The weather in New York is hopelessly dark and grey. The temperature is close to what Finland usually gets at midsummer, but the sun, which shines generously on weekdays, has withdrawn behind thick drizzle for the weekend. The gloom made me drop my plans to go adventuring in town. Even my favourite presenter on WNYC is under the weather, and the Blockbuster video shop was swarming with bored-looking neighbours ready to hibernate, because on Thursday the groundhog of Punxsutawney saw his shadow in Pennsylvania, which by his reckoning means six more weeks of this strange summery winter. Solid food stocks are called for, then: in weather like this the body cries out for comforting carbohydrates.
Two excellent food blogs - 101 Cookbooks, written in San Francisco, the food capital of the United States, and Cream Puffs in Venice, a new arrival blogging from Toronto, the belly of Canada - wrote about pizza recently in the most mouth-watering way. It brought back memories of my own. At a wood-fired pizzeria in the shadow of Vesuvius we were asked "Bianca o rossa?", and with our shaky Italian we took it to be a question about the wine. So the pizza that arrived, made of nothing but white vegetables, came as something of a surprise. The question had of course been about tomato sauce, which a white pizza does not have.
At its simplest a white pizza holds nothing but salt and herbs, but the food bloggers spurred me on to something a little more involved. Against all my usual shopping habits I went to restock at the D'Agostino on 110th Street in the worst of the evening rush. The experience was bruising, naturally, but as my reward I netted artichokes, Yukon Gold potatoes grown on Prince Edward Island, organic rosemary and a tasty gorgonzola. In the end I saved the artichokes for something else, but the rest of the haul turned into a delicious potato and rosemary pizza.
For the base, half the dough from the recipe I wrote down a couple of weeks ago with the asparagus pizza is enough. I slice the potatoes raw with a sharp knife, a couple of millimetres thick, and lay them over the base like a mosaic. I add no salt at all, because blue cheese is very salty. I don't bother letting the base rise again, but slip the pizza straight into the hot oven. Once it is done I let it cool for at least half an hour before serving, because that evens out the flavours.
Recipe card
Potato and Rosemary Pizza
- 1 pizza, about 30 cm
- Oven 250 °C
- Baking about 12 min
- Cooling at least half an hour
You will need
| 1 batch | pizza dough (the asparagus pizza recipe makes two bases) |
Topping for one pizza base
| 1 tbsp | extra virgin olive oil |
| 1-2 | medium Yukon Gold or other waxy potatoes |
| 50-75 g | gorgonzola or other blue cheese |
| 50 g | grated mozzarella |
| 1-2 tsp | rosemary needles |
Method
- Roll the dough out into a round about 30 cm across.
- Heat the oven to 250 °C and brush the base with a tablespoon of olive oil.
- Peel the raw potatoes and slice them with a sharp knife a couple of millimetres thick. Lay them over the base like a mosaic.
- Scatter over the rosemary, the blue cheese and the mozzarella. Blue cheese is very salty, so no salt needs adding.
- Don't bother letting the base rise, just slip the pizza into the oven and bake for 12 minutes, or until the edges begin to turn golden.
- Leave to cool for at least half an hour before serving; it evens out the flavours.
I serve it with a full-bodied red - the dregs of a Californian Niebaum-Coppola Zinfandel suited this food and the general hibernating mood down to the ground. The Coppola on the label is Francis Ford, who is said to have bought the estate in the Napa Valley with his Godfather money. As for Niebaum, I read only now that he was a sea captain born in Helsinki as Gustaf Nybom, who founded the winery back in the nineteenth century.
