Thick-Crusted Sicilian Style Pizza with Onions

A Sicilian pizza recipe from Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day.

Outside of those times when we make our own dough, we don’t often use pizza recipes.  It’s pretty intuitive, we like to think.  Or maybe we just like to risk it.

However, a month ago while wandering around a Barnes and Noble, I started leafing through a copy of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François’ Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day.  I put it down, but kept thinking about the recipes I’d seen… and I ended up buying it on Amazon a few days later.

I’d love to review it someday, but since this is our first try at a recipe from it… well, that wouldn’t be fair, would it?  So here’s a look at one of the many recipes from this book.  Why this one?  Well the planets aligned, and we had exactly 3 oz. of pecorino romano in the fridge.  Also, Sicilian pizza is the pizza of my dreams.

Our only modification was to use some of our own pre-made dough… since the recipe called for 2 lbs. (!) and 1/2” thick dough, we doubled up our dough and halved the pan, opting for a half-sized sheet pan.  Who needs all that dough anyway?

Toppings: Sliced Vidalia onions, anchovies

Sauce: Crushed San Marzano tomatoes

Dough:  Bon Appétit/Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Dough

Technique:

• Remove the crust from the fridge 3 hours before you want to bake.  This seems to be crucial to getting great results.  An hour before you want to bake, preheat your oven to 500˚.
• Roll or stretch out the crust until it fits snugly into your (olive-oiled) pizza pan.  Per the recipe, the dough should be 1/2” thick.
• Spread 6 oz. of shredded mozzarella over the pizza.  Top with a drained can of crushed San Marzano tomatoes.  Top with 3 oz. of pecorino romano cheese.  Top liberally with a Vidalia onion sliced into thin rings.  Add anchovies if you like (I didn’t; Nikc did.  Glad we only did half).
• Place the pizza in the oven.  Bake for 18-20 minutes for a full-sized pizza (15 if you go our route and do a smaller version).
• Remove from the oven.  Add a drizzle of olive oil.

Laurynn:  This was just a good standard version of Sicilian pizza.  While baking, it filled the house with a really rich irresistible smell, like roasting onions and fresh bread and browned cheese.  Biting into it, I found it to be a bit doughy for my liking in places (there were weird folds/pockets in the crust), and I think more tomatoes or sauce would have helped a lot.  I also wanted more onions.  The edges of the crust were perfect… the cheese ran over and crisped against the pan… like Little Caesar’s pizza, back before they sold those $5 things.  If I could do it again, I’d have used my favorite sauce recipe, and done this up in a richer style more like our favorite local pizza place.  Their Sicilian pizza is the best I’ve ever tried from their amazing meat-infused sauce.

Nikc:  I liked this one the way it came out. It’s very simple, very bready, and really open for a variety of toppings. The recipe called for two whole onions sliced thin. That seemed insane, but really it wouldn’t have been. The onions had such a nice roasted sweet flavor and cooked down so much, that more would have been welcome. As for the anchovies, I think they’re the best pizza topping in the world. But I know that some people have an aversion to salty fish so they’re completely optional.