Grilled Chicken Parmesan Pizza

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of posting a recipe for a delicious savory crust pizza. This week’s new recipe uses the same crust (or any crust you like, really, whether home-made or purchased) in a different way: Grilled Chicken Parmesan Pizza. Rolling the dough out thinner than for a baked pizza, and grilling it rather than baking it, results in a crisper crust that combines wonderfully with any of your favorite toppings. Here we’re making it with a chicken parmesan topping, crowned with parmesan and one of the truly great cooking cheeses: fontina. (The parmesan is grated, and the fontina is shaved into thin slices with a cheese slicer.) The saucing method – grilling tomatoes till soft and then mashing them onto the dough and adding an herb or two – is borrowed from a classic method for saucing margarita pizza.


A note about the grilling part: Although grilled pizza is generally made on an outdoor gas or charcoal grill, my weapon of choice for such things is a stove-top grill pan, and this recipe was prepared on that basis. If you prefer an outdoor grill, heat it to about medium hot and the recipe should work just as well.


Now let’s grill some pizza! This recipe makes 4 single-serving pizzas.


Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.


Blanch 3 large tomatoes (beefsteak or similar) for about 1 minute, rinse in cold water till they’re cool enough to handle easily, and remove the peels. Slice the tomatoes into ½” thick slices, and set aside.


Dry 1-1/2 pounds of chicken tenders or thin-cut breasts with paper towels. Brush each side with olive oil, and season both sides with salt, pepper and fresh thyme.


Put the sliced tomatoes into a hot grill pan lightly coated with olive oil. Season with salt, pepper, and few drops of white wine vinegar and heat until just soft, turning over half-way. Set the tomatoes aside. Scrape any tomato residue off of the pan with a wooden spoon.


Place the chicken on the grill pan. Cook until the chicken is browned and cooked through, turning over half-way. Set the chicken aside. After it has rested for a few minutes, cut the chicken into bite size pieces.


Divide a pizza dough (large enough to make a normal 16” pizza) into 4 equal parts on a floured surface, and gently roll each out to about 1/8” thickness.


Working one dough at a time, lightly brush one side of the each dough with olive oil and place on the grill pan, oiled side down.


As the dough cooks, air pockets may form as shown in the photo at right. This is a good thing; it means your dough will have a light crispness.


When the dough is browned, after about 2 minutes, brush oil on the top side and turn the dough over.


Immediately place ¼ of the roasted tomatoes on the dough, crush them and spread them around as a sauce. Sprinkle ¾ teaspoon of chopped fresh oregano on the dough.


Put ¼ of the chicken, 1/3 cup of shaved fontina cheese, 3 tablespoons of grated fresh parmesan, 1/2 teaspoon of chopped fresh basil, ½ teaspoon of chopped fresh parsley and ¼ teaspoon of butter substitute on the dough. (If you like some heat on your pizza, you can also add a pinch of dried red pepper flakes.) Cover with a large bowl and cook for about another 2 minutes until the cheese is melted.


Keep the finished pizza warm in the oven while cooking the remaining pizzas as described above. For an extra special touch, drizzle each pizza with olive oil before serving.


And there you have it: a special grilled treat your whole family will enjoy. (At least my whole family enjoyed it; I assume yours will too.) If you’d like a cookbook-style, notebook-ready copy of this or any other Kissing the Cook recipe, send me a note with your e-mail address and I’ll send it along.


See you next week with a special family recipe from my favorite cook. Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Enjoying a Cold One

In the summertime, there's nothing like relaxing with something cold and refreshing. Since some folks don't hold alcohol very well (which is code for, since I don't hold alcohol very well), I often rely on the delicious, tomatoey tang of the classic cold soup from Mexico (where they really know what a hot summer is), home-made gazpacho. If you've had good gazpacho, you know just what I mean. If you haven't, well, today's your lucky day. (This also addresses a promise I made after last week's post to write about something that is both low-fat and not heavily burdened by carbs.)

The recipe, which makes four meal-size portions or six to eight appetizer size portions, follows. As you'll see, the overall approach involves dividing the chopped vegetables into thirds, one of which is pureed to a fine consistency, the second of which is ground to a slightly larger, coarser consistency, and the third of which is used in its basic chopped state without being pureed at all. The resulting combination of textures adds a wonderful dimension to the tasty tartness of the basic soup. The only thing that would make it even better would be to top it with fresh, home-made croutons, so we will. (I have to get some carbs in there, you know.)

The recipe, as you would expect, involves a lot of tomatoes. I use fresh, since this is primarily a summer dish and it's easy to get - or even grow - good tomatoes. (I've never made this with canned tomatoes, but if you do and it works, let me know!) For this reason, a couple of special notes about the tomatoes are in order.

First, I like to use plum tomatoes. In addition to having a delightful taste, their oblong shape makes it easy to seed them by cutting them in half; round tomatoes need to be cut into quarters for seeding. That may not make much of a difference if you're using five tomatoes, but if you're starting with five pounds of tomatoes, as you do with this dish, a few seconds saved on each tomato quickly add up. (If this reminds you even a little of that oft-told story of why a certain famous cartoon mouse has four fingers on each hand instead of five, it's not coincidental. That's where I got the idea.)

Second, you'll note the recipe calls for the tomatoes not only to be seeded, but also peeled. For any readers who are new to peeling tomatoes, it's easier than it sounds. The trick is to blanch them in boiling water for about a minute; once they cool off enough to handle, you'll find the skins remove easily. (I like to quicken the process by blanching the tomatoes in batches of three or four; while each batch is blanching, there's enough time to take the previous batch out of a cooling bath (think blanch-and-shock) and peel them before the newly blanched batch takes their place in the cold water.

A third special note, this one about the red onion you'll be using. Red onions have great flavor but tend to have a nasty bite. You can decrease the onion's bite, while still keeping the flavor, by soaking it in water for five minutes prior to using.

Enough talk...let's make some gazpacho!

As with most things involving tomatoes, use non-metallic bowls.
Begin by peeling and seeding five pounds of tomatoes as described above. When they're done, cut them into bite size pieces. Place the pieces into a pot, slowly bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer. After simmering the tomatoes for 15 minutes, stirring often to prevent them from sticking to pot, press them through a food mill (or let them cool and then crush them with your hands), putting the juice back into the pot and keeping the tomato meat for used later in the recipe. Boil the juice for about five minutes, stirring often.
    
While the tomatoes are cooking, combine in a large bowl 1 chopped red onion; 1 peeled, seeded and chopped cucumber; 1 seeded and chopped green or red bell pepper; and 2 chopped stalks of celery. Separate about one-third of the mixture and put it aside. To the remaining two-thirds, 2 tablespoons of chopped, fresh cilantro;2 tablespoons of chopped, fresh chives; and the tomato meat you put aside earlier. Then add 2 minced garlic cloves, 1/4 cup of red wine vinegar, 1/4 cup of olive oil, the juice of 1 lime, 2 teaspoons of sugar, 4 teaspoons of salt, 2 teaspoons of fresh-ground black pepper, and 1 teaspoon of hot sauce.

Mix all these ingredients well and divide that mixture in half.

Using a food processor, finely puree one of the halves and coarse-puree the other half. Once that's done, combine them with the chopped vegetables you put aside earlier, add the tomato liquid you heated, and mix until everything is combined.

You're just about done! Just put hot mixture into a non-metallic storage container, cover tightly and refrigerate overnight to let the soup cool and the flavors blend.
Of course, you'll also need croutons to go with your new gazpacho.

To make the croutons, put 4 roughly chopped cloves of garlic into 1/2 cup of olive oil. Let it rest for as long as possible, to give the garlic a chance to infuse the oil. (If you do this before you start the gazpacho as noted above, the garlic will have time to infuse the oil while you're processing the tomatoes.)

While you're preheating your oven to 250 degrees, brush both sides of three or four slices of firmly-textured bread with the garlic-infused oil. Cut the bread into squares about 1/2" on each side, and spread them out on a baking sheet. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour until the bread is at the desired level of crispness, turning the baking pan half-way through to heat the croutons evenly. When they're done, sprinkle them with fresh parmesan, put in a sealed bag or container, and store until you're ready to use them to top your gazpacho!
For a cookbook style, notebook-ready copy of this or any other recipe from this site, just drop me a line and I'll get it right off to you.


Thanks for visiting! Till next week, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

The Raviolo and I

Raviolo: a word so obscure, even Microsoft Word's spell-checking software doesn’t recognize it. Its better know plural, of course, is ravioli. By either name, though, this wonderful cheesy-stuffed pasta pillow is not only delicious to eat; it’s also easy and fun to make. If you’ve never made it (or any other fresh pasta) before, I invite you to try now; you’re in for a real treat, not to mention a real sense of accomplishment once you’ve seen and tasted what you made. And you won’t need a pasta machine. (I didn’t even own one until earlier this week, but that story’s a future post.)


My introduction to home-made ravioli was a pasta class I took several years ago at the culinary arts school of a local community college.  The pasta chef teaching the course excitedly brought out the school’s brand new restaurant-grade pasta machine, an impressive multi-gadgeted electric device only about the size of a household toaster but costing a couple of thousand dollars. Or at least it was impressive until the machine started shutting down from the motor overheating every time someone tried to use it. A few in the class decided to stay with it, enduring a continuous cycle of press, overheat, wait for it to cool down and then try turning it on again. I opted for the other type of pasta maker, the round wooden kind that never overheats or breaks down, also known as a rolling pin. That’s one of the most encouraging things about making pasta; people did it centuries before any of the fancy kitchen equipment we have today was invented.


Both the pasta dough and the filling are easy to make. The dough described follows a traditional recipe. The filling features Fontina cheese. I wasn’t familiar with it until recently, when I heard Bobby Flay make an off-handed remark on a Throwdown rerun about Fontina being one of the best cheeses there is. Once I heard that, I had to get some and find out what he was talking about. My first taste of its wonderful Italian aura immediately screamed ravioli.


The dough for about two dozen ravioli (more or less, depending on how big you make them) begins in a large bowl into which you put 2 cups of all-purpose flour and ½ teaspoon of salt. Mix them until they’re combined and then form a well in the middle of the flour-pile. Into the well, put three egg-substitute eggs (or, if you like, three real eggs), and a teaspoon of olive oil. Mix them together using your hand, first combining the wet ingredients with the inner-most part of the flour pile, and gradually working your way outward until all the flour is incorporated to form a dough.

[Before we go further, I must add the following remark. There’s a good chance you’ve seen someone make pasta dough as described above, except without the bowl; in other words, with the flour piled directly on the kitchen counter. That’s the most authentic way, but it’s hard to do with only two cups of flour without making a mess once you start mixing in the wet ingredients. If you really want to try it, I suggest waiting until you’re making at least a double-batch of dough.]

Knead the dough for four to five minutes until it’s smooth and elastic, flouring your work surface as necessary during the kneading. After kneading, cut the dough ball into quarters. Wrap each quarter in plastic wrap and let them rest for 20 minutes while you mix the filling.
The filling, though delicious, couldn't be simpler to make.


Just put the following ingredients into a bowl and mix well until they’re combined: 1 cup of Ricotta cheese, 3/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese, 3/4 cup of fresh grated Fontina cheese, 1 egg-substitute egg, 2 tablespoons of fresh chopped parsley, ½ teaspoon of garlic powder, and salt and pepper to taste.

So now you’ve got your dough, and you’ve got your filling. Next stop: home-made ravioli!


Beginning with the first quarter-portion of dough (and keeping the remaining portions covered to keep them from drying out), roll the dough out on a well-floured surface into something as close as you can to a square about 12” on each side and 1/16” thick. Using a cooking cutter, cut out as many pieces as you can. (Remember, each raviolo will require two of the pieces.) Place a generous teaspoon of filling on the centers of half of the pieces; using your finger, coat around the edges of those pieces with egg-substitute (or a real egg, beaten) and place an identical dough shape on top. Press the edges down onto the egg with your finger, then with a fork to seal. Done right, the egg will keep the ravioli from opening up later in the cooking water.
And that's it! As you finish the ravioli, either put them aside (if you’re going to cook them right away), or place them on a baking sheet covered with parchment for freezing later. In either case, cover them to prevent drying out while you repeat the above with each of the remaining pasta quarters.

Remember that fresh pasta generally cooks faster than the packaged kind. The ravioli will generally cook in about 7 minutes, but check them often for doneness. If you choose instead to freeze them, put the ravioli in the freezer on the baking sheet first; once they’re frozen, put them together in a plastic bag for storage. (If you put the ravioli together in the bag before they’re frozen, they’ll likely stick together.)



Once the ravioli are cooked, all that remains is to top them off with your favorite sauce and some parmesan, and to enjoy the taste of fresh-made ravioli – and the fantastic feeling of having made them yourself!
For a cookbook style, notebook-ready copy of this or any other recipe from this site, just drop me a line and I’ll get it right off to you. (I also hope to get a video of this recipe finished and available on You-Tube soon...stay tuned!)


Thanks for visiting! Till next week, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)