Pizza and Beer (#1168) - A Classic Combo

As you may have read here, I'm lookin' to be the pizza man now.  With cookbooks, stones, ingredients and a complete lack of understanding of  what I'm actually doing, last night was the first official Homemade Pizza Night. Garlic and Mushroom Pizza was on the menu.

Admittedly, the first batch of dough ended up in the garbage. Really.  The moral to that one is simply to read the directions. If the directions on the yeast packet and directions for the dough in the book are not for the same volume, you will  have trouble if you don't re-adjust things.  Trust me.

Adjusting for adjustments, the dough came together the second time.  Before long, the kneading was done and it was in the bowl so it could rise.  I was still quite a bit unsure about what I had created, as it just didn't seem right. Mind you, I had NO IDEA what right is as I have never made dough before.  

Yeasts, those  awesome little fungi that gobble up sugar and fart carbon dioxide, really do quite a job.  After an hour in the warm bowl, the dough had doubled in size. Reports that I had this much excitement about the living yeasts are over-exaggerated, but it was still neat to know that a microbe was gonna help me make a pizza. Biochemistry is sooooo cool.

Before long, parsley, cheese, garlic, bread crumbs and butter where stuffed into portobello mushroom caps.   Before slipping it into the oven, here is what we were lookin' at....

Twenty minutes at 450 degrees on the stone brought me to this....

Getting it in and out of the oven was a snap with the pizza peel.  While I could not shoot it into the oven like a professional, it worked well.  If you try it, be sure to use a dash of corn meal on the pizza bottom and peel to make it slide easily.  

After getting it out the oven (and snapping the silly photo), I realized the pizza....my precious little pizza that I cared for and nurtured for hours....was ill.....

Now, you might think "Oh, I get it! It has a yeast infection!"  (ba-dum-dum). No.  Far worse.  It was more like...

Elephantiasis....

Sure, the crust was a bit thicker than expected (like half an inch thick), but something went awry and parts of the crust were nearly 2 inches thick.  That is a damn thick pizza. 

So, as I sit here and type this, I still have NO IDEA what I did wrong.  The cookbook suggests that you mix the dough, let it rise, deflate it and let is "rest".  I did not do that as most dough recipes make no reference to letting it sit twice.  (I did, however, find a recipe where a fellow puts his in the fridge for the night....)   Maybe I didn't flatten it out enough when I shaped the pizza in the first place.  Who knows.

I do know by the time the pizza was ready to be processed as leftovers and bagged for the fridge, I was using the pizza wheel to cut entire chunks of crust off.  I felt like the surgeons you sometimes see on those medical shows carving chunks of tumors off of stricken patients....

All my whining aside, I WILL make this recipe again. It was delicious.  That said, I will not stuff the mushrooms.  It was a bit too hard to eat, as you might imagine.  You get a mouthful of mushroom...or not.  Next time, the 'shrooms will be chopped and spread around while the bread crumb mixture simply sprinkled (which I did anyway).  It'll be fine, I'm sure.

Speaking of fine, one can't experiment with a new, wild recipe without trying a new wild beer, right?  Ruthless Rye (#1168) from Sierra Nevada Brewing Company was a perfect match!  Red to the eye and with a crisp, peppery aroma (apparently from the rye), the hop character on the tongue and finish went hand in hand with earthiness of the mushrooms on the pizza. 4 out of 5!

So there you have it.  A excellent meal, in my humble opinion.  Perfect? No.  Did I gain valuable experience in the art of pizza making?  Yes.  Did I pair the pizza (a pizza I never previously had, mind you) with a fitting beer. Hell yes.  

My culinary skills are expanding, people.  My pizza doughs just "knead" a little work.....