Pizza Resurrected

The Craving: "Hey, doesn't a pizza sound really good tonight?"

The Supplies: A mix of white and whole-wheat flours. A little bit of creamy chevre in a plastic tub. A handful of leeks. A Brandywine tomato.

The Obstacles: We had no yeast. I had remembered that even without yeast, you can get a little rise out of a basic flour dough by keeping it pretty wet and making sure your baking surface is blazing hot. As the water in the dough turns to steam, it bubbles up, like naan. But that left the dough a tacky mess.The dough managed to get stuck all over the rolling mat just as I getting ready to stick it on the pizza stone.

The Intervention: My wife exercised her household prerogative over baking floury doughs and commandeered the project. This meant taking my messy smear of dough, adding flour, rolling it out with a rolling pin, and using a handful of olive oil to keep it from sticking. A pizza peel transferred it to the oven for 5 minutes of pre-cooking. Then we layered on thin-sliced tomato, little crumbles of goat cheese, and a bunch of sauteed leeks (plus coarse salt), and gave it another ten minutes or so.

The Results: Delicious. The dough did indeed get up a little bit of a naan-like puff, and the gooey goat cheese and crunchy leeks made for a perfect summer supper. Yes, it would have been better with twice as much goat cheese, and yes the dough still slightly resembled hardtack, but it was either that or no pizza at all.