3 - Delicious Brick Oven Pizza (without a brick oven!)

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Welcome back to the podcast. This is Michelle. Hope you guys are having a good week. I am running on about four hours of sleep at this moment. And my body does not deal well with very little sleep. I went for several months when our youngest was brand new and did not get much sleep at all for about 18 months. And...

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My health really took a turn at that point, but that's another story for another day. So I hope I'm coherent in this one, but this is the only opportunity I've had lately when the house was quiet and I was by myself to record a podcast. So we're just going to go for it. All right, so I had asked our Instagram

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family. And if you guys aren't following us on Instagram, please do so. We're just Biscuits and Gravy podcast on Instagram. That is where I will be posting more real-time things and, you know, pictures of what I'm cooking or restaurants that we're visiting or, you know, places that we're on vacation and that kind of thing. So it would be really cool.

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I know to see those more real time and not wait for a podcast episode to explain them. But I'm really excited also guys because I have set up a website for us and it's just biscuitsandgravypodcast.com and I'm really excited about it. It's looking really neat and efficient and it...

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it gives me a lot of space to create as well. So like I went in and we did the transcription for all of the episodes that we've done so far so people can read them if they don't wanna listen to them. So they read kind of like a blog post and I've also put in some pictures with those. So yeah, so it's kind of like a blog slash podcast website. You can actually listen to the podcast on that website as well. You don't have to go to...

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like a podcast app or anything like that. I'm also excited because we have reserve, we have our first reservation specifically for the purpose of the podcast. It is going to be a family vacation to Topsail Island but we have partnered with a a resort there that is going to host us for this and so I

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That's coming up in just a couple of weeks now. So we're super excited. The kids don't know. So that's another cool thing that I was able to do this year was to plan our little trips and vacations and not really tell anybody where we're going. Just tell them this is what you need to pack. Have it ready. This is the date that we're going. This is the date we're coming back. And then they really don't have a clue.

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where we're going, what we're doing, or anything like that. So that's kind of fun for me because the planning is like one of the most fun parts of the whole thing for me. So lots of fun things coming for the podcast. I'm getting really excited about it. I hope you guys are too. I love to hear from you guys over on Instagram. You guys are very interactive with my questions that I pose on there and I thank you for that because that really just encourages me and helps me to.

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know what you're interested in seeing and that kind of thing. So thank you so much. Alright so this episode is about one of our favorite meals brick oven pizza. Now I don't know if brick oven pizza is specifically southern. I would probably venture to say it is not. But it is one of our favorite things. And I did ask you guys on Instagram if you would like the recipe to this. And so

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overwhelming response was yes. And so here we are. I'm gonna give you my recipe. This recipe is adapted by...adapted from Jill Winger, the Prairie Homesteads cookbook. And I love her cookbook. I'll actually link this in the show notes so you guys can check out her cookbook. I cook through this cookbook a lot and

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really come from this cookbook. So, highly recommend. And she uses real ingredients. You know, no packaged things or whatever. And I really appreciate that because I get super frustrated. I don't know about y'all. I get super frustrated when

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I am a from scratch cook. I like to use real ingredients. I don't like to buy boxes or cans of things to put in my meals. I know that's convenient and fast, but it's not healthy. So when I open a cookbook and I get excited about a recipe or the picture associated with it or the title, and then I see it's got creme a souce soup.

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whatever. It's got a box of cake mix or a box, you know, I don't know. Whatever it is that they put in those cookbooks that are just convenience foods. I just that just that's one of my pet peeves. I just at that point I'm just a little angry and then I'm like, OK, let me go back to one of my tried and true, which is this cookbook. So all right. Brick oven pizza.

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Alright, so what you're gonna do is you're gonna start with a tablespoon of active dry yeast. Now all of the ingredients that I use in my cooking...

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I would say probably if we don't raise them on on our farm I get them from Azure Standard which is a it's a bulk organic food co-op and so if you want a good source of organic food

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that is delivered once a month to a drop location, then I highly recommend Azure Standard. I've been using them for probably three or four years now. And when my husband wasn't working a steady job over the last couple of years, we had to cut out our Azure Standard order.

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that's just the season of life we knew we were in and I grieved over it. It was like so sad not to be able to get those really good ingredients that I knew I could count on. So I will also link Azure Standard in the show notes as well as on the website so you guys can check them out and see where the drop location is that's closest to you. Highly recommend them. So let me get back to the recipe. A

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where I was going with that was that I get my active dry yeast from as your standard. You're going to put it in, I usually use a large bowl or a large pot. I usually use a pot, it's like a gallon size pot probably. Add 3 1 1 half cups of warm water to it.

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Let that start to incorporate, get bubbly. And then you're gonna add in a little over seven cups of flour. If you guys have followed me for any amount of time, you know I'm not much on measuring. So I very loosely follow her recipe where it has measurements on here. But use your own judgment. If the dough, when you get this all mixed together, the...

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the flour and the water and the yeast and then the salt that I'm about to tell you about. If you get it added together and incorporated and you're like, this looks really, really sticky or this looks really dry, then just adjust it. You know how to do this. Just add a little bit more water if it's too dry or add a little bit more flour if it looks too wet. So a little over seven cups of all purpose flour.

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and then a tablespoon of fine sea salt. So you're gonna mix all this together. What I like to do, she recommends, let's see, in this recipe she recommends two to three hours to let it sit and rise at room temperature or until it's bubbly. I usually let it go all day. I used to only let it rise for a couple of hours.

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and I noticed that when I baked the pizzas, the crust didn't rise a whole lot. I mean, it did a little bit, but not much. And my kids love, and I love to, like really, if we're gonna make a rising crust pizza, if it's not like a flat crust, then we really want it to be bubbly and puffy. Like that, it just makes, it's a pretty pizza, it's fun to eat.

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I think it just makes it chewy and softer. So I usually make this dough in the morning and then let it sit pretty much all day on the counter and just get bubbly. I put a little lid on it and it just lets it rise and get bubbly. And by the time I'm getting ready to cook it for supper, about 4 p.m., it's ready to go. You can actually, she says you can actually...

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You can use it immediately after two to three hours of letting it rise or you can refrigerate it up to seven days. She recommends letting the dough age in the refrigerator for at least one day because she thinks it improves the flavor, but I never do that. I think I might've done that like one time and I really couldn't tell any difference. So I just like to go ahead and use it.

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So once you're ready to use your dough, what I will do is, our kitchen table, I will lay out, this makes four pizzas. So I will lay out four pieces of parchment paper and I will divide the dough into four balls and I will flour my parchment paper, get a good amount of flour on my hands, maybe sprinkle a little bit more flour on the dough balls.

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and then I will take each one and form it into a pizza crust, a round pizza crust. Now they're not going to be perfectly round like this. I'm not a professional. I don't know how to make a perfectly round pizza crust, so I'm not even going to pretend to try. But they always come out really fun shaped and they're you know there's no problem with that. So um

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So I form those, I try not to work the dough too much because I think it takes out some of those bubbles that I'm looking for in the rise and the crust. And so as minimally as possible, I will flatten them out. I don't actually use a rolling pin for these either. You can try it that way if you want to, but I always just form the pizza crust with my hands. So.

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Then, I mean really the rest is up to you. That's the fun thing about pizza, you know, is that it can be so individualistic. You can use sauce, you can not use sauce. Well, I'll just tell you the way we normally do it. I have one kid, bless his heart, who is super picky. He does not like.

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cheese although he will eat cheese on pizza if we go out to eat or at the store or if someone else serves it to him. But if I make the pizza at home he refuses to eat the cheese. And this is good cheese. So I'm not really understanding that mentality but it is what it is and I know this. So he will actually eat parmesan cheese. So on his pizza he always gets his own pizza that he kind of shares with his brother whoever wants some but...

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We know this is specifically his. We will put sauce. So I get an organic tomato sauce and I will put that on the pizza and I will actually put it as close to the crust as possible. I don't like a lot of wasted space and a lot of my kids won't eat crust. So I like to just put the tomato sauce as far out as I possibly can.

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then I'll do like a little sprinkle of garlic salt all over the sauce and some oregano. and then I will start putting my toppings on. so for my son that's a little bit pickier he gets um sometimes he'll get salami and then parmesan cheese grated parmesan cheese um but lately he's been wanting like ham

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which I'm not super fond of because it's like Deli ham, but it is what it is, you know, you got to pick your battles But he wants ham and then Parmesan cheese on it. So that's what he gets For the other pizzas. I usually do salami lots and lots of cheese and Or just plain cheese pizzas where I'll put cheddar

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and mozzarella and parmesan. I've been getting these mozzarella sliced cheeses from these like little logs from Aldi for the last little bit and that is super helpful so that I'm not like pulling mozzarella apart or I'm not chopping it or anything it's already pre-cut. I know it's probably not the best option. I'm sure it's got preservatives in it and things but...

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but that's what I've been using just for convenience sake because it's super easy just to pull those little slices off and put them on your pizza. When your pizzas are ready to go, I should have mentioned this earlier, you're going to heat up your oven as high as it will go. My oven goes to 550. Let's see if Jill Winger... Yes, she said...

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to the highest temperature possible, which is usually 550 to 600. Mine's 550, so I will have preheated my oven with my round stone, my baking stone, in my oven for about 30 minutes. So the whole time I'm assembling the pizzas, the oven needs to be preheating or have already been preheated. She says it works better if you can have your oven preheated at least

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30 minutes before you start actually baking your pizzas. So this is the brick oven pizza without the brick oven method. What you'll do is you'll take your first pizza, you'll put it in there when it's preheated, and cook it for five minutes. And then you will turn on the broil.

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feature and you will broil it for two additional minutes. So seven minutes total that this is cooking. Five just regular baking at 550 or 600 and then two minutes of broiling and it comes out so beautiful like I mean this looks like a brick oven pizza. This looks like something you would order at a fancy pizzeria or whatever and so

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It looks really, really pretty. The tops of them get a little bit charred and it really makes those bubbles in the crust rise. And I just love it. It looks really fancy. So that's it. That's all you have to do. And then when you cook pizzas one by one, it doesn't take long at all. Obviously, if you're only cooking pizzas for seven minutes each, so less than an hour, you can have your supper. So if I need...

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quick supper. This is usually what I do. I just have to have planned ahead of time to make the dough in the morning and then just let it sit and it's ready to go in the evening. This is like probably the simplest dinner I make for my family and everyone really really loves it. So this is how we do it. I would love to hear how you guys do it if you make your own brick oven pizzas without the brick oven at your own home.

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I want to hear from you and see if you have made this recipe or if you're going to make this recipe. I want to see how it turns out. You can always email me at biscuitsandgravyfm at gmail.com or you can send me a message on our website. We've got a form on there where you can contact me and just chat with me and send me some information or if you've got a suggestion for a Southern food that you'd like me to try.

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or a southern restaurant or a southern place to travel to, then I'd love to hear those suggestions as well. I'm getting really excited about this podcast. The summer is gonna be fun. We're almost done with school for the year and I'm gonna have so much fun just planning these little trips and little getaways for our family or for me individually and then bringing the results to you guys.

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Thank you for listening. If you haven't left us a rating or review, I would so appreciate you doing that. That just allows other people to find out about our podcast. The more reviews and ratings we get, then the more the podcast apps will show our podcast to other people. So I'd really appreciate it if you just take just a second to go and do that.

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You can do that on your podcast app of choice or you can go to our website and there's actually some links where you can leave a rating or review. So I appreciate you guys. Thank you for all your feedback and I will see you guys next time. Bye.