Make Friends with your Baker

Word Dan on bringing out the baker in all those dedicated to the delicious. It's all about sustainability these days and while urban delicacies such as squirrel and pigeon can satisfy your needs, they are best suited for hungry lumbermen deep in the woods and crack bums from a neighborhood near you.

Back to the bread. Being a slave to the corporate world and all, I'm all about building strategic relationships. I like to leave some things to the pros, and focus on my strengths. Tempted to drop some econ. terms on you like comparative advantage, I'll sum it up to this: bakers do it best, and can offer me much of the pleasure of hand made dough without the sloppiness and white stains that often come with it...

Having a talk with a baker I visit regularly, he mentioned that he could make one big, freshly risen pizza dough, clear bag and all (see Dan's post on making bread) for the low low price of 2.50.

After some careful research, I decided to do two things that were foreign to me: Grill a pizza with fresh dough & incorporate raw eggs and letting them cook through right on the pizza. Being completely inept at laying out pizza dough, my creation looked straight up retarded. Fortunately the delicious factor more than made up for my less than optimal form on this one.

Here are the participants in this dish:
Pizza dough
Pizza sauce (canned does just fine)
An onion, cut up real fine with a sharp ass knife*
3 big ham slices
4 Huevos (Mexican for eggs)
Parmesan, cut into petals
Basil leaves

*No joke, read all the techniques about cutting an onion and not crying you want, the sharper your knife, the less you damage the onion and release all the delicious juices that are meant to stay inside, and most of all: the less you cry

For starters, the dough. Most of the work is done for you if you buy fresh dough, but you still have the opportunity to fuck this up, so listen up.
Let it get to room temperature if you are freshly busting it out of the fridge. Lay down some flour and work it to get it spread out. Tossing it in the air Italian style, I found out, is much harder than it looks on TV. So here's my advice. Hold it from the top with one hand, and slightly pull down with the other. Keep rotating the dough with both hands, stretching from the bottom. Think of a rapper cranking his wheel. For extra steez, mean mug a bit. Drive slow homie.



Before going any further, get your grill ready. One side real high, the other on low. As it's heating up, toss your onions and cook them down in butter and or oil to desired softness.

Make sure your grill is real clean and wipe some olive oil on the high side. Toss that doughy goodness right on there. In about a minute, you should have a slightly bubbly, golden on the bottom pizza dough. Pull it off.



Lay the dough down on a cutting board, COOKED SIDE UP. Mash your knuckle into the four key areas where you will eventually put the eggs, forming a slight divot to ensure less runniness. Toss on the sauce, ham and onions, in that specific order on top of the COOKED SIDE OF THE PIZZA. Don't make me tell you which side again.



Crack the eggs on there. The onions will absorb what the eggs release and from there, a match made in heaven. Lightly top with Parmesan and basil. Put in on the low heat side, as far away from high heat as possible and close the lid. The BBQ should know what to do from there. The eggs and dough should cook in roughly the same amount of time, less than ten minutes I'd say.

And there we have it. If all of Ottawa were to try this, I'd give Pizza Pizza one week before it's looking to refinance its loans and ignoring calls from creditors.

-Dave, Dedicated to Delicious