Bleu Pizza

My husband and I recently took a vacation up to the Bay Area; His younger sister graduated from UC Berkeley Memorial Weekend and my husband and I wanted to visit San Francisco together. We had a great 5 days in San Francisco and are already planning our next trip.

This wasn't my first trip to the city (I went to SFSU-Go Gators!), but it was only my 2nd time in Berkeley. After her graduation ceremony, my sister-in-law wanted to get pizza for dinner. Only we didn't just call Pizza Hut and make it a night. No, she led us to a pizza co-op (how Nor Cal is that?!) that makes only one type of pizza a day and all 12 people that work there are equal partners in the business. Sounds hippish, right? Well it totally was, but the pizza was SO good! The day we were there the pizza consisted of 4 cheeses (mozazrella, fontina, parmasean, and bleu), 3 onions (yellow, red, and green), garlic olive oil, and basil, all piled onto a thin crust. We quickly gobbled up 2 pizzas, topped off with a few bottles of Belgium white beers. SO GOOD!

I never thought about puttine bleu cheese on a pizza before, but it is such a good idea!! The little pockets of bleu jump onto your tongue and stand out beautifully against the fresh mozzerela. I highly reccommend adding some bleu cheese to your next pizza.

The memory of that pizza stuck with me and I have been thinking about recreating it ever since. I made a batch of whole wheat pizza dough (well, that makes it sound really easy. My first 2 attempts were total FAILS...not really sure what went wrong. The third batch came out great and was the base for this pizza) on Sunday afternoon, let it rise, and then threw it in the fridge so it would be ready for dinner today.

While this is not an *exact* replica of Cheeseboard's Pizza of the Day (May 22), it was a pretty good riff on the original. My husband and I both gobbled it up. MMMMM, pizza! Here is the restaurant's website, and a link to their Twitter, which lists their daily pizzas.

Bleu Pizza

Bleu cheese, crumbled
Fresh mozzarella, shredded (I bought a hunk of buffalo mozzarella and shredded. SO much better than the pre-shredded stuff)
Low-fat cheddar
garlic olive oil (I crushed 3 cloves of garlic into about 3 tablespoons of oil and let it sit for 2 days....you don't need to infuse it for so long. You can just use regular olive oil too.)
1 green onion, sliced,
2 cloves of garlic, diced
a few fresh basil leaves

Pizza Crust
I used this recipe, but I subbed in Whole Wheat Flour.
The first two times I made it for this pizza, I used all purpose flour and the dough came out WAY too sticky. The whole wheat flour did not have that problem. I would reccommened omitting a 1/4 of water at first, and then add it in if your dough is too dry once mixed (before kneading).
That is the same dough recipe I used for my Healthy Pizza, which I also made with whole wheat flour.

Directions:
Pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees with the pizza stone inside, on the lowest rack.

Roll out a large piece of parchment paper and sprinkle with the cornmeal. Pull off two large hunks of pizza dough (about a handful each), and roll them out one at a time on the parchment paper. I used my hands to pull, stretch, and push the dough into shape, working it until it was about 1/8" thick. The cooked into a thin (but not cracker-like) crust; shape into a thicker crust if desired.

Brush each round of dough with the garlic olive oil, all the way to the edges. Sprinkle with the cheddar and mozzarella cheese. Dot with crumbled bleu cheese. Sprinkle diced garlic and chopped green onions over the cheese.


Here are the uncooked pizzas, all dressed up and ready to head into the oven. Mmmm.


Place the pizzas on your pizza stone and cook for 5-7 minutes. (I placed the pizzas on the stone while they were still on the parchment paper...I am never able to get the dough off the parchment without totally ruining the crusts! :) )