Want a nice spicy and sweet pizza with all the lusciousness of melting cheese curd, salty and fatty bacon cut with the welcoming bitterness of raddichio del Traviso?

Then here it is-just in time for the snows of January.

I sell an amazing amount of this combination on the weekends at the Avalanche Pizza shoppe at the Athens Farmers Market and sometimes combine it with gorgonzola, (when I’m feeling aggressive,) or I sometimes use dried cherries with the chipotle onion. My favorite way to cook it is as a stuffed bread. I’ll fold the bread in a football shape, fill it with the filling and top it with cilantro and aged cheddar then roll it up into a batard shape and slit the top. When it is pulled from the oven it looks like a belly that has been…slit. I call it the Mexican Cartel Snitch Bread.

Above is the batch I did this weekend. I formed some smallish local spelt schiacciata with asiago, fresh spinach and the chipolte-onion-bluberry mix then added fresh curd afterwards.

Recipe:

1 dough ball from Easy Dough Recipe

1 medium to large onion

three chipotle peppers from a can with adobo sauce

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 cup dried blueberry

5-8 leaves of raddichio del Traviso (regular raddichio will do in a pinch) slice thin or thick depending on what you like.

1 rasher of thick cut bacon cut into thin batons

5-7 ounces of fresh curd torn into chunks

preheat the oven to 450 degrees with a heavy upturned cookie sheet on the middle shelf.

Toss onions with olive oil in oven proof pan. Tear the chipotle peppers up and add to the pan with a small amount of adobo sauce (1 tbspn.) Heat in the oven for 12 to 16 minutes tossing halfway to incorporate flavors. Remove from oven and toss dried blueberries then put back in oven for 5 minutes until onions are limp. Remove and toss again then put into a small container and cover to let the blueberries rehydrate with the steam.

Take one dough ball from the Easy Dough Recipe and form a disc. Place either on parchment or a pizza screen the chipotle mix on the dough then place the sliced raddichio, the bacon then the fresh curd. Bake for 12 to 16 minutes or call a professional like Joel Fair (below) and he’ll come by and cook it for you!

     This Pizza Bianca is different from the 6-foot monsters made in Rome, Italy but tasty nonetheless. My staff and I ate the rest.

I promised to do a blog post about how to make pizza bianca and, I guess, this should be considered a “blomise.” After an earlier blog post on natural yeast, I’ve had alot of comments about the time it takes to obtain a strong enough levening agent to use in bread or pizza dough so… I’ve decided to combine the two.

 I have found that to raise a hearty strain of wild yeast as fast as possible from the environmnet without other contaminants takes about four to five days. Just use fruit and filtered water and wash your hands before handling either.

Maturation of a natural starter is a wait-and-see effort. But the starter is only the beginning. It can take up to 20 days of feeding for a strong, fragrant and relevant mother to take hold. (why 20 you idiot?? I can do it in…) When you take your time and don’t push things, your  starter will respond better.

 I bake hundreds of breads each week and, like kids at differing stages of development, these large plastic bins with goo made from my starters start to talk to me. Some scream for attention early,(i.e. they need a nice bake in the oven.) Others are more mellow and coast for a long period before displaying the fruity, aggressive gas and enzematic activity associated with a great pre-ferment. I’ve even screamed at my staff, ”Who put the fruit juice in with this starter?” and, after finding out that it had naturally evolved into this wonderful floral goo, felt like a dad who watching his kid kick some ass at a wrestling match.

 I use a cold-maturation for my pre-ferments. This enables the yeasts to activate slower and I think, because I am using old grains like spelt, coaxes more flavor out of the whole grains. Thus, when I plan to bake, (which is every day.) I start a by feeding spelt and high protein flours to my pre-ferment that was made with the natural mother (10 pecent starter to 90 percent high gluten flour spelt and water. Then I feed twice a day for a week with the dough near the pizza ovens, (60-75 degrees.) I throw out or recycle 80 percent of the preferment and add another 80 percent flour and water, mixing with my hands. At this temp, the yeast is in it’s perfect environment to eat, eat, eat, then turn to an almost lifeless soup. After the week, I mix one more time and retard the pre ferment in my walk-in for a much needed rest for a few days.

For bake day, I take my pre ferment out for about five hours. My initial mix starts with the “Autolyse” method of mixing just the flour and water in a Stephan VCM (vertical-cutter-mixer… and yes, this is appalling to most “serious” bakers but…the hell with them- you gotta work with what you got!) I wait about 25 minutes to mix the yeast and salt in. This process greatly enhances the gluten net.

 I sometimes use a small amount of diastatic malt from Ohio’s Berry Farms and salt with a hydration of either 40 to 60 pecent depending upon what I am baking.  I also use a Pate’ Fermentee, or old dough to the mix. The little bit of malt helps with the overall taste and resulting crust as my dough retards in a cold environment for 12 to sometimes over 48 hours before baking. After this fast mix for up to three whole minutes, I bench the mix for a rest using the windowpane test

I hope you can learn some stuff from this but, just remember, I am just a pizza guy and baker who has pretty much learned by the seat of my pants, but if you want some books that are great, try Peter Reinharts “The Bread Bakers Apprentice” or “My Bread” by Jim Lahey, or “Tartine Bread.”

Just remember, you learn better from mistakes than from perfection and if you really mess things up, just lie and tell your guests its a “rustic” bread recipe from a lost Celtic tribe off the coast of Idaho. Just don’t blame me, I’m just a goon. Here’s a video of this pizza bianca with a killer topping.

Here is the recipe for the cilantro topping:

These were the Na’an that I attempted. The cilantro topping was great but the dough suc…errrr… didn’t quite meet my expectations.

2 Jalepeno’s

1 red ancho chili

5 cloves garlic

One bunch cilantro

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon cumin

salt and pepper to taste

Place all in a blender, food processor or bowl with an immersion blender and blend together. Hold under refrigeration to let flavors meld for four hours or longer. Place on Pizza Bianca as shown in video

 ”These people have not only given up on a job, they’ve given up on everything… the kids suffer the most.”

On the way back to my pizzeria, I listened to two pundits talk about the balance of wealth in the United States and felt my blood pressure rising. It remided my about a story I had just read from La Bonne Table, written by Ludwig Bemelmans in 1953.

The Spaghetti Train

I came into the dining car late. Patrizzi was finished with his breakfast- that is, with the orange juice, toast, coffee and egg part of it. The other passengers had left. The crew seated at the end of the car had faces like wax figures in the bright sunlight.

Patrizzi lifted his nose and sniffed. “Spaghetti,” he said. ”Real Spaghetti?”

“Yes, said the steward, “we are eating now. Back there the cooks are from Napoli.”

“I’d very much like some of your spaghetti,” said Patrizzi. “Enough for me and my friend here.”

The steward said the cooks would be delighted.

The spaghetti came, cooked with butter and garlic and with a handful of chopped parsley strewn over it.

“Some people condemn the Italian kitchen,” said Patrizzi, “and also the French. They say they can’t eat the food on account of the garlic. Now there is no good cooking except with garlic-but in the hands of a bad cook it is poisonous. It must be used with extrreme care. The most reckless are the English; once they take to cooking with garlic they use it so freely it’s impossible even for an Italian to eat it. For example, Somerset Maugham once served truffles wrapped in bacon, a very good dish. The truffles profit by the flavor of the bacon, the bacon is enhanced by the truffles, and I like it. But at the luncheon I bit into a truffle and inside wis a whole clove of garlic. Both the truffle and bacon were ruined. And the garlic, which, incidentally, was also in the chicken we were served and on the toast that came with the cheese and in the salad- it was so predominant that the whole meal was ruined. Now take this spaghetti-simple, ultra-simple- but with a bouquet like the finest wine.”

The train had stopped at a small station to wait for a clear track. Outside the window were cars of a freight train. The boxcar doors were open, and inside were benches on which sat people most of whom had no shoes and all of whose eyes were fixed on the spaghetti and the bottle of wine on our table. I said that it seemed to me that in Italy there was a belief that God had made some people rich and others poor, and that the tragedy was that not only the rich but the poor also believed it, and consequently it would never change.

Patrizzi answered, “And don’t you think this is as it should be and a very good arrangement? Have you ever seen an Italian peasant envious of those who have fine cares, or horses, or jewels? No, they admire those things, knowing they can never have them for themselves. They adopt a detachment, like people who go to the theater, or to an art gallery to admire priceless paintings. They are glad to know that these things exist, but they also know they never can own them. Just from looking at these things they devrive a pleasure that possession never brings, because possession means worry.” He snapped his finger. “More,” he shouted back to the steward.