Bacon pizza (not what you'd think)

So now that I've finished my backlog of posts on Taiwan, I can finally get around to posting about the stuff that I actually ate during the year (not overly exciting for the most part). My suitemate and I got into a lot of baking at the beginning of the year, so I'm probably going to knock out those things first. This list... starts with a bacon pizza. What you see above is the final product. Although I must warn you that when I say bacon pizza, it's not as simple as it seems. Since we made this from scratch, we were able to take some, let's call them liberties.



We first started by making dough from scratch. With a recipe borrowed from somewhere on the Slice website. Really simple, basically the standard mix of flour (although we had to use a lot of whole wheat when we ran low on white), sugar, salt, yeast. Mix it all together, beat the crap out of it and let it rise. Since this was in the dead of winter (yes, a long time ago), and Columbia doesn't know how to regulate heating/cooling relative to the seasons, we borrowed the heat lamp from our turtles to make our dough rise. SORRY GUYS!



While we were waiting for our dough rise, and oh did we wait, we prepped a full package of thick cut bacon. By our estimation, the baking time in the oven wouldn't suffice to cook through the bacon, and we wanted a crispy topping, not a soggy strip of bacon that wouldn't break. Let's be honest, the thought of gnawing on semi-cooked strips of pork fat isn't very appetizing.



We also took some sweet Italian sausage and separated it from the casings, crumbled it, and pan fried it until it was just browned. It was a group consensus that a single type of meat on pizza was somewhat weak. I think this was actually cooked in the bacon fat, so that it would infuse the flavor. To be completely honest, I don't think it made a difference, but it sounded good in theory.



What post of pizza baking would be complete without a picture of Chris shredding cheese (obviously taken without him knowing). I will probably be murdered in a few hours for posting this. Worth it.



And there is our crust, post rising, and post beating. It was recommended that the dough be separated into 3 smaller pizzas, but when we were rolling it out, it seemed to tear way too easily. In retrospect, post baking, it rose quite a bit, and even though our pan was way larger in area than a traditional circular pan, it would've been smart to split it into 2 batches. Whatever, it ended up being a super thick pizza, although it wasn't overly doughy. We would've eaten it one way or another, so it's really a moot point, but note to self... scale back dough for singular pizza. Oh, and if you have a really sharp eye, I'm sure you can notice that our crust is actually lined with bacon. That wasn't on purpose, I just did a craptacular job of tucking it in.



What post about baking pizza would be complete without a picture of Daven being 100% useless and continuously throwing up peace signs. If there were an award for the most Asian white person, he would win it. For real, his Chinese is probably as good as mine, and he's even better at Japanese.



And... the pizza ready to bake. We should've used green peppers. There's all too much red on this pizza between the sauce, sausage, and peppers. Did I mention that we used an entire pack of cheese on this beauty? I think the final thing probably weighed close to 5+ pounds between the dough, cheese, sauce, and other crap that we added. Easily finished between 3 (yes it was just the 3 of us... shut up). It was delicious and I kind of want to do this again before the end of the year. I'm also tagging this as a recipe (questionably haha).