← →

venison prosciutto pizza with fennel and shitakes + the egg

March 4th, 2009 · 3,095 Comments

so let’s talk pizza.

in the usual fashion of me watching the calories, i starved myself all day – and then began making mario batali’s pizza dough recipe. or at least the one from ’03 that i found over at food & wine. and in keeping with the magazine/website concept, the dough actually had wine as an ingredient (mario you sly fox you) – and i quite liked that idea. because i like a pizza dough with character – as in flavor and i’ve not been having the best luck finding the dough of my dreams.

mario not only uses wine in his dough, but also chooses to use cake yeast which i converted to 18 grams of active dry yeast using my trusty yeast calculator. as called for, i used mostly 00 flour, the perfect flour for pizza making insuring a crisp crust and a soft crumb. but it’s a very soft flour, making it hard to manuever the dough, so a bit of all purpose gets added – if only for insurance. judging from the above photo, the 1:6 ratio was not enough… at least for me. next time i’ll add a bit more ap flour. the pie got mangled upon being placed onto the 550 degree pizza stone. but hey, looks aren’t everything…

really the story goes something like this. chris was coming over with some of his home-cured venison prosciutto and i had one fennel bulb and a big bunch of shitakes in my fridge. for some reason i felt unsure of the vegetable combo so i called my friend laura wilson, formerly the chef at ombi restaurant and she said – pizza. and i thought to myself, why did i not think to make pizza? and then i realized it’s just that well, i don’t think of so many things…

i caramelized the fennel and shitakes in some olive oil along with about half a dozen roughly chopped garlic cloves, then chris showed up with the prosciutto (check out his december 2 post about the doe that he butchered) which got sliced and added to the top. the pie was then hit with a generous amount of fresh thyme and at the last moment i thought EGG and well, maybe i do think of things sometimes…..

sadly, the pie got folded onto itself which affected nothing but my pride. and the yoke broke too but you know, it was all really just so much more than good.

did i mention that the prosciutto was AMAZING? the smell alone was absolutely intoxicating.

meat + salt + patience = delicious. my kind of math.

a wonderful cheeseless pizza. it can be done.

just simply fabulous stuff…

 

Tags: mushrooms · pizza · venison and other game

3,095 responses so far ↓

Leave a Comment