Week 3: BBQ Pizza

This was a big week for me.  It was the first time I managed to get the pizza from the peel to the stone in the oven without a near catastrophe.  It was also the first week I got the pizza from the peel to the stone without frantically calling my husband in for help.  I felt so accomplished.

This week I decided to make a barbecue pizza.  Barbecue pizza is one of my favorite pizzas.  We used to make this all the time when we lived in Knoxville.  I make it a lot mainly because I find that bbq sauce lasts in the fridge a lot longer than pizza sauce does.  You can store it open for more than a couple of weeks.  This means that we almost always have on hand what we need to make it.

For this pizza I used my brother-in-law Shaun’s homemade bbq sauce.  We received some for Christmas and I’ve been itching to break it open.  Finally I got my chance.  It’s delicious.  If it were a good idea to eat it with a spoon, I would.  My husband, the barbecue snob, also gives it a thumbs up.  See, my husband is from Kansas City and has a set opinion about what barbecue should taste like.  The barbecue in East Tennessee just didn’t cut it for him.  Lucky for my husband, Shaun is from Kansas and therefore his barbecue tastes run similar to my husband’s.

BBQ pizza is really easy to make.  I used my standard crust recipe and topped it with some barbecue sauce.

Next comes some cheese (I like to do a 50/50/ blend of cheddar and mozzarella) and the chicken on my husband’s half.  He pre-cooked it beforehand.  Into the oven it went, and out it came after 10 minutes.

Remember all that bragging I did about how I finally learned how to use my pizza peel and how proud I was for getting it into the oven without a near catastrophe?  Well, getting it out was a different story.  I decided to use a trick I saw Alton Brown do once – you push the pizza up against the back of the oven and slide the peel under the pizza really fast.  That would have been fine had I not been holding the peel too far up on the handle and burned my finger on the pizza stone.  It hurt.  A lot.

At least the pizza wasn’t compromised.

Since we’ve made this pizza many times before we knew what to expect – it was pretty tasty, as usual.  The saltiness of the cheddar balances the sweetness of the sauce quite nicely.  Other toppings, such as caramalized onions, spinach, bell peppers, etc, would have been nice on this, but it’s pretty good with just cheese or chicken.