3/8 Pizza Night

So Haskell had the grand idea to make pizza last night. Pepperoni just wasn't going to cut it, so we made a quick trip to Fromagio Kitchen in Cambridge, where we found a few top-notch toppings. We bought some fancy pants fontina cheese, some brown clamshell (honshimeji) mushrooms, fresh mozzarella and basil. We then took our toppings one step further - as I tend to do with these things - and picked up some duck prosciutto and some lardo. Now lets talk about how good those two things are. Duck prosciutto... Had it a couple weeks ago at Central Kitchen and loved it. 'Twas just as amazing this time. Each slice is about equal proportion cured fat and meat. This particular version had a good amount of black pepper on it too. And lardo??? I've actually never had the stuff before... well not when it's just "lardo." Basically its just pork back fat, cured like prosciutto and sliced thinly. So essentially, it's like eating the fat from prosciutto. I can't tell you how good this is.

So onto the cooking. Haskell made the dough while I started preparing some stuff to snack on. Some olives, ciabatta, olive oil, mimolette cheese and the aforementioned lardo. We also cracked open a 1985 Vosnes Romanee, a red burgundy that had aged wonderfully. So clearly, we were off to a good start...

Ok, onto the pizzas. The first one was pretty basic but very well executed by Haskell. We started off pretty simply with mozzarella, previously home-made tomato sauce, basil and fontina. We noticed the dough was lacking salt, but otherwise a flawless pie. Oh, and at this point Dave came over to help with the eating – lest you think that two people could eat all this food alone.

Onto the second pizza. Things got a bit more creative here. Toppings included duck prosciutto, ricotta, fontina, slivers of green olives, and lightly dressed arugula on top of everything after the pizza came out of the oven. The duck was crisped up like bacon, the ricotta was nice and sweet and the arugula had its characteristic pepperiness. Very tasty.

Pizza three... clamshell mushrooms, tomato sauce, fontina and basil. The mushrooms were lightly sautéed before being added to the pizza and had a nice bite to them. We're starting to be quite full now, not helped by the fact that Dave is now watching Roadhouse on the TV - not a movie that one should watch while eating.

Final pizza... ricotta, olives, lardo and tomato sauce. we we're stuffed by now and probably didn’t really appreciate this one. The lardo mostly melted into the pizza which was definitely not a bad thing. By the end of the night, we had eaten all but two of the slices, which if you do some math is a lot of pizza. Anyway, the best pizza of the night? In my opinion, the duck prosciutto was the winner - but I'm not sure what the others thought. In any event, besides the whole over-eating thing, I would say it was a pretty successful evening.