Gastronomy612′s Weblog

So Jim Lahey (YES! THIS Jim Lahey) has a new that came out called My Bread, or rather, my bread.  Because of this, his book reviewed with a recipe in Gourmet’s last issue in November.  The title of the recipe is called Pizza Patate and includes the necessary pizza dough recipe as well.  When I first considered making this I was falsely under the impression that it would be much like a potato knish, or even sort of close to gözleme.  However, after using my brain and eyes to read through the recipe a week thereafter, I came to realize it was nothing more than a potato topped pizza recipe.  It was also not a baked potato pizza a la Pizza Luce which I love love love.  On the other hand, it was because it was none of these things that I became intrigued and made a serous commitment to make Pizza Patate.

I attached the slicer t the food processor and sliced about four medium sized potatoes.  Everything was going well until a potato got stuck and it being 8:30am, I figured that using a knife would be the most effective way to push it down through the spout.  Which it was.  Until the handle of the knife got stuck on the slicer, I had a 7″ chef’s knife wobbling around, and the slicer stem broke.  (Don’t worry, I jumped away for safety rather than do anything effective like turn the food processor off.  Safety first though.)  Being safe and sound, I continued on by placing the taters in a bowl with a generous helping of kosher salt and filling it with water until all the spuds were covered.  I left them in the refrigerator longer than anticipated, but it was not detrimental (Friday morning to Sunday night).

Sunday morning I deviated from my normal pizza dough to use Lahey’s recipe (which is only slightly different from his No-Knead recipe).  After getting the dough close to ready, I emptied the potato bowl of its water and pressed any remaining water out with a dry towel.  Then in went to the thinly sliced onion (which I sliced by hand kthx?), some olive oil, as well as pepper.  Because the potatoes were soaking in Kosher salt for two and a half days, adding salt was wholly unnecessary.  Then I spread these guys across the dough which was already stretched across the pizza stone which had been preheating n the oven for a good half hour.  But something was inherently wrong, and it wasn’t just the lack of rosemary…

It was the lack of bacon.  After more consideration, it was also the lack of cheese.  In essence, I created not pizza patate, but rather, a breakfasty potato pizza, which according to Babelfish (which had steered me wrong so many times before in my seven years of German language learning), looks like this in Italian: pizza della prima colazione della patata.

Pizza della prima colazione della patat pretty much tasted like a giant-sized hash brown, but the delicious kind that was made with love and not with over processed potatoes from Denny’s.  However, now that my replacement slicer stem has arrived in the mail, I may safely slice some potatoes and try pizza patate again, but more accurately.