Made pizza with the family for Valentine's Day, and here were the toppings to choose from:-Asiago cheese
-Fontina cheese
-Reggiano Parmesan
-Sliced mozzarella
-Smoked mussels
-Bacon
-Soojookh (Armenian homemade hot sausage)
-Marinated mushrooms
-Olives
-Basil
-Carmelized onions
-Grilled zucchini and grilled eggplant
-Roasted red peppers
10 people, 10 personalities, 10 pizzas... all very different. Here was my approach: After surveying the scene, I knew that I couldn't possibly take on all of those flavors on one pizza. Here, like any good buffet, building the pizza was exactly the same as building the plate: go with complementary flavors, and pick a horse and run with it. You have to get over the feeling of "loss" that you're not going to be able to eat every single flavor, and go with the one that will give you the most joy at the time. For me, that was picking the foods I don't normally eat. So I went "meat-lovers."
My pizza:
1. I sprinkled Asiago cheese around the outside of my dough, then dabbed water just inside that cheese line, and folded over the edge of the dough to make a "stuffed crust".... did I come up with that idea? No, fast food pizzerias did. Did I crush it? Yessir.
2. Chunky pizza sauce (great job to my mother on an excellent sauce)
3. Carmelized onions (45% density)
4. Crumbled bacon (10% density)
5. Soojookh (5% density)
6. Marinated mushrooms (25% density)
7. Smoked mussels (10% density)
8. Reggiano parmesan (40% density)
9. Asiago cheese (30% density)
Gorgeous. It was smokey, meaty, flavorful and well-balanced. I'm not tooting my own horn, but I do feel my somewhat unhealthy obsession with thinking about and planning my buffet "attack" was perfect preparation for this pizza.
There were some other stellar pizzas that day, this was just one example.
Another road was to make multiple pizzas in one pie, if you couldn't make up your mind. Now, this is like making multiple plates at a buffet, so you can't fault the approach, and a creative way to work the buffet from a different angle. See "The Salad Bar" for tips on creating dividers like this person did with crust (yes, this person is a Mercedes driver... or a member of the Peace Corps, I can't remember which).
So with the ingredients above, how would you do it?
