My new favorite pizza

The pizza experiments continue in our kitchen. We're eating pizza twice a week or so and debating all the nuances of crust texture, crispness, chewiness, how airy or dense it should be, etc. It's a fun process. Krestia prefers the basic pizza dough recipe in the Joy of Cooking but it needs some altering. We've found that it rises too much in the oven, producing more of what I would call a foccacia instead of a pizza crust. It needs to be more flat and crispy instead of bread-like. So he decreased the yeast which helped a little. Shaping the dough is an important part of the process, too. It takes time to really work it into a nice flat circle. Krestia likes to be really Italian and toss the dough in the air.

While Krestia focuses on the technicalities of the crust, I've been playing around with toppings. He tends to be a basic red sauce and mozzarella guy, but I convinced him recently to try the Backpacker Pizza at Moose's Tooth--fresh spinach topped with sun-dried tomatoes, roasted garlic, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, feta, mozzarella and provolone. Yum. We combined that in our heads with the Goat pizza at Great Northern Pizza and came up with what I call, for lack of a better term, the Mediterranean pizza. Or maybe I should call it the Goat Backpacker? :) Anyway, I spread a thin layer of olive oil over the crust, then put down a layer of fresh spinach leaves, trimmed of rough stems and cut in half if they're big leaves. Then I add artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives and roasted garlic. Over all of that I crumble some soft goat cheese, then slide it into a 500 degree oven (that has been preheating with a pizza stone in it for 15-30 minutes) for around 5 minutes. It doesn't look nearly as pretty when it comes out (the spinach wilts and gets a little brown) but it tastes really, really good.