A hearty super thin-crust pizza? Just add Canadian bacon.
Our inspiration for this pizza was the huge bag of kale my mom gave us that she grew in her yard over the winter. And possibly the Canadian bacon lingering in our fridge from last weekend’s breakfast pig-out.
We also wanted to settle a dispute about pizza sauce vs. spaghetti sauce on pizza. I’ve always been on the side of spaghetti sauce, as I generally find store-bought pizza sauce to be much too sweet. But I don’t know, maybe it was the Swiss cheese, maybe it was the Don Pepino brand… it was great. It could have even been a little sweeter. I never thought I’d say that.
After last week’s dough massacre, this week was smooth sailing. The dough was super-stretchy, so we took advantage of that, going super thin with our crust (when you eat pizza on a weekly basis, you’re prone to dough overload). The crust was perfect.
Toppings: Sautéed kale, diced Canadian bacon, grated Swiss cheese
Sauce: Don Pepino’s
Dough: Bon Appétit/Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Dough
Technique:
- Remove the crust from the fridge
3 2 hours before you want to bake. This seems to be crucial to getting great results. (We took ours out about 2 hours before baking, and everything was fine). - Dice up your Canadian bacon slices into manageable pieces. Cook them in a skillet over medium heat to crisp them up a bit. Remove bacon from the skillet; leave the drippings if you’d like to cook your kale in them.
- Roughly chop the kale into 1” pieces, removing thick stems if you don’t like eating them. Put a little oil in your skillet (or use the bacon drippings) and sauté your kale over medium-high heat until it’s soft as you like it. Remember, it cooks a bit more in the oven.
- Strain your sauce, giving it 10 minutes to release some not too flavorful liquid. You don’t want that on your pizza.
- Roll and stretch out the crust on a sheet of parchment or a pizza pan. Spread it with sauce. Add the cheese, Canadian bacon, and kale in your order of preference (Nikc prefers toppings on top of cheese. I usually do things the other way). If your kale is on top, spritz a little olive oil on it to crisp it up.
- Team-lift the pizza into the oven and bake it until the crust is brown.
Laurynn: The crust/red sauce combo really made this pizza. This is how pizza should be, in my book. Swiss cheese on pizza is definitely worth revisiting, but it needs something sweet to offset it. Maybe Easter ham? There’s a thought. Or even roasted squash. Or honey. Or maybe this is the betis talking?
Nikc: I really love incorporating Don Pepino sauce to a home pizza. Seriously, I eat this stuff from the can. And rumor has it that it is actually the sauce of choice at a local pizza chain. As for the topping combo, kale brings more flavor than you would think while Canadian bacon brings less. Overall they balance each other out quite nicely. In the pan, I just heated up the Canadian bacon then quickly sautéed the kale in the leftover juices. We sprayed the pizza with olive oil which made the finished kale turn a little black, but it didn’t affect the final flavor.
