America's Most Wanted Recipes - California Pizza Kitchen

America's Most Wanted Recipes - Sage Richardson

I don't know about you guys, but one of my favorite things to get at a restaurant is pizza!!! California Pizza Kitchen's pizza is delicious, and I couldn't resist from including one of it's recipes in my blog. I chose to do a simple pizza with pepperoni and olives, "a menu item that's been on the California Pizza Kitchen menu since 1985" (Douglas, 45). The challenge of this recipe is making the dough, as well as cooking the dough on the grill. This fire-grilled pizza is the alternative to cooking pizza in a pizza oven, which is something most of us don't have. Here are the details!

Ingredients

Rolled out dough

Dough
- 1/2 cup water
- 2 teaspoons olive oil
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon yeast
- 2 teaspoons sugar
- 1 1/2 cups flour

Pizza
- Tomato sauce
- Pepperoni
- Mozzarella cheese

Adding toppings

- Cheddar cheese
- Sliced olives

(Douglas, 45)

Instructions

- Mix dough ingredients, let rise until size doubles
- Put dough out onto a floured surface
- Divide dough into 7 equal pieces
- Roll out dough into desired shape and thickness of pizza crust
- Place dough onto grill, cook until slightly crispy
- Remove dough from grill, let stand for 2 minutes
- Place desired toppings onto pizza, including tomato sauce, pepperoni, olives, and cheese
- Place pizza into oven on broil
- Cook until pizza toppings are melted 
- Cut pizza into slices

Finished product!

(Douglas, 45)

Cooked pizzas

I loved doing this recipe, because it made me feel like I was a cook in a pizza kitchen! Cooking the pizzas on the grill was definitely difficult, I had to be careful not to let any dough slip through the cracks. The second hardest part about this recipe was "making sure to not overcook the pizzas" once they were in the oven, since the toppings needed to melt but the dough had already been grilled (Douglas, 45). The fun of making different, crazy shapes of pizza made up for it though! Of all the recipes I've tried so far, this one was the most fun by far. My family even got involved and put toppings on their own pizzas. The recipe tasted very similar to the pizzas at California Pizza Kitchen, so I'd call it a success! If you were to choose, what toppings would you have on your pizza? Thanks for reading, I hope you can have as much fun with this recipe as I did!


Douglas, Ron. America's Most Wanted Recipes: Delicious Recipes from Your Family's Favorite Restaurants. 1st ed. New York N.Y.: Atria Paperback, 2009. Print.