Eggs-perimentation - Numero Dos:

I love Eggs on a pizza.  They are a perfect topping being both a topping and possibly becoming part of the sauce of the pizza.  If you time it right, you can get the egg to cook to that perfect Sunny Side Up - runny deliciousness.  After the pizza comes out, you simply take a fork and knife, or a spoon and break the yolk and spread it around the pizza.  The egg is now playing two roles, both of which work perfectly on a pizza. But I've already told you this the last time I posted, and then Peter reiterated it in his recent blog about Pure Pizza in Charlotte.

So this is the second pizza in my latest little pizza experimentation here at Casa Ingles (as we affectionately call it)!  The fun thing about making pizza, as I've written before, is that there is a lot of opportunity for creativity.  Unlike when cooking other things, you get to try a number versions every time you make pizza.  They bake quickly and you are generally making at least 4 different pizzas during a meal.  It would get costly if you cooked up 4 large steaks every time you had that as a main dish, using seasonings and different cooking techniques.  I suppose you could cut a steak into smaller portions and do that, but that has it's own set of downfalls.  My point (and I do have one) is that pizza is a naturally interactive food during planning, prep, and eating.

You can lay out a plan and easily find a new path to the perfect pizza that you are hoping to make. I often only plan out a couple of the pizzas I'm going to make and then let the others come out of something I see while I'm shopping, or something that may be in the house at the time.  It's those found ingredients that sometimes take a pizza to the next level.  This pizza came out of the idea of using Jalapeños.  I am fascinated with the idea of pre-cooking them, which knocks out some of the heat and leaves you with a bold flavorful ingredient with enough spice to make them stand out, but not too much for those who can't take a lot of heat.

Jalapeño & Sunny-Eggs Pizza de Casa Ingles

Ingredients:

Pizza Dough

-I used my favorite Central Milling Germania Flour, Signature Bruery Pizza Dough but you can use your own favorite dough

Peter's Herb Oil

Partially baked thinly sliced potato

Sautéed Mushrooms, Zucchini, and Jalapeños

-I sautéed these to get them started cooking before going onto the pizza.  Season with a little salt and pepper and sauté until just cooked - allowing room for them to finish cooking on the pizza.

Bel Gioioso Creamy Gorgonzola Cheese (or other blue cheese)

2 Eggs

Chopped Scallions

Fresh Rosemary Needles

Grated Parmesan

The Build:

Spread the dough on a well floured peel.

Sprinkle a little of the Herb Oil on the dough.

Add the potatoes, zucchini and mushrooms.

Break off chunks of the creamy gorgonzola cheese.  Alternatively, you could use another soft cheese, like a brie mixed with a little blue cheese.  I didn't use much cheese here.  First of all this cheese is very flavorful and I didn't want it to take over.  Second, I wanted the sautéed vegetables and the egg to play a bigger role.

I wanted to make sure that I achieved runny sunny-side Up eggs on this pizza.  So, I decided to set this pizza in the oven and bake it for a couple of minutes and then add the egg.

The Bake:

Bake in your oven for approximately 2-3 minutes.

*Make sure you pre-heat the oven for at least an hour to get your pizza stone up to temperature.  I pre-heat at 550 degrees and then turn it to Convection Bake before loading my first pizza, which lowers the temp to 525 degrees.

Pull the pizza out and crack two fresh eggs over the top.

Add the sautéed jalapeños.

Place it back into the oven.  Bake until the eggs and crust and all the ingredients are just right.  This should be about 4-5 minutes.  For this pizza, base the doneness on the eggs.

The eggs came out perfect on this one.  You can see that my crust has some charring and darkness to the edges and the toppings got a little brown on the edges as well.  The egg is perfectly cooked!  The yolk is soft and ready to be spread across the pizza and become part of the overall sauce.

Carefully spread the yolk around trying not to move all the ingredients away from the center as you do.  You'll find that you can move things back and forth once you break the yolk and start spreading it out so that you keep the ingredients balanced for each bite.

Finally, top the finished pizza with scallions and some grated Parmesan.

Enjoy!  And do send us some ideas of your own...

As a special welcome to The Fire Within, our newest sponsor, here is a video we shot last October at an oven owners conference hosted by Joseph Pergolizzi, the owner and founder of The Fire Within.  We shot a number of these instructional videos at the end of the conference with various attendees, asking each of the oven owners what kind of pizza they wanted to make, and Joseph chose this one and a couple of others, including a killer clam pizza. In this video, though, we not only get to make a simple yet beautiful pizza with pesto, two kinds of cheese (with a special tribute to Provolone, which both of us love), and local cherry tomatoes, but also talk about the oven rigs themselves.

Note that the crust is a little puffy in this version, almost like a round Sicilian or focaccia style dough, but you can always make the crust as thin or thick as you like when you do it. The dough was so delicious (recipe in the PQ Instructional archives), and the combo of fresh tomatoes, pesto, and cheeses are so perfect that, when the cameras stopped running, we devoured this little pie in about 30 seconds.

For more details on these oven rigs, click through to The Fire Within website on our home page. Joseph and I are already talking about doing another conference in Boulder next autumn and would love to have you there.

Eggs

The first time I had egg on a pizza was at a little French Creperie in Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.  My family was visiting me while I was working up there, and we took a weekend trip over to the island.  One morning we went to this little place I read about known for having a good cappuccino.  When I saw that there was a pizza with eggs, I had to try it.  I don't know about you, but when I am eating eggs, toast is the primary delivery system for getting those eggs with the sauce, bacon, sausage, etc. up to my mouth.  Why wouldn't a pizza with the egg breakfast already arranged on it be the perfect meal?

That first egg pizza was a scrambled egg version with some Tyrolean bacon, chives and a little cheese mixed in.  It was truly delicious.  The eggs were still moist.  It was cheesy and the bacon, I found out, was painstakingly chosen over many others based on how it performed on the pizza.  I would have to say it was an epiphany moment for me.

A few years later, while we were filming the original Pizza Quest road trip, we were in San Francisco at Pizzeria Delfina and these guys opened my eyes a little wider.  They made a pizza and finished it off by simply cracking an egg on top.  It came out sunny side up.  Craig Stoll, the owner, cut up the yolk with a fork and knife, spreading it around the top of the pizza.  Egg epiphany numero dos!  I love the runny yolk dripping off of my "toast."  It's a wonderful textural eating experience.  The yolk is, in effect, both the meal and a sauce.

Fast forward to now: I was in the mood for some runny yolk and pizza.  So I decided to have a Pizza Egg Fest!   I'll release these in three short recipe pictorials.  They all came out delicious and made a fantastic breakfast the next day.

The first was inspired by Nancy Silverton at Pizzeria Mozza, and it has egg, bacon, Yukon Gold potato with Bermuda onions to finish it off.  It's amazing!  Here's how I did it:  I had some plain old russets laying around and a few boring scallions, but my eggs looked just like Nancy's!  I'm sure hers are fancy, free-range eggs from chickens with actual names (Portlandia reference), but looking at them, my eggs were just fine.

Bacon and Eggs Pizza

Ingredients:

Pizza Dough *Link

-I used my favorite Central Milling Germania Flour-based Signature Bruery Pizza Dough

Peter's Herb Oil *Link

Partially Baked Potato, sliced thin

Grated Mozz.

Applewood Smoked Bacon, cooked but not totally crisped

1 Egg

Chopped Scallions

Grated Parmesan

The Build:

Spread the dough on a well floured peel.  Notice that I stretched the dough with my hands fairly thin.  You can see in the one shot that light is coming through.  I left the edge, or cornicione, in an irregular rustic "mess."  You'll see how nicely this ends up when I the baked pizza.  I think it's a good way to create a real hand-made look, and I love the thicker puffed up areas that result.

Sprinkle a little of the Herb Oil on the dough.

Add a layer of sliced potatoes that are pre-baked but still firm enough to slice.  They will finish cooking on the pizza.

Break some bacon into pieces and spread them around the pizza.

Add the grated mozzarella.

Crack an egg over the pizza.  *Note: I used a lot of flour under this pizza to make sure when I put the pizza into the oven that the pizza came off the peel with the egg!

The Bake:

Bake in your oven for approximately 7-10 minutes.  For this one, you want to check on the progress of the egg.  The idea is to get it out before it gets too hard.  You want it to be soft, ideally runny so you can spread the yolk all over the pizza right before you cut it into slices.

*Note: Make sure you pre-heat the oven for at least an hour to get your pizza stone up to temperature.  I pre-heat at 550 degrees and then turn it to Convection Bake before loading my first pizza, which lowers the temp to 525 degrees.

When the pizza comes out, sprinkle the chopped scallions over the top and add your grated Parmesan to finish.  (You'll see that when this came out the egg appears soft, but as I took pictures and finished topping it, the yolk continued to cook.  By the time I cut it, it had solidified into more of a soft-hard boiled egg.  It was still great, but this is a good example of how you have to manage the time in the oven to bring the egg out on time.  Perhaps 30-60 seconds less for this one would have been perfect. Or, you can wait until the pizza has baked for a minute or two and then add the egg to the top. Your oven will determine this for you.)

Bacon, Egg, Cheese, and Hash-browns…Oh my!

Give this a whirl and let us know how you like to play with eggs on your pizza.

Enjoy!

Scott Thorsen was my wing man at the Fire Within Conference in Boulder last October. Together, we mixed and shaped enough dough to crank out over 200 pizzas during the weekend, and we managed to save a few Country Doughs for this video demo. Scott, who has his own wood-fired rig in Sacramento, California, and a pizza and catering business that he runs out of the rig called Bella Familia, ably backed up all the presenters at the conference by doing much of the prep work and a lot of the heavy lifting. So, I wanted to give him a chance to get in front of the camera before he headed home and show us his pizzaiolo prowess. In this video