I love pizza. I make pizza a lot. We have homemade pizza about once a week. Usually on Thursdays.
So when a pizza competition for some scholarship money was announced I was excited. There was just one glitch. It was a mystery basket challenge and we wouldn't find out our ingredients until it was time to cook. The concept kind of freaked me out. But I signed up and waited to hear if I had been selected to participate. (There was a random drawing to determine who would participate because of limited space.)
When I heard I was selected I was doubly freaked. What if I opened the basket and it was something strange, like duck confit or a live lobster? What if my mind went completely blank and I couldn't think of anything to make? I started checking out pizza recipes for strange ingredients. I enlisted my friend Maria to come for moral support. I got a babysitter and packed my tool kit and headed back into the city for the nighttime competition.
Entering the school at night was a totally different experience. The hallways seem dim and a bit grungier than they do in the morning. The students, a little more boisterous. I made my way to the sign in for the competition and received a time slot for firing the pizza. Maria, who had come only to provide support was roped into participating because some of the selected students canceled at the last minute.
When the room was open, there was a table piled with ingredients. For some reason it took me a little while to register that this was what we were going to cook with. I must watch too many reality TV shows because I was sure that everyone was going to get at least one common ingredient and that table was the remainder of the "pantry" that we would supplement our box from. When I finally grasped the reality of the situation, my mind did go blank.
I was so focused on not pinning myself into one idea because I didn't know what was going to be around to use, that having a lot of choices swamped me. But, while my mind was spinning, the rest of the contestants swarmed the table. When they pulled away, the pickings were slim and my mind was still a jumbled mass of half-baked ideas. I finally spotted some potatoes and decided to go with a potato pizza inspired by a recipe I had seen in my research.
My pizza ended up being a ricotta base mixed with some vinegar to try to give it a little more sour cream taste. (Afterward, I realized that there was actually a refrigerator that had dairy products in it that I didn't notice. I may have been able to have sour cream instead of trying to fake it.) I boiled and sliced the potatoes and then tossed them in melted butter, garlic and thyme. When the pizza come out of the oven I topped it with fresh chives. It was not bad.
At some point between walking into the classroom and starting to cook, I had forgotten that we needed to make 2 pizzas. So when it came to actually put the things on the dough, I had to leave the dough a bit thick, spread the toppings a little thin and leave about 2 inches around the edges as crust. Also, when the potatoes took a little longer to boil, so I didn't get them into the butter/herb mixture while it was hot enough to give it a little crisp. There was no time to reheat it, so into the oven it went that way.
As I was pulling the pizza out of the oven, I knew it was slightly under baked. But I was freaked out it was going to burn and pulled it out anyway. (This remains a great flaw in my cooking. I am always a little timid about cranking the heat and then end up not cooking something quite enough. Things don't usually end up raw, but they never take on that great caramelized feature.) I debated back and forth whether or not to add cheese, and made the wrong decision and left it off.
Someone else in the room made a pizza that was essentially the same pizza, only MUCH better executed. The crust was crisp, the cheese was melty, and the potatoes were sauteed instead of boiled and had better flavor (if a little salty to my taste). That pizza took 2nd place. First place went to a pizza with sausage and duck that I didn't get to taste. The 3rd place was a wonderful green curry chicken pizza that I would love to recreate if I didn't routinely cook for people who can't eat curry due to heartburn issues. Maria made a really interesting pizza with beets, caramelized onions and brie that was almost universally labeled as having potential but was missing something to make it really shine.
All in all, it was a good time and I would do it again. I definitely found it fun to meet students from other classes and see how the competitions go. I found that when it comes to pizza, too thick and undercooked dough was the most prevalent problem and really killed the pizza. The pizzas that won all had a great thin crust cooked to the perfect crispness. And not to toot my own horn (and my friend's) Maria and I had pizzas that IMHO fell into the top third of the competition. While they each had their flaws, they were round, creative and didn't degrade into a watery mass on top of a soggy undercooked bread.
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