Kitchen Sink Pizza

Kitchen Sink Pizza

So tonight I was in charge of making dinner- without any input from my better half! Shoot! I'm terrible at making decisions! But then I remembered that about a week ago, Skylar (the better half's name) was asking for pizza. We love artichoke hearts on our pizza, I checked the pantry and - SCORE - can of artichoke hearts! So I googled the recipe for dough (from All Recipes.com), which, by the way, is the best pizza dough I've ever encountered! It's light and airy but you don't have to roll it too thin to get that crunch that every pizza base should have! I did tweak the baking times, however. So my personal recipe goes as follows (feel free to tweak this how you'd like as well).

Dough:
1 package yeast
1 cup hot (110 degrees) water
2 Cups flour
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
2 tsp white sugar
1 tsp salt

**I ended up adding about a handful of cornmeal to my bread machine after it had mixed all the flour in with the liquids to help firm up the dough a little bit more**

As mentioned in the note above, I have a bread machine. The recipe from allrecipes.com has instructions to mix w/out a bread machine. I just combined all the ingredients listed above into the machine and mixed/rise as scheduled according to the machine.

When the dough is about 30 mins away from being done w/ rising, I started to prep my toppings. I haven't addressed the fact as to why it's called "Kitchen Sink Pizza" - if I need to - it's because I went through both my pantry and my refrigerator and grabbed anything that looked remotely cohesive on a heap of carbs, topped w/ cheese (which happened to be sharp cheddar - so we didn't use a ton) and of course, to make any meal that much more amazing - bacon! But you can use whatever your heart desires! However, if you don't feel like thinking too much, this turned out really good!

Toppings:

2 cloves garlic, diced

about 10 kalamata olives, diced

1/2 Can (7oz) artichoke hearts, diced

4 slices bacon, diced and fried

about 20 pieces Salami

2 C(ish) of Cheese, your choice

Start by freezing your bacon for about 20 minutes before you try to dice it (makes your life so much easier). Dice your bacon and fry it until it is JUST barely crispy (it will crisp more in the oven, but make sure it's cooked), strain from fat and set aside on paper towel. Dice up the rest of your ingredients and set aside. To roll out your dough, dust your surface with either flour or cornmeal and start rollin! Make sure to fit the size of your baking tray - I have a round Pampered Chef baking stone that I use (thanks Mom). 

After you have rolled out your dough and placed it on your baking tray, set your oven to 350 and start preheating. While it's preheating, place your dough in the oven to pre-bake for 5 minutes. Remove dough, placed sauce (we used olive oil) as light/thick as you'd like and place toppings - I'd start w/ the minced garlic, then 1/2 your cheese, then flat meats, followed by diced toppings. Then top w/ remaining cheese. I started baking this for 15 minutes, then after 15 minutes I turned my oven up to 400 and baked for an additional 5 minutes. Cut into pieces and serve!

Bon appetite! Please leave your versions behind, I love new ideas!

Thanks for reading!