Pizza two kinds ピザ２種類

Although I posted my pizza recipes before, since I am running out of new dishes I decide to post these two pizzas I made recently which were really enjoyable with a glass of red wine. The dough was hand stretched (not rolled) then transferred to a wooden pizza peel coated with cornmeal (for easy sliding off the paddle). Then bushed with garlic infused olive oil (crushed garlic plus oil).  The first one is Pizza Margherita. Instead of plain Mozzarella cheese I used smoked Mozzarella for this (more details of the recipe have been posted before).

As before I put slices of Mozzarella on the dough and then placed my marinara sauce on the slices of cheese. (the sauce was made from garlic, onion, skinned Campari tomato and several spices).  I put the sauce on the cheese instead of vice versa to prevent the moisture from the sauce making the dough/crust soggy, I put half of the torn basil on top before baking and added more after the pizza came out of the oven. I brushed the crust with the garlic infused oil on the outer edge and added grated Parmigiano Reggiano on the top.

The second pizza included ingredients my wife's suggested. The cheeses were Mozzarella (leftover from making the Margherita pizza), Double Gloucester and smoked Gouda, all finely diced and mixed.  I topped everything with oil cured black olives (stones removed) and pimento stuffed green olive (these olives were ear-marked for the Martinis I have on occasion...oh well).

I garnished the pizza with torn fresh basil and grated Parmesan.

The oven I use; (Miele) has an "intensive" mode which is set at 480F with intense heat from the bottom. I preheated the oven for 30 minutes with a pizza stone on the lower rack. I then slid the pizza onto the stone. It took less than 5 minutes for the pizza to cook. We ate one slice each from each of the two pizzas and then (we couldn't resist) shared one more slice. Luckily, our gluttony still left us with enough slices for leftovers. We wrapped the remaining pizza into 2 slice packets wrapped in plastic wrap and kept them in the refrigerator.  The slices heat up very nicely in the toaster oven (we use "toast" mode with the pizza slices on the aluminum foil). This is a great snack with a glass of red wine to look forward to after we come home from work.