresh ricotta. I might put a little like basil on top when it comes out of the oven or even a handful of arugula if I have it. It wilts a little, but it doesn't lose its color or flavor that way. That whole pizza is like so simple and so delicious. I love it. And it's not, remember, it's not like sausage or broccoli in every single bite.

You know, you don't overload it, just like a sprinkle of each. It's lovely. A second topping combo that I like is pepperoni, caramelized onions that are like basically onion jam. They're so buttery and sweet. So I'm on. I do slice mushrooms that are raw since they will cook in the oven. And we already have some big flavors from the pepperoni and the onion. So it's cool if the mushrooms aren't like roasted within an inch of their life. And then a little bit of pesto mixed in with the red sauce. It's salty, it's sweet, it's earthy, it's a little bright from the pesto. It's really good. And it's like nothing crazy. And then a third topping combo

comes from my friend Michael, who I mentioned in last week's episode. He's kind of my, he's my pizza guru. He makes the best barbecue chicken pizza. I don't even like barbecue chicken pizza. And his is so stinking good. But he also makes a pizza that you would never think of in a million years that is shockingly delicious that I will share with you now. You brush olive oil on the dough. There's no sauce. Okay? Then you're going to take apples. You're going to thinly slice apples. Keep the peel on. I said apples. I know. It's fine. Toss the sliced apples with a little bit of maple syrup. don't leave me yet i know um spread those out on the pizza along with some bacon mozzarella and corgonzola cheese okay then you bake it and then once it comes out of the

oven you drizzle on a little bit more maple syrup it is sweet and salty and it has this tang from the gorgonzola it is a delight my husband cause is a he's like a middle school boy when it comes to pizza like he you know and he loves michael's weird apple pizza like it's just It's so good. Okay, and here is a little bonus tip from Michael, my pizza guru. He makes something he calls hot honey. He warms up honey in a little pan, adds in chopped dried chilies that you can actually get a target now.

Like they sell dried chilies, any kind of dried chili. Put those in the honey on a pan, warm it together for like 15 minutes on the stove, and then you let it cool and then you put it back in a bottle. And then he'll drizzle that on pizzas when they come out of the oven or even just by the slice, if not everybody's into it. I have not tried it yet, but he swears by it, and I trust his pizza and cooking opinions wholeheartedly. So I'm just going to give you that information. If you try it before I do, please let me know. Hot honey. It's a thing, I guess. All right. Now, that leads me to our final word on toppings.

Aw, isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. A lot of you want, like, new creative ideas for how to top your pizzas. And hopefully some of these ideas will give you ideas. But whatever you choose, here are a couple of rules. Simple is better than everything. A pizza with just like a great red sauce, some good cheese, maybe like a little sausage,

is worlds better than a pizza with every single thing piled on. You don't need everything to make it creative. It's just going to make it muddy. You can use your flavor Bible as like a great tool to get topping combo ideas. Just pick like one thing. Like, hmm, I have roasted sweet potatoes. And then look up sweet potatoes in your flavor Bible. feel like I always mentioned sweet potatoes when I mention the flavor Bible. It's so strange.

And then just like see a couple of things like a cheese maybe and maybe a meat and try and make a sweet potato pizza. You just never know. But just pick like two or three things that go together. Try it out. Keep it simple. The other thing to remember is to have contrasting flavors. Think about sweet, salty, earthy, fresh, like all at once. So like that apple pizza, The apples in the maple syrup are sweet. The bacon is crunchy and salty. The Gorgonzola is kind of tangy and has that strong, like, pungent blue cheese flavor. The mozzarella is super mild, and it just binds everything together.

All of that is what makes the pizza work, having all of that in one pizza, all those different flavors. It's why my favorite pizza is sausage, broccoli rob, and ricotta. The sausage is spicy. The broccoli rob is a little bitter, and the ricotta is, like, creamy and just a little bit sweet, and it rounds the whole thing out. It's so good. So consider how your toppings go together, how they talk to each other. It's like, okay, hang with me. It's like you want to spice girls pizza. All the personalities represented well, very individual, but like singing together in perfect harmony, right? Spice Girls pizza, you get it. Okay, let's talk about tools. Do you use a

baking stone, a baking peel? What if you don't have space? for either. Do you have to have one of those fancy peels to slide the pizza in and out of the up? You know, so many questions about tools. And understandably so, it can be really overwhelming. Like, I need all of these things to make pizza. Now, because I make pizza every week and I know I love it, I have pizza tools. I have a big cast iron pizza pan that just like literally sits in my oven. Like, that's where it's stored is in my oven. Now, I have a double oven. The top one is like half the size of a regular oven. It's kind of skinny.

And that's our pizza oven. That's what we use for a pizza oven. The pan just like stays in there. Michael uses a pizza steel. And my cooking sister, Brie McCoy, from our savorylife.com, she uses a pizza stone. It is all about personal preference. Like one is not better than the other. I love my cast iron pizza pan because it has handles.

It's round. And so like, I don't know, it, like, the shape is there, which is fantastic. And the pizza stays warm. So, like, if I, obviously it stays warm if it's in the oven. But, like, if I have a pizza and I pull it out of the oven on the cast iron pan, like, it'll stay warm for a while, like, even out of the oven. It's pretty fantastic. But really, the handles are just a huge, a huge bonus on that thing.

I'm going to, I'll put some links in the show notes of all. It's going to be so link heavy, you guys, like so many pizza things. But I do think that investing in something that can hold heat is really lovely in making great pizza at home. You don't have to. You don't have to. A sheet pan that's covered in parchment paper will do just fine. You know, just cook it on a sheet pan.

You just won't get the same crust on the bottom as you might from a stone or a steel. I personally think it's absolutely worth a small investment. And I feel that way about a pizza peel, too. I have two pizza peels. Those are the big wooden things with the handles, like a big wooden cutting board. It's like a big shovel. It's a pizza shovel. I have two.

I know, right? I have one for assembling a new pizza, right? When I'm putting one together. And then another one to pull the pizza out of the oven. So it helps me like keep my rhythm and I'm not stuck needing to get a pizza out of the oven, but I don't have a peel to do it because there's a fresh pizza on the peel. And it's like, oh no, what do I do now? Like, I'm stuck.

So I have two. and I just store them with my cutting boards. That's great. Okay, let's talk about a big deterrent for making your own pizza at home, and that's just getting the dang pizza in and out of the oven. Even with the peel, it can be really hard. So here's how you get a pizza off the peel or off of your parchment paper on a sheep pen, if you're sliding it onto the rack.

You have to have friction between your pizza and whatever it's under. I'm going to keep using the word peel because that's what I use. You have to have friction between your peel and your pizza. And the best way to get that is with a combination of flour and cornmeal. Flower has better coverage. You can kind of get it to cover the whole peel. But then the cornmeal adds some grit the flour does not have. So put a generous, generous sprinkling on the pizza peel, spread it around the edges,

make sure the peel is fully covered. It's way better to have too much flour than too little. And especially as you get started just to kind of get used to the feeling and then put your dough on top. Try to stretch out your dough as much as you can before you put it on the peel, because then it starts to just sort of soak up all the flour and the stuff. Kind of stretch it on the, like on your wrists. Stretch it on your wrist. You don't have to toss it. But then you can put it on the peel and you can kind of, you know, move it out to a circle or whatever. And as you put the toppings on, you occasionally give the peel a little shake to make sure the pizza can still

move around. It should just slide around like it's nothing. Okay. Now, if it gets stuck, don't panic. It just means there's not enough friction on some spot on the peel and the pizza. Don't shake it more because then it'll just tear. And if you have toppings already on your pizza, oh, it's heartbreaking. So what you're going to do if it gets stuck, just use your hands, or better yet, a bench scraper, that's what I use, and you just find, like, where is it stuck? And you lift that stuck piece of dough off at the peel, then you just throw another sprinkling the flour cornmeal mixture, and then you just slide it around some more. It always needs to be able to move while you're putting toppings on. Otherwise, when you put it in the oven, it'll stick.

You'll height everything. I have experienced my fair share of accidental calzone where my pizza got stuck and it just flipped over on itself. And I was like, well, this is what we're doing now. We're having calzone. So, okay, what about baking? Unless you are baking a pizza dough that specifically requires a certain temperature, you pretty much always want to crank your oven as high as it will go. For most of us, that's 550 degrees, which feels hot. I know. But remember, like restaurants with pizza ovens, their temperatures are like a thousand degrees. It's crazy.

Pizza is really meant to be cooked at a high temperature. Some of you mentioned on Instagram not being able to get your pizza off the pan once it's cooked, and the likely reason for that is that you're not cooking at a high enough temperature. It's not being forced to separate from the pan quickly enough because the heat's just too low. So crank that heat, hi, man. and in fact if you are able to turn your oven on like even an hour before it's time to put the pizza in especially if you're sliding the pizza onto a steel or stone it's even better because it'll all heat up it's not essential but it will make a big difference um most pizzas only take a few minutes to bake

unless they're deep dish um but remember that different dough styles lead to different results right we learned that last week a neapolitan dough is supposed to get a little charred on the bottom and the sides New York style, it's better cooked to like a golden brown. Otherwise, it just gets tough and it loses that, that classic like crust sag that it's supposed to have. Yeah. And another way that you can sort of like fake out, like McGiver, a pizza oven, is to put your rack on the top rack,

like your oven rack at the very highest it will go. So you're creating like a smaller space for heat to circulate around your pizza and it'll cook a little bit better. Okay. I already, so we did cheese, we did sauce. I have so many words, you guys. We did cheese and sauce and toppings, tools, baking. Now let's finish with some time savers.

I already mentioned one that I will come back to, and that's just to get your toppings already made from somewhere. I love my Italian deli, but a grocery store salad bar is amazing. You can get exactly the amount you want without waste. A few cherry tomatoes, olives, grilled chicken. little little rugaleta put on top there's so many options it's like the best thing you can save time by just making stuff ahead of time sauce can be made ahead of time and frozen or just made three days before and sit in your fridge um i talked about that in the last episode about freezing it and all that you can go

and then let's see really the thing you guys with making pizza as quick as you can is just having everything ready to go so like pick up a few ingredients already made on your way home, or keep some, like, cooked sausage in a bag in the freezer to throw on pizza straight from the freezer. I think pizza feels like it takes forever because you haven't done it enough to feel confident in it and to realize that if you're trying to make everything from scratch at once at 4.30, you will only get pizza if you call Domino's. Like, you can't get like, I want pizza.

I want homemade pizza. That's just not how it goes. It just takes a little bit of planning ahead, and that's okay. the best way to be adjacent to homemade pizza without planning is to use frozen non or flatbread, jarred sauce, cheese, and then anything else in your fridge or freezer that can count as a topping. Bake it and call it a day. So it's all ready. We do that a lot with meatballs.

Like we have meatball non-pita and it's great, but it's not pizza pizza. But you can make pizza ahead of time. And I really hope you use a grocery store style bar and freeze your, pizza dough. It's amazing. Okay, have I talked enough about pizza yet? Yeah, probably. We'll just call it a day. I mean, it's not even close to being done, but I feel like I've exhausted it enough for now. I hope that these two episodes give you some really great ideas and inspiration to make your own pizza without being afraid of it. You can totally do this and check the show notes for like links to tons of things and recipes and all that. And if you haven't listened to Part 1, please, please do.

Understanding dough. I know it sounds so weird. But understanding dough, it's super important in making homemade pizza and your expectations of your homemade pizza work for you. Okay. All right. That's it. I'm going to stop talking now. I love talking about pizza and could all day. Thank you so much for listening.

Until next time. Be a genius about the things that matter. I'm lazy about the things that don't. You ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that. more dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough.

Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.