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White pizza sauces are usually based on ricotta cheese, which is why they usually taste like
nothing at all.
I make my white pizza with a garlicy cream sauce. It sure ain't good for you, but at
least it tastes like something.
I'm using my standard pizza dough for this recipe. That's linked in the description,
but here's the short version.
Bloom yeast in warm sugar water. Add more water, sugar, salt, olive oil and bread flour.
Mix until smooth and elastic. Then divide into individual balls, deposit each ball in
its own oiled container, cover and throw immediately into the fridge. I like a long, slow, cold
rise. I'm working with this dough after its aged for almost three days.
Actually, back up, before you toss your dough, you gotta get your oven pre-heating. I'm using
a pizza stone, and I'm heating it with the oven at 550 F convection for a full hour before
baking.
While your stone or steel or whatever you're using is heating, it's time to make the sauce.
I'm making enough for just one 12 or 13 inch pizza. Four or five garlic gloves. Get them
chopped up pretty fine.
Then I'll grate up some hard cheese. I'm using pecorino Romano. You could use parmesan, but
I think the acidity of a sheep's milk cheese does a lot to replace the acidity that you'd
normally get from tomato sauce.
I usually grate up a pile that's about the size of my garlic pile. How much garlic and
cheese is that? I don't know, man. I just eyeball this stuff. Fine, I'll weigh it.
"24 grams."
24 grams of garlic. How much cheese?
"20 grams."
20 grams. Or thereabouts.
Ok, so in this pan I've got on medium heat, I'll melt a little butter. Doesn't have to
be a non-stick pan. I just think that's easier to clean. Then garlic goes in the butter,
and you cook it until it's just starting to go golden. Before it burns, cover the pan
with a good layer of heavy cream. Brits would call it double cream.
How much cream was that? Oh fine, I'll weight the carton and subtract that from the original
weight.
473 grams minus...
"322 grams"
...equals 151 grams. Like, half a cup.
I just bring that to a boil, and before it boils over on me, I turn the heat off, and
let it cool down. You want to wait until the bubbling has pretty much stopped. That's important.
I'll grind in some pepper. There's more than enough salt in the cheese, and if you put
hard cheese into a sauce when it's really boiling, the proteins in the cheese will over-coagulate
and it'll go grainy.
I'll pull it off the heat to be safe. Now, see how it's leaving a trail when I drag the
spatula across the bottom? That's how I know the texture is perfect. That, by the way,
is Alfredo sauce. You could just put that right on pasta. Just don't eat too much of
it.
OK, so you can put that aside, and then stretch out your dough. I'm using cornmeal on the
peel to keep the dough from sticking. Then, uh oh, look at that. At it sits and cools,
that sauce will really stiffen up. No problem, just mix in some fresh cream. This is really
important, because we want a very thin layer of sauce on our pizza, and if this sauce is
too viscous, you won't be able to get it thin.
How thin?
Literally, as thin as is physically possible is what I try for. This sauce is very rich,
very intense. I really don't like too much of it. I'm just slapping it on and using the
silicon spatula like a putty knife. You might not need the whole recipe's worth to cover
the pizza.
Then comes cheese. If you're after that traditional New York-style flavor and texture, you need
whole milk, low moisture mozzarella. The only way I can get that where I live is molded
into string cheese, which is why these are little rounds. Don't make fun of me. It's
call be resourceful.
On the pizza stone it goes, and you want to be particularly careful about not over-cooking
this one. If that sauce gets too hot, it'll break. The fat will separate out in a big
yellow grease layer. That was right on the edge of happening with this pie. And yes,
I rest my pizzas on a cooling rack. I think that keeps them crisper.
What I like to do is let that cool down for a few minutes, then grab a stick or two of
rosemary, chop it up, and sprinkle it on top. I think a white pizza is really screaming
for some color contrast. There's still plenty of heat in that cheese to soften up the rosemary
a bit, but waiting a few minutes before you put it on insures that the rosemary won't
go instantly brown.
And there you go: white pizza that actually tastes like something. Gooey, cheesy, garlicy
— real nice change of pace from tomato sauce.
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Now, finally, I've been getting a lot of questions about this. It's just an external hard drive
on velcro. There it is. All my pizzas are in there.