by A.J. Coltrane
The arugula is going nuts right now. It looks like it’s trying to bolt, so we did what we always do when something may be threatening to bolt – we whacked many of the plants’ leaves and consumed them. “Let’s see you go to seed now!” (It does seem to slow the bolting process. Maybe.)
Pizza with arugula as the star of the show. I think it’s relatively photogenic:
The Very Loose Recipe (I initially dumped in too much water, so I added more flour to make a 60% hydration. Hence the weird math.):
240g AP flour, 144g water, 5g kosher salt (2% of the flour weight, which is normal), 1 tsp instant yeast, 2-3 TBP olive oil.
I was pretty careless during production I guess — the large amount of oil was a screwup as well. (And no, I wasn’t having any beverages at that time.)
Preheat the oven to 500F.
Stretch the dough was very thinly over a pizza pan. (I used a perforated pizza pan for baking.)
Spread red sauce very thinly over the dough.
Cook for 7 minutes.
Add the goat cheese and cook another 6 minutes.
Remove from the oven and top with the parmesan and arugula.
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I was pleasantly surprised at how good arugula is on pizza! I never thought – “Salad greens on pizza, what a great idea!” But really, the peppery bite of the arugula with the salt from the parmesan, fat from the goat cheese and acid from the red sauce — it was really pretty good. The extra oil in the very thin dough made for a very crackery pizza.
The is the 24th “pizza/flatbread” post. Whew. I got to looking back through them – the photography is always… what it is. A couple of previous favorites:
The March 2011 “Pizza Dough” post. I scaled nine different recipes to a common denominator of flour volume. That was fun to do, if a little tedious at times. (No photos on this one, though Google loves it.)
The February 2013 “Heart Shaped Pizza“. Awwwww. I gave the post the evocative name – “Another Six Minute Pizza”. I’m such a romantic.
July 2012 – “Leftover Calzone Ingredients? More Pizza!” Featuring one “ok” pizza picture, one that’s better than that (the lower picture, in my opinion is the better one), and one very good picture of “the princess”.
And finally, the Super Bowl “Pizza Bianca – A Sizable Super Bowl Sendup“. It’s a 16″ x 22” grilled flatbread that was served at our Super Bowl party. It was a “big” hit.
Ugh. I always feel like I need to wash my hands after puns like that.
FlatbreadGarden 
Nice. Very pretty! I really need to try your dough recipe a couple times, to get that onto my go-to list.
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Oh, and I’ve used arugula in lots of “low cook” recipes. I put them in my hum-bow filling, and they do well in ravioli. Overall a superb plant with enough body to handle some heat and a nice flavor.
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The pepperyness is a nice surprise. I think we’ll be growing a lot more of it in the future, just not May – July.
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Oh, and could you give more info on the pizza dough, like how much rise-time?
Puhleeez?
k
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This one was a quick one — only a couple of hours rise time with 7-8 minutes of kneading at low speed. Interestingly, it was really extensible. Maybe the warm weather really accelerates the enzymes, or there’s another factor that plays into the stretchiness. I’ll need to look into the effect of temperature on extensibility. It may be that I simply didn’t knead it long enough and the gluten didn’t develop as much as usual. I was trying to be nice to the Kitchenaid when it was ~80F in the house. I’ve already taken it apart once due to (possible) heat issues, which was plenty.
The other thing with the short knead time — I always have Peter Reinhart in the back of my head telling my not to oxidize the dough by over-working it. I’m basically *always* going to err on the side of under-kneading. Maybe I’ll “outgrow” that at some point. Early teachers can make a strong impression on the formation of a “style”. (Not that I have a “style”, but you get the idea.)
In a related note, I’ve been running into some interesting stuff on the “00” flour. I need some more looking around before it’s a post, but basically it sounds like “00” flour is intended to be really loose on purpose. They even test for it in the factory.
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