Thursday, February 08, 2007

I have blogged about this pizza before, and have to laugh at my "you may want to make two" suggestion. You WILL want to make two, and you will probably still not have leftovers. It is, almost four years later, still my signature pizza, and still probably my all time most favorite thing to eat, period, no exaggeration. In fact, I cannot look at the pictures of it too much right now because it is making me sad that I do not have some right now.

I do now use Peter Reinhardt's recipe for traditional Neopolitan pizza dough, because it is easier (although I am not sure it is as ideally suited to this pretty hefty mix of toppings).

I mention it now because I learned an important and valuable lesson about onions last night. I usually caramelize my onions in a regular 10" Calphalon anodized alumninum skillet, but last night my 12" copper pan was already out, so I figured why not just caramelize some extra onions and reduce the leftovers into an onion jam?

Why not indeed? Because all the caramelization that was suppose to happen on the onions happened on the stainless steel. Fortunately, a lot of it was cleaned up when I cooked the leftover onions down and deglazed the pan with some vinegar, but man, was it still a mess to clean. (I say that like I cleaned it, when in fact I just owe my husband a trillion apologies.)

Anyway, now I have onion jam and a ton of leftover prosciutto and am at a loss for what to do with it- I kind of just want to make more pizza but will likely instead make sandwiches.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Next time, just deglaze as you go. I use a dry sherry, usually, and as soon as I notice a golden crust start to form on the pan I deglaze. The I let the onions keep cooking down and deglaze again as neccesary. I have never used anything but my stainless all-clad to carmelize onions, they drilled that into us at school, I will have to try the anodized non-stick next time and see what happens.

Hannah said...

Excellent to know. I was planning on upgrading my everyday workhorse skillet from a (very battered) 10 inch anodized Calphalon to a 12 inch All Clad Master Chef, but the onion situation would have been a deal breaker.

Anonymous said...

For the last 6 months I have been making and jarring a big mess of caramelized onions about every month and then just using a scoop of them whenever I would start a recipe with sauteed onions. In terms of saved time and effort this is WAY up there for me on the short cuts list. And now reading this entry reminds me that I should use them for pizza too. (Having a non-pig eater in the house means we make it vegetarian or with something else salty to replace the prosciutto -- I like anchovies -- but it is always excellent.)