Inventing your homemade hometown pizza: how to not fall face first into the cheese

​You’re making a great pepperoni pizza at home. That’s done. Now, how do you start branching out and making a pizza nobody has ever made before?
 
Easy. Just figure it out. It’s actually fun. It’s a mental exercise in the behavior of all the components—your dough, its transformation into crust, sauce, cheese, and individual toppings. How do they behave? How is each component determined to undermine your success? Or how does each one wish to cooperate?
 
The unusual pizzas I’ve made this way include the Clam Chowder Pizza, the subsequent Deconstructed Clam Chowder Pizza, the Gumbo Pizza, the Chicken, Shrimp and Andouille Étouffée Pizza, the Shrimp & Garlic Pizza, and a whole series of pizzas with non-traditional toppings that just weren’t very difficult. They were more surprising to people than anything.

“Shrimp and garlic,” you ask. “How hard can that be?” It’s not—but it takes thinking about it, and then experimentation with both the shrimp and the garlic to figure out how exactly you want to dial it in.
 
And keep in mind through this new pizza process that your dough is your friend. Pizza dough is not out to get you. Understanding your friend and how well your friend plays with your toppings’ characteristics is going to carry you far.

Above: the world-famous in my house Shrimp, Chicken & Andouille Étouffée Pizza


So, what kind of pizza do you want to create?
 
Last week, I asked for you to send in ideas for what pizza best represents your hometown.
 
We’re going to look at two of them: Cindy and Neil, who sent very different ideas based around pork. Then we’re going to look at one of my own hometown pizzas, which is yet again different.
 
The first pizza is challenging to engineer. The second is more of a series of creative decisions. And the third is a kind of common-sense approach to what seems a little crazy. (It’s one of my more ridiculous pizza experiments, which inspired my wife to say, “I’ve wasted my life.”)
 
The first pizza is Cindy’s, coming to us from her hometown in Indiana. Indy Cindy tells us one of Indiana’s Big Deal foods is the Breaded Tenderloin Sandwich.
 
She says, “I crave a good breaded loin every now and then, but I'm picky about it. It cannot be dry. I'm thinking a pizza with bits of breaded tenderloin, lettuce, pickles, onion.”
 
Ironically, the sandwich is already a kind of hometown homage itself, inspired by German wienerschnitzel. The Indiana sandwich is a slice of pork tenderloin pounded thin, breaded and fried. It’s served on a bun with lettuce, pickles and onion. Tomato is known to happen, but is apparently controversial. (Can’t we all just get along?) Cindy lives on the edge and goes with the tomato slice.
 
On the pizza, we could go with red sauce to represent the tomato. We could also slice grape tomatoes and put them on the pizza for an added tomato boost.
 
But here's the big challenge I see for this pizza: the breaded tenderloin. If you fry up some breaded pork loin and toss it on a sauced-up pizza, it is unlikely to emerge from that oven as crispy as it entered. What to do?
 
You could hold the pork loin until the pizza is baked, then apply it to the hot pizza. (Which some will see as a cop out.)
 
I have a different idea that’s far more controversial than a mere tomato slice. It’s keeping in the spirit of the sandwich while altering the pork component.
 
Forget breading and frying those bits of pork tenderloin. Instead, take little pork chunks and par-cook them without breading. Then, spread them around the pizza and bake.
 
When it emerges from the oven, sprinkle that pizza generously with fried panko bread crumbs.
 
Instead of ending up with damp breaded cutlet bits, you get the juicy pork mixed in with fried and crunchy panko fun.
 
I also might use the pickles as a garnish instead of baking them on the pizza, especially if we’re talking about using shredded lettuce.  
 
So I haven’t tried Cindy’s pizza yet, but I plan to.
 
I also plan to try Neil’s pizza, which is a whole other kind of hometown tribute. It’s more straightforward in its execution—yet still requires thought. It’s not just sauce and cheese on a crust.
 
Neil lives about 90 minutes northwest of Toronto. He tells us that local specialty foods include the Yukon Gold potato (developed nearby). He also points to the area’s “peameal bacon,” which is a kind of “a wet-cured, unsmoked back bacon made from trimmed lean boneless pork loin rolled in cornmeal.” (Thank you, Wikipedia.) He tells us a popular sandwich around those parts is peameal bacon on a bun.
 
And, of course, Ontario is known for maple syrup. Neil says, “I propose a potato and back bacon pizza with caramelized onions, and maybe with some maple syrup (a la the hot honey thing). Not really outrageous—potato pizza is a personal favourite—but certainly nothing that I could get at a local pizzeria.
 
Neil concludes, “And definitely a white pizza because we’re not in Kansas anymore ;-)”
 
Despite the fact that they’re common in Italy (and I’ve even seen them in New York slice joints), nobody ever sees that potato pizza coming.
 
In this case, the Yukon Gold potato is a winner. It’s a firm, waxy potato. It’s perfect for the job. You slice the potato paper thin, put the slices in a saucepan with salted water until the water boils, then drain the slices and let them cool.
 
I like a composed pizza, with bite-size topping pieces distributed evenly. In theory, at least, you get a little of everything in each bite. That means the peameal bacon should be cubed, then sauteed a bit to get a little caramelization on it. (Bonus: the way it’s processed means peameal bacon is difficult to overcook and remains juicy.)
 
Just as with Mike’s Hot Honey, which is all the rage right now, the hot maple syrup idea would not be my first choice for most pizzas. But it sounds great for this. It’s almost breakfast pizza of a different kind. (It doesn’t have to be a hot syrup. But there are plenty of hot maple syrups on the market. Why not try?)
 
I suggest a drizzle of syrup after baking rather than applying it to the pizza before baking. The moisture won’t cook off and you retain the flavor and integrity of a fine local product.
 
But what about the white pizza part of this equation?
 
There are various ways to do this. My preferred way would be doing it like the sauce for mac & cheese.
 
Make a béchamel sauce with milk, butter and flour. Then add shredded mozzarella and Pecorino Romano.
 
Spread the sauce on the stretched dough, distribute the potato slices around the pizza, top it all with the bacon, and bake that bad boy.
 
You might have a different thought. I’ll bet Neil does. I never quizzed him on his proposed execution, just like I never quizzed Cindy—except to suggest the fried panko idea. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t an ardent traditionalist who balks at coloring outside the lines. (She’s not.)
 
And now, I want to try Ontario Neil’s pizza alongside Indy Cindy’s.
 
I’m not sure when it’s going to happen, but I’m champing at the bit.
 
So, here now is the weird pizza that made my wife say that she’s wasted her life: The Chicken, Shrimp and Andouille Étouffée Pizza.
 
You might be asking, “What the hell is étouffée?”
 
The word is French. It’s from the verb “étouffer,”  meaning “to smother.”
 
Étouffée a Louisiana dish made with the holy trinity (onion, celery and bell pepper) sizzled in a light roux of oil and flour. Then the spices and broth are added, along with the proteins of your choice.
 
It’s savory, hearty, and a little spicy. It can be eaten by itself or as a “smother” for another dish. (At an old New Orleans roadhouse called Mandina’s, I once had their special known as Softshell Crab Lafitte. It’s a deep-fried softshell crab smothered in crawfish étouffée. It was epic. And probably not something your cardiologist wants to see you eating.)
 
Somebody online had proposed making what I would call an “deconstructed” étouffée pizza.
 
He proposed starting with the individual components and putting them on a pizza with a roux-based sauce.
 
I say, “No.”
 
Here’s why…
 
The flavor of this dish is predicated on the melding of all those ingredients, which simmer together for awhile.
 
Baked from their raw or par-cooked state separately on top of a pizza is not going to produce that glorious synergistic flavor bomb.
 
Your disappointed gustatory cortex will not dance the Méringue.
 
To get that kind of flavorized excitement, you need to start with a bowl of already exciting previously made étouffée.
 
And just a note: étouffée is arguably soup-like. Soup is an emulsion. And emulsions make good pizza sauce.
 
I remove all the solids and set them aside. I take the étouffée liquid, and thicken it somewhat more than I would for a proper étouffée. I use some flour to make a slurry with some of the étouffée liquid, then stir it into the rest of the liquid in a hot saucepan until it thickens.
 
I spread the “sauce” of étouffée liquid on the raw pizza dough. Then I add mozzarella and Romano. Next comes the étouffée solids as the toppings: the chicken, sausage, veggies and shrimp.
 
(IMPORTANT NOTE: if using shrimp, you might want to eliminate the shrimp cooked with the étouffée and add some freshly par-cooked shrimp. Otherwise, you’re baking already cooked shrimp and that might not work out so well.)
 
Then I bake the pizza as per usual. For me, that’s in a home oven on a steel that’s preheated to 550 and using the top broiler.
 
And that is how we got the étouffée pizza in the photo at the top of this story.
 
It’s a crazy little thing called pizza love.
 
We’ll be dealing with the hometown pizza project more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you’re interested in submitting your own idea for a hometown pizza or what to share one you’ve actually created, you can use the contact form on the website. Or if you receive this as the Free The Pizza weekly newsletter, just reply to the email. Either way, use the subject line, “Hometown.”
 
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