Inspirational Pizza

There are people who sit around in bars and coffeeshops, brainstorming far-fetched ideas that seem incredibly brilliant at the time, coming up with inventions or one-of-a-kind enterprises no one else has considered – and then they go home and get ready for their 9 to 5 jobs the next day and forget about their schemes until the napkin they sketched them on resurfaces, crumpled and faded, in the pocket of an overcoat.

Jon Roberts is not one of those people.

He and a friend, Scott Smith, came up with an idea then followed through.

After baking pizza together in the homemade, wood-burning pizza oven in Jon’s back yard, the two decided to build another oven – this one on the back of a pickup truck. Now these two young guys bring brick-oven pizza to the people, firing up the 1,800-pound wood-burning oven at music festivals and farmer’s markets and vineyards, where they are regulars, and at private parties and other events as they come up. The pizzas are organic and use locally-grown ingredients. Last year, Jon sold 1,500 of them at a local music festival in Floyd, Virginia.

The business is called Dogtown Pizza, named for the mountain holler where Jon lives, in the Blue Ridge near Floyd.

If you had told me two years ago that you wanted to build a concrete oven and cart it around to bake pizza – with organic, local ingredients, no less -- I would have rolled my eyes and called you a dreamer. Recently I’ve learned that dreamers can also be do-ers.
Thanks, Jon, for the lesson.

If you’re not in or around Floyd County and Dogtown, dream your own dream and make your own pizza. In the time it takes to order and wait for delivery, I can put together a fabulous pizza with fresh garden chard and garlic – and they ain’t got that on the menu at Domino’s. Not that I’m bragging. I’m just sayin’.

Here’s my recipe, for a quick, barely-has-to-rise dough and toppings. The trick is to set your oven as high as it will go – unless you have a pizza oven your backyard, in which case you’re way ahead of me!

Way Better Than Carryout Pizza
1 tablespoon yeast
1 cup warm water
1 teaspoon sugar or other sweetener
2 tablespoons olive oil
2-1/2 cups unbleached white flour (or mix with whole wheat)
Pizza sauce – homemade or jarred
Toppings – your choice, see below
Mozarella – almost a whole block (16 oz?) shredded (I usually use Sargento) or use fresh
Dissolve yeast in water. Add remaining ingredients. Stir 100 strokes (or knead, if you’re like me and love the meditative quality of working the dough in your hands).
Cover with a warm, damp cloth and let rise five minutes (really!)
Roll the dough out on whatever you’ve got for baking – a pizza stone, if you’re lucky, a cookie pan, if you’re like me. I sprinkle a little oil on the pan to keep the crust from sticking. And I like to begin to flatten the dough with my marble rolling pin, then pick it up and practice spinning it around like the pizza guys I remember from a good pizza place I remember from college. That only takes me so far, though, because I’m not very good at it and because my cookie pan is rectangular, not circular (and you get a circle when you spin the dough), so I use the rolling pin to finish getting the dough nice and flat on the pan.
Slather the dough with pizza sauce, supplemented with extra dried oregano if you like that (I do). Sprinkle grated mozzarella all over – fresh mozzarella is a real treat, just know that it won’t melt to look the way you expect a conventional pizza to look.
Top with your favorites. Mine vary, but include chard or spinach lightly sautéed in olive oil; thinly sliced, raw garlic, tossed with olive oil to soften; fresh basil leaves from the garden; and roasted red pepper slices.
Bake 10 to 13 minutes at 475 or as high as your oven will go.