“It was one of those moments where you say, ‘This is a perfect bite.’” That’s an actual quote from someone eating this pizza--one of my harshest critics, in fact. If you’re already making homemade pizza at any level, the pizza she’s talking about is easy to assemble, nobody sees it coming, and people love it. Welcome to the unexpected--The Land of Shrimp & Garlic Pizza. We’re going to talk about: 1) how to make it, 2) what goes on it, and 3) how to handle it so it amazes your friends and family and makes you a homemade pizza superhero. Part of the attraction for this pizza is novelty. Most people have never had it—or even anything resembling it. In fact, many find it baffling. Ironically, shrimp and other shellfish on pizza is probably one of the most common presentations you see around coastal Italy and beyond. My first experience with shellfish on pizza was in the south of France, in Cannes. (Sounds fancy. It was not. I was 24 years old with a duffel bag, living in a clean if low-rent hotel, and working aboard yachts owned by the people who really were fancy.) There are all kinds of “fisherman” pizzas available along the coast. But here at home in the US, seafood on pizza seems to mainly be a kind of trigger on social media. People get violent. It’s hard to understand why food needs to be such a battleground. Everyone is in search of the same thing: flavor. And for the record, this pizza has flavor to burn. Shrimp on pizza with chopped garlic scattered about is a flavor smart bomb looking for a way to explode in your mouth. I’ve served this pizza countless times over 20 years. I actually served it to a chef trained in Michelin-star kitchens who (unbeknownst to me) was expecting it to be awful. His sommelier wife took a bite of that pizza fresh from the oven and declared, “Oh, my God! And you DON’T want to open a restaurant? WHY?!” (I think we’ve all seen enough professional kitchen nightmares on TV to know the answer to that question.) My chef friend cited this pizza when he wrote the foreword to Free The Pizza. But more important, I take all this as validation that such a simple pizza is worthy of any home pizzamaker’s attention, and will help you develop that iconic, pizza-geek superhero status in the minds of your cohorts who dine upon it. Let’s get cooking here. As stated previously, we’re presuming you have basic facility with making a pizza. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you’re already expert at pizza and understand ingredients and don’t have the patience to read this epic tome on how to make this pizza, here's the bottom line: 1. Assemble a cheese pizza as you normally would 2. Top it with sautéed shrimp and chopped fresh garlic 3. Drizzle with olive oil and bake. Done. Now, if you’re like so many pizza newbs I know, here's what to expect: we’re going to dig in on this baby, discuss the whys and hows of shrimp, garlic, pizza and life, the universe and everything. Well, maybe only shrimp, garlic, pizza. Existentialism and pizza do not pair well. Ready? If you know how to make a cheese pizza, don't read the next important note. Just scroll down to the subsequent section, "So, you can make a cheese pizza." DIFFERENT IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have no facility at all with pizza, I heartily recommend learning that part first. Do not start with this pizza. Start with making dough, then making a cheese pizza. The cheese pizza is the elemental pizza. It's the pizza where there’s no place to hide and proves you can actually do it. You will love having done it that way. I guarantee it. Where to learn? One place to do so (and certainly not the only place) is between the pages of Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With the Oven You Already Have. Pizza is practice. Getting there takes a little bit of time, requires specific ingredients, and it will make you very happy once you nail it. I do not recommend the many, many quickie pizza recipes available online. They are universally a disappointment. You’re better off just buying a premade dough. But really, learn to do this from scratch and you'll feel quite pleased with yourself--and you may never buy another takeout pizza ever again. So, you can make a cheese pizza. Presumably you have all the ingredients for that. Next, we must acquire shrimp and garlic. That means the right shrimp and the right garlic. Ingredients matter. If you’re just getting into this and haven’t ventured deep into ingredients, know that this doesn’t always mean buying the most expensive product. It means buying the smartest product. In this case, the shrimp should be raw. They will also be frozen, and that’s fine. It's preferable, actually. Most of us never have access to truly fresh shrimp. What might appear to be fresh in the supermarket seafood case is typically a thawed product with a label that says, “Previously frozen.” So frozen is fine. It was caught and frozen ASAP—often right on the boat. More important, both for reasons of flavor and health (personal as well as planetary), the shrimp should be wild caught. I could go on about why, but that's an essay about environment and health and saving the planet and right now, we're just freeing the pizza. Peeled shrimp is fine. Easy-peel is OK, too. It just means you have to peel them after thawing. Peeled shrimp with tail-on means you’ll just be plucking off the tail. I prefer small-ish shrimp. Smaller whole shrimp make for a better presentation. If you can’t get them small, you’ll have to cut up bigger shrimp. And I admit, when it was available to me, I used to buy large, wild-caught Argentine red shrimp or wild-caught Key West pink shrimp. I didn’t care that they were big. They tasted great. I happily cut those large shrimp up into small pieces about the size of a fingertip. (NOTE: Do not accidentally serve any actual fingertips.) This is all about creating a composed pizza. With even distribution of shrimp, everybody gets some and nobody feels like sticking the back of your hand with a fork while you’re reaching for a shrimp-heavy slice. Thawing the shrimp is essential. The day before you make the pizza, you can move the quantity of shrimp for your pizza into the fridge and thaw it overnight. Or, if thawing the same day, you can take the frozen shrimp, put them into a sealed plastic bag, and submerge the bag in cold water. It should take about 45 minutes to thaw. (This latter method is apparently endorsed by the FDA as safe. At least, I saw it on a Martha Stewart website, and she’s been in enough trouble already. So I figure she’s legit on this count.) The other thing we need to discuss is garlic. Buy fresh, whole-bulb garlic. Do not, for the love of all that is holy, buy processed garlic in a tube, jar, bucket or industrial-sized drum. That garlic is evil. Last week, I saw a disturbing photo on Italian Food Lovers Social. Someone claiming to be an ardent lover of Italian food showed their ingredients for a dish containing garlic. His photo of the raw ingredients included a head-sized container of pre-chopped garlic that was mostly empty. He must have had it for years. Old, evil, pre-chopped garlic in a head-sized bucket is no way to win friends and influence people. Pre-chopped garlic in a jar develops off-flavors. It contains stabilizers. It’s often pasteurized. It doesn’t taste good. Eventually, it begins to stink. And not in a good way. Nobody will say of your pre-chopped garlic, “Yum, what’s that stink!?” Also, besides being a gruesome taste sensation from the bad side of town, pre-chopped garlic in a jar means many of the actual nutritional and health benefits of the garlic are gone. So buy real, whole-bulb garlic that looks like the plant product that it is. If your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as garlic, it’s the wrong garlic. This is not food snobbery talking. This is practical appreciation for good ingredients that are savorable, sanative and sane as well as salubrious. SIDEBAR: A Garlic-Chopping Tutorial If you're new to cheffy things, using fresh garlic is easy to do. If you’re baffled by the garlic bulb, here’s the deal: separate a clove from the bud. Place the clove on a cutting board. Take the flat side of your chef’s knife, place it on the clove with your other hand on top, and press down until you hear the clove break. That sound is the clove breaking as the skin peels away. Just pull away the skin, and repeat the action with enough cloves until you have the amount of garlic you desire. (I typically use three big cloves for this pizza. It ends up being about a rounded tablespoon full of fresh, chopped garlic.) Mince the peeled and broken cloves using your chef’s knife. If you can't handle that level of dexterity, use a garlic press. And use one that’s easy to clean. I find cleaning a tiny, cheap garlic press far more annoying than chopping garlic (which is actually fun). The rocker type of press is especially suited to easy cleaning. Barring that, an easy-clean press with a built-in “hole punch” (my phrase, not an industry standard) will make your life far easier. But try chopping it. Chopping garlic is a good time, and makes you look cool. So practice. You’ll learn to love it. The ultimate payoff is when there’s fresh garlic on your pizza, and you take it out of the oven, and your dinner guests exclaim, “That smells amazing!” And the taste is even more amazing. END GARLIC SIDEBAR What do we mean by a composed pizza? In this case, we’re not talking something like a classic Neapolitan pizza of about 12 inches diameter as a single serving eaten with a knife and fork where the toppings are scattered randomly and without apparent order. (That is arguably an uncomposed pizza. It really depends on who you are and what's on the pizza.) Our pizza is more American sized (bigger—14 to 16 inches, depending on your oven and your comfort level) with an even distribution of sauce, cheese and toppings. It usually gets cut into six or eight equal slices, and nobody at your table should have topping FOMO. (When I'm serving a big group, I will cut 16 narrow slices. My experience is it's more satisfying for everyone than cutting it into squares.) Get the wet out. Another thing to know about shrimp is that, like so much else that goes on top of pizza, their mission in life is to be a water delivery system. You can cook a raw shrimp on top of a pizza (I’ve done it many times), and I do not recommend it. It’s interesting that the single most clicked Free The Pizza blog post in a Google Search is “Swimming Pool Pizza Prevention Plan.” Among other things, that post is a cautionary tale about why you might want to par-cook certain toppings before you bake them on a pizza. Shrimp definitely qualifies as one of these toppings. They come from the sea, and they are full of the sea. After patting them dry, I recommend throwing your thawed shrimp into a hot sauté pan with a little olive oil. Perhaps some salt or maybe Creole seasoning, too. Toss them around on medium heat until they just begin to cook. They’ll curl up a little more than the way the came. You don’t want to cook them fully. They’re going to cook more in the oven. You don’t want them overcooked. Overcooked shrimp are no fun. They’re like little round nuggets of seafood misery. After sautéing the shrimp, I let them drain on paper towel. There, they will await their assignment to the top of the pizza. As for that garlic, just chop it into little bits. Mince it and let it wait for its final mission: being sprinkled onto the pizza raw. It’s very simple. Some would sauté it beforehand. I’ve done it. But I prefer baking it right on the pizza. I also drizzle a little olive oil around the pizza on the shrimp and garlic and let it all meld together in a garlicky, shrimpy delight. Here’s how you assemble this crowd-pleasing piece of pizza goodness… Stretch your dough, then apply sauce and cheese as you normally would. In theory, you could now just launch and bake. Instead, evenly distribute the par-cooked shrimp around the pizza. Remember, this is an exercise where less is more. Amass too much shrimp and it will get ugly. Make sure the shrimp fit comfortably and have some elbow room on the pizza. (I know, I know. Shrimp have evolved to no longer have elbows. So it goes.) Take the chopped garlic in your fingertips, hold it about a foot or so above the pizza, and sprinkle it evenly about the entire pie. (Watch the pizza where you want the garlic to land, and it will land there mainly.) Next (and this is optional, but I like it), drizzle a little bit of olive oil around the pizza. In a pinch, I’ve poured it straight from the olive-oil bottle with my thumb over the spout to slow the flow. But I prefer the control of using a plastic squeeze bottle with a narrow tip. You don't want to flood the pizza. (Less is more yet again.) So now, your pizza is ready to launch. Go for it. Bake it as you would normally bake your cheese pizza. It will likely take a little longer with the shrimp on it. For my pizza, I’m launching into a 550-degree oven preheated for an hour with a baking steel in the top third (about 8 inches from the electric broiler). After launch, I switch the oven from bake to high broil. This pizza would normally take about 5 to 6 minutes, turning it 180-degrees at halfway. (In the old days, before I used the broiler, it would probably have baked for 9 minutes or so.) I monitor the pizza for char on top, removing it when it’s baked with enough char for my liking. (Char is a personal preference. I don’t normally go for the overall New-Haven level heavy char, but how you char—if at all—is up to you.) I remove the pizza to a cooling rack. The pizza will be wet on top and needs time to set. If you want to garnish it with some fresh herbs, that too up to you. Sometimes (as in the photos here) I use fresh cilantro. Other times, fresh Italian, flat-leaf parsley. And I admit, the garnish is as much about the burst of color as the burst of herby flavor. Move the set and optionally garnished pizza to the serving tray and slice as usual. Deliver it to the table and wait for the applause. Congratulations. You’re a pizza hero. Variations I’ve also baked this same pizza with sliced serrano chilis added for some zip. Another fun addition is slices of Spanish chorizo. Spanish chorizo is a dry-cured sausage like pepperoni. I find it more flavorful and, typically, less fatty than pepperoni. It’s a good alternative. The one, ever more serious, crowd-winning variation is adding squares of cooked bacon before baking the pizza. Shrimp & bacon seems to never meet with an argument. And of course, do whatever makes you feel good. Enjoy, and free your pizza! --------- Are you new to pizza, and want to learn the basics for making a pizza like this? My weird little book is one way to do it. It's less about recipes and more about how to get from zero to pizza. Besides learning to make great pizza, there’s not much else you can do with it. In fact, you can’t even use it to level a table leg if you buy the Kindle edition (which is less expensive than print editions, and has active links to instructional videos and printable kitchen worksheets). To learn more about Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have, click here.
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AuthorBlaine Parker is the award-winning author of the bestselling, unusual and amusing how-to pizza book, Free The Pizza. Also known as The Pizza Geek and "Hey, Pizza Man!", Blaine is fanatical about the idea that true, pro-quality pizza can be made at home. His home. Your home. Anyone's home. After 20 years of honing his craft and making pizza in standard consumer ovens across the nation, he's sharing what he's learned with home cooks like you. Are you ready to pizza? Archives
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