Beer Pizza

Beer + Pizza is one of the classics, but what of pizza made with beer, rather than consumed with beer?  As a topping, beer lacks a certain something (mostly solidity).  However, as a part of the crust it performs quite well.

It happens not completely irregularly that beer is made in our house.  This is a bit of a hobby when living in the states but has assumed a new level of necessity since moving to Italy.  While wine is good, cheap and plentiful here the beer situation is more or less completely reversed.  There are microbreweries, but they are perhaps 30 years behind the states (and several hundred years behind the UK or, say, Belgium).  The teacher of the beer class in the Association of Italian Sommelier's course started out by reassuring the class that good beers really do exist, they just hadn't ever seen or tasted one.  The selection around Florence has never lead me to doubt his statements.

So, should we wish to have good beer, it is largely necessary to make our own.  Now, for those of you who don't habitually ferment alcoholic beverages at home, one of the side effects is a lot of yeast cells that don't end up in the finished product.  Usually, one makes a gift of them to the municipal sewer system, but you can extend their stay in your house by using them in bread, which usually ends up with even better texture than the results we get with a normal sponge (3 day) culture.  The only downside is the level of hops present in the lees can be pretty overpowering if you've just made, say, an IPA or some such thing.

The beer in question was a stout hopped like an IPA, so bitterness was going to be a part of the pizza.  The idea was to put together something that would balance that bitterness while including it as an intentional element -- the "ingredient of honor" even.  Normally (and this will strike some as heresy) I'm fairly anti red sauce on pizza.  I worked at several pizza places during school and grew to feel that the stuff was both deeply overused and a bit boring.  To go with this crust though, I wanted the robustness and sweet/tangy essence that a good red sauce brings to the table.  For toppings I ended up just using fresh mozzarella, sweet Italian sausage and bitter green olives with the pits removed.   One of the things I learned working in those pizza shops was that while lots of toppings can be fun, they really aren't necessary, or even especially desirable.  This simple setup played the nutty bitterness of the crust off the lightly sweet/sour savoriness of the sauce and while the cheese and sausage provided a base of unami/meaty/savory goodness the green olives added another salty note and referred back to the bitterness of the crust. 

Beer Pizza: (this assumes that you know how to make your own bread and that you happen to have the leavings from beer making sitting around).

Dough:  Take around a cup of the lees left over from racking your beer, add a cup of flour and let sit for a few hours (or overnight) to get the yeast started again.  (If necessary you can add more yeast, also, depending on how hoppy your beer is, you may want to use a lees/water mixture here).  Take your sponge and add another two cups of flour, two tablespoons of olive oil and a pinch of salt.  Kneed, then brush with olive oil and put in a covered bowl in a warm place to rise.  After it has risen dust your baking surface (cookie sheet, pizza stone, cast iron skillet, what ever you use...) with corn meal (polenta) and stretch out the dough.

Sauce:  Coarsely dice a small/medium onion and 3 (+/-) cloves of garlic.  Heat up some olive oil and saute the onion and garlic until the garlic is starting to turn golden and soft, then add a can of whole tomatoes -- including the juice -- a teaspoon or so of (entirely optional) tomato paste and the usual herbal suspects and simmer for at least 15 min. (or until quite thick, whichever is longer) breaking the tomatoes up as you go.  Spread thinly on the crust.

Shred/tear/slice your mozzarella and spread it (thinly), followed by the sausage and olives.  The toppings really don't need to be very thick -- so long as you have some of everything on most slices your fine.  Neapolitan pizza has even less than that.  Cheese spreads as it melts, you don't have to go overboard (though I admit it's pretty fun now and again, it just doesn't make a better pizza).  Stick your pizza in the oven and cook til the crust is golden brown.