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Tag Archives: breakfast

Pizza rat.  I’ve been told that this is actually me in rat form.

I continue to make pizza.  Because…why not?  You already know of my excessive fondness for pizza.  And now, I have expanded the pizza making to the early morning hours!  Huzzah!  While I think cold or reheated (via skillet) pizza is a wonderful breakfast, I’ve decided that I should also have the option of having fresh pizza at breakfast.  And so, breakfast pizza!

Thus, I recently made a breakfast pizza consisting of a garlicky olive oil, fresh asparagus tossed in that same garlicky olive oil and some grated parm, grape tomatoes, fresh mozz, and fresh eggs cracked on top.  Why?  Because I had all of that in my fridge already as well as pizza dough and I needed to get rid of some of it.  Also, pizza.  Duh.

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The pizza dough was a no-knead dough recipe as the last pizza post and it was unfortunately still a tad salty for my taste.  The salt didn’t magically disappear.  You know, as salt does sometimes (it does not).

But since I knew that crust would be somewhat salty, I purposely did not season any of the toppings with other than some fresh ground pepper.  I baked it on a quarter sheet pan, because I assembled it the night before, at 450degF.  The results were good…but soggy.  There were a lot of toppings and I wasn’t baking directly on the stone so the crust didn’t really have a chance to really get nice and crisp.  It tasted really good, still a bit on the salty side, but really good with the garlic and the asparagus and the runny egg.  But the texture…

I did think I could do better, so here’s attempt #2.  Attempt #2 was probably 4 days after originally making the dough.  The crust was definitely the most flavorful of the bunch.

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I used the same toppings but this time I brushed the dough with some olive oil and garlic and then parbaked the crust at 550degF for about 8 min.  I did forget to dock the dough and it puffed up a bit.  I had to try and work around that to make sure the eggs didn’t slide off.  Remember to dock the dough, guys.

Anyway, after removing the crust from the oven, I loaded up the toppings, arranged the eggs so they didn’t immediately slide off, and put it back in the oven for another 10 min to get the crust nice and browned.  The problem with leaving it in the oven for 10min was that the eggs were overdone.  They were gel set as opposed to runny.  Still delicious, but I think 8 min would be about the max you could leave the eggs in the oven and still have them be kind of runny.  So I had good crust but sub-par eggs this time.  There will need to be attempt #3.

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For some reason, I have an excessive amount of tomato paste. So much tomato paste. The most tomato paste. So I’ve been trying to find things to make to get rid of this stockpile of tomato paste. I made ketchup one time and it is seriously some of the best ketchup I’ve ever had. And I’m not really a big ketchup fan. But this post is not about ketchup. It is about shakshuka.

Shakshuka is a dish of most likely Middle Eastern/North African origin, often accredited to Tunisia. It consists of eggs poached in a sauce of tomatoes, onions, chilies, and some cumin. It’s delicious. Really great breakfast. So I made some in hopes to get rid of some tomato paste.

I technically didn’t make shakshuka, I guess. I made something inspired by it. Because along with the tomato paste and tomatoes that I was getting rid of, I wanted to get rid of some sherry. There is no sherry, or any other alcohol, in shakshuka. But there are alcohol soluble flavors in tomatoes and I had alcohol that I wanted to get rid of. Soooo…in it went.

In the end, my tomato base involved a bell pepper, (chopped), half an onion (chopped), 5-6 cloves of garlic (minced), as many tomatoes as I wanted to get rid of (chopped), a splash of sherry, as much water as I needed to get the consistency I wanted, a large handful of fresh spinach, a small fistful of crushed red pepper (I like spicy food), and salt, pepper, sugar, cumin, and paprika to taste. I poached two eggs in the sauce toward the end of the simmering time. And I’ve served it with both waffled tots and toasted sourdough.

And it’s so good.

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