One thing I always loved about The Band, of which Robbie Robertson was an integral—and Canadian—part, was the way they took traditional sounds, styles, and instruments and used them in non-traditional ways.

Likewise, what I like about kohlrabi is that it is a very traditional vegetable, but one that might need some updating in its uses (um, “what uses?” you might be wondering).  Kohlrabi happens to be German for cabbage  (kohl) and turnip (rabi), and this is essentially what it is, a cabbage-turnip-veggie-thingy.  It tastes pretty much like that too so its uses are anywhere you’d use one or the other of those.

(Image of kohlrabi from allotments.ie)

I decided to take it in another direction, much the way that Robertson helped Bob Dylan take his music electric in 1965.  Okay, that was an absurd comparison, and I’m not even the first to put kohlrabi on a pizza, Kristin from Farm Fresh Feasts did it with kohlrabi from her CSA over a year ago, which partly gave me the inspiration for this pizza!

So it turns out I’m not quite a Robbie Robertson… but I’d like to think that this pizza, which I’m referring to as Kohlrabi Robertson, is something along the lines of what he is all about, bridging the gap between the traditional and the modern.  And in this case that’s using a very traditional European vegetable to make a modern pizza.

This pizza then crossed borders from a Europe to East Asia with the addition of bok choy to the base and as a topping.  Unsure of what to use a couple heads of bok choy that were getting a bit yellow and wilty I threw them in a pesto along with some kale from the garden.  After all, it was Week of Greens and I had to finish on a strong green note.

To compare this pizza—or myself—one more time to the great musician who crossed genres and helped contribute to the formation of the types of music known as Americana, Roots Rock, and Country Rock, this pizza crosses genres and blends cultures.  Oh man, this is so ridiculous, I should just stop here, but for some reason I keep reaching for comparisons.  Time to be honest, the main reason this pizza is called Kohlrabi Robertson is because the name just floated into my head while making it and I like puns.  But I really do love The Band and Robbie Robertson so I’m happy to name this pizza after him!

Oh, and I should mention that, most importantly, after all this blabbing about genres, cultures, and musical greats, this pizza was delicious.  I also have to say that kohlrabi is a new favorite veggie for me, and I think I’ll eat it in more formats than just as a pizza topping!

On Wednesday I had leftover pizza dough in the fridge from my Young Assistant’s birthday party a few days before.  It was just the boys and I for dinner because Madame was in Toronto for work.  I pulled the dough out and assessed what ingredients were available for toppings.  Leftover whipped butternut squash in the fridge from the night before.  Onions.  Walnuts.  Greens growing in the garden.  An emergency stash of mozzarella in the freezer and a small amount of goat cheese.  I did a quick search for foods that can accompany butternut and decided some caramelized onions and wilted greens would do nicely.  Oh and I did a second pizza that was much simpler that the boys preferred, it just had sauce and cheese….  So here’s the butternut pizza that emerged:

Butternut and Caramelized Onion Pizza Topped with Wilted Greens

Ingredients:

• whipped butternut* (½  cup or more)
• ½ cup onion (or more), chopped and fried with a bit of olive oil until nicely caramelized (5-10 minutes)
• ½ cup walnuts
• 5-10 leaves of chard/spinach/other green, chopped coarsely
• mozzarella (grated or sliced thinly)
• soft goat cheese (crumbled)
• olive oil
• balsamic vinegar
• pizza dough (I recommend this one)

Stretch your pizza dough and top with the whipped butternut.  Add the cheeses, caramelized onions, and walnuts.  Cook at 500 for 4-5 minutes.  Meanwhile chop the greens and toss them in a small amount olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  Open the oven and quickly add the greens on top of the pizza and cook 2-3 more minutes, until they are wilted.  Enjoy!

As I’ve already stated, I’m pretty much obsessed with pizza.  Maybe my favorite thing about pizza is the freedom to put whatever you want on a piece of dough and still be able to call it pizza.  The discovery (well, for me it was a discovery, for others it was pretty old news) that fruit is one of the best pizza toppings led me to regularly attempt new fruit pizza creations.  This is one of them, and it was incredible!  It was also a good opportunity to use up some of the apricots from the half-box that I got from Sustainable 360.

Apricots are pretty.  They’re pretty cute too.

Cardamom Apricot Pizza

Keep it simple:

• Apricots, halved and sprinkled with cardamom
• Walnuts, lightly candied with a bit of honey, salt, and butter
• Mozzarella and crumbled goat cheese
• Olive oil (or maybe walnut oil if you have it!)

1. Stretch out dough and drizzle lightly with oil.
2. Arrange mozzarella, apricots, and walnuts, then crumble the goat cheese on top of everything.
3. Bake as hot as your oven will allow (in my case I go between 500 and 550).

Last night my Young Assistant and I made three pizzas for dinner.  Here are pizzas one and two, both featuring garden-fresh pesto and produce.  I will follow up with a post soon about the third pizza.

This event also marked the first pesto-making of the season.  Well, that’s not completely true. but this was the first all-basil pesto!  My young assistant was very helpful with the making of the pesto and especially the peeling of garlic.

Wonderful Basil.  Blanch it by boiling then cooling to preserve its amazing color.

“Garlic doesn’t sting, does it, Dada?”  He is less fond of peeling onions.

Is it bad his fingernails are so dirty, I mean, he is a 4-year-old boy….

Walnuts make a great local substitute for pine nuts.

Pesto Margarita Pizza

(This style of pizza normally doesn’t have pesto, but since we had lots of basil we really wanted to feature it!)

• ½ large tomato, sliced into wedges
• 5-6 cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1-2 scallions or very small onions, chopped
• 3-5 small cloves garlic, chopped
• Fresh basil
• 2-3 Tbs. olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• Fresh mozzarella, sliced into pieces similar in size/shape to the tomato wedges
• ¼ cup pesto
• Pizza dough

Zucchini Pesto Pizza

• 1 small zucchini, sliced fairly thin (or 1 quarter of a huge zucchini)
• 1-2 scallions, chopped
• Fresh herbs (basil, thyme, oregano), chopped
• 1 clove garlic, thinly sliced
• 2-3 Tbs. olive oil
• Fresh mozzarella, sliced
• ¼ cup pesto mixed with ¼ cup pizza sauce
• Pizza dough

1. Prepare the vegetables, herbs, and seasoning by mixing them together in a bowl and tossing with the olive oil.  Refrigerate until ready to top pizza with them.
2. Stretch out the pizza dough to your preferred size and shape (typically a circle, but maybe a rectangle if that’s what fits your pan).  Try to resist the urge to use a rolling pin which will rob your pizza dough of many of the bubbles that the yeast have been hard at work creating!
3. Spread the pesto/sauce and then arrange the rest of the ingredients on top.  You do not need your cheese to cover every square inch!  (Pizzeria secret – a sprinkle of extra salt on top of the pizza before baking).  Bake as hot as your oven will allow (I preheat to 550, then lower the heat to 500 when I put the pizza on the stone).

Be sure to check out my dandelion greens pizza, as well as the rhubarb and asparagus pizzas.  Oh and then there’s the one with beets, which ought to be in season again!  Mmmmm, thinking about those other pizzas makes me want to make some pizza as soon as I can.   Strange that I might have to convince the rest of my family to eat it again so soon, who wouldn’t want pizza right now?!

Shaved Asparagus Pizza with Rhubarb Vinegar – Recipe PDF

Inspiration for Rhubarb Vinegar with Asparagus from Food Network and  Shaved Asparagus Pizza from Smitten Kitchen

Rhubarb Cranberry Goat Cheese Pizza – Recipe PDF

Inspiration for honey-glazed rhubarb from Brooklyn Locavore

And finally, my assistant, hard at work grating cheese (and yes, that’s pepperoni on the cutting board for the “kid” pizza, what can I say, kids just love their pepperoni, but at least it’s from a local company):

This pizza is pretty simple; it is a pizza with Dandelion Pesto as the base, topped with mozzarella, ricotta, cranberries, pecans, and… more dandelion greens!  We didn’t candy the pecans this time but I think it would be even better if they were candied, as the slight bitterness of the dandelion greens will be better balanced with extra sweetness.  The cranberries do provide some sweetness and if you prefer the bitter edge then leave the pecans un-sweetened.

Dandelion Pesto Pizza

Pesto inspired by David Lebovitz

Ingredients:

• Large bowl of dandelion greens (pick in morning, lightly wash, store in fridge)
• ¼ cup parmesan, grated
• ¼ cup pecans/walnuts/heartnuts*
• 2 Tbs. oil
• salt

• 1-2 cups mozzarella, grated
• ½ cup ricotta
• ½ cup dried cranberries
• ½ cup pecans  (optional – candied, lightly fried with butter and honey/maple syrup)
• 1 Tbs. oil
• 1 Tbs. balsamic vinegar
• Salt and pepper

• Pizza dough

Preheat the oven as hot as you are comfortable—500 is what we do.  Heat a pot of salted water and bring to a boil.  When water is boiling add most of the dandelion greens, saving 15-20 leaves for later.  Boil for 30 seconds (or less), just long enough to wilt the greens (This also helps preserve their “greenness”).  Transfer them using tongs or a slotted spoon to a food processor.  Add the parmesan, pecans, oil, and salt.  Puree until smooth.

Spread the pesto on a prepared pizza dough (it will turn out more bubbly if you stretch rather than roll the dough).  Top with mozzarella and spoonfuls of ricotta, then with the cranberries and pecans.  Bake the pizza for 3-6 minutes.

Meanwhile toss the remaining dandelion greens with the oil and vinegar, and a small amount of salt and pepper.  When the cheese on the pizza has melted and is beginning to bubble add the tossed greens and bake several more minutes until the crust is beginning to turn golden.  Remove pizza, allow to briefly cool, slice and serve.  Pair with a sweet white wine?

*I never seem to have pinenuts around.  I just can’t buy such an expensive nut.  But I don’t really mind if you do  And if you’re wondering about the cracking of the pecans, before leaving Georgia we were given a huge bag of pecans from a friend who got them from a relative with a pecan tree….  It is a bit of extra work but worth it for the wonderful treasures inside!

This morning I took out my dough which had been in the fridge since two days ago and shaped it.  Then I transferred it on wax paper to the freezer.  I made six medium-sized pizzas (sans the toppings) and piled them up one on top of another.  This is the experiment.

I will take out the dough 1-2 hours before I plan to bake and let them thaw out and then put the toppings on them.  I have read about people pre-cooking their dough and then freezing it, both with and without toppings but I didn’t want to have a pizza that seemed like leftovers.  I just want to know if I can break pizza night up into more manageable steps.  My ultimate goal would be to freeze an entire unbaked pizza and see if it will still puff up in the oven when baked, kind of like Digiorno.  From Our Front Porch  freezes their pizza dough after shaping it but I haven’t yet found anyone who has done the whole thing uncooked (which doesn’t mean nobody has, I just haven’t found them!).

—————————————-

fail…

…fail continued…

Well, I pulled out the dough in the middle of the afternoon and they had all stuck to each other.  So my first smart idea for next time is not to stack them!  I need a more manageable way of freezing them and keeping things from sitting on top of them.  I then found that many of them were falling apart as I moved them about the counter top, getting things into position for preparing my pizzas.  After a while I decided to cut my losses and threw four of the six pizzas into a big lump and reworked the dough.

Back to the beginning…

The two that looked the best I put back in the freezer, only this time just straight onto pizza trays, without stacking them.  I turned shaped the dough pile into three new balls of dough and let them sit for an hour.  Then I proceeded with pizza night as planned (but don’t worry, I still revisited the experiment).

The Pizzas

The first pizza was a half-and-half pizza, with half being the always kid-friendly pepperoni (with local pepperoni) and the other half having caramelized Spanish onions, garlic, and steamed broccoli (no, the broccoli is not local, but our friends were leaving town and left a bunch of perishables with us so in a sense it is local since it came from their house which is closer than the grocery store or any farm…).

Pizza number two had a light base of sunflower oil (our best local option), mozzarella cheese, smoked blue cheese, chicken (remember the chicken we ate a few days ago, we have lots left!), and leeks.  This pizza was quite good but I decided next time I would put a base of ricotta cheese on it to help moisten it.

The final pizza was a repeat from several weeks ago.  It had a base of pizza sauce and mozzarella, and was topped with beets that were simmered for 30 minutes, crumbled extra sharp white cheddar, and more leeks.  It was awesome!  The key to putting beets on a pizza seems to be making sure they are cooked the way you like them BEFORE you put them on the pizza.  Since I like my beets to have a bit of butter on them I lightly fry them to melt the butter after cooking them in water for half an hour.

Back to the Freezer…

I pulled the completely frozen dough out of the freezer and topped it with sauce and cheese and then returned it to the freezer.  Later in the evening I checked to see if all was frozen and indeed it was so I then wrapped it in plastic wrap (do they make biodegradable plastic wrap??) and put them back in the freezer, this time stacking them more confidently than the first time.  I will update when I cook these with fresh toppings someday soon…. Or not too soon, since they are in the freezer what’s the rush?

*See The Bread Baker’s Apprentice or Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads