Today I decided to try something I’ve never had before — Fig Pizza, which comes out of the West and can be found on page 364.
Pizza dough is a wonderful blank canvas to express your creativity in whatever way you want! It may have originated in Italy, but we Americans have truly made it our own. You can put everything from the old standard of pepperoni to pineapples, to figs on top of your pizza. Right now, my fig tree is harvesting many delicious ripe figs and I need to find ways to use them, so this was a terrific way to put those plump, sweet, juicy figs to use while trying a new and exciting recipe. This recipe also had pancetta, which is often called the Italian bacon, but I don’t think that characterization does it justice. Pancetta, like bacon, is made from pork belly, but while bacon is smoked, pancetta is dry cured in salt and various spices and aged for several months. It has a very distinctive flavor that’s both richer and more delicate than bacon. The pancetta compliments the figs in special way that you won’t get with bacon, so while this pizza would still taste great if you had to substitute, I highly recommend that you try to get your hands on some pancetta for this if you can. However, in the future I would like to try substituting the ricotta cheese with chèvre because I think its acidic qualities would balance quite nicely with the salty and the sweet flavors.
A note on making pizza dough (which I plan to expand on in a future Cooking School 101 post). More than most recipes, doughs for things like pizza and pasta are highly impacted by the humidity level of your kitchen, and even the state you live in. Meaning in drier air you need a lower flour ratio to your wet ingredients and moister air requires a higher flour ratio. So if you’re making your own pizza dough and add the flour that the recipe calls for and what you’re left with is the consistency of sticky glue it means you need to keep adding flour a cup at a time until it’s the right consistency. If you’re using a stand mixer with a hook attachment, your dough is done when it starts to come together and form a ball on the lower part of the hook.
This was a delicious pizza and a great new recipe to try as I celebrate the first month of the Me n’ Martha project!
