“Pizza!” you may be saying with increduility as you wonder at the seeming incongruity of providing pizza recipes on a sandwich blog.  Well, please bear with us while we provide this rather plausible and very convincing rationale.

In Scandinavia, there is a long tradition of open-faced sandwiches (or smørrebrød as they are called in Denmark).   Open-faced sandwiches are essentially bread, with layered toppings. So it’s not much of a stretch to call a pizza, a sandwich.  After all, it is just that: bread with layered toppings.  For the pizza purists among the readers, this might seem like too much of a stretch, but we say that pizza by any other name is still an open faced sandwich.  Convinced yet?

Having provided this rather valid justification for what might, at first glance, appear incongrous, we will now provide  recipes for some of our favourite pizzas.

Making homemade pizza takes some time, but can be done from start to finish in 2 hours. This includes making your own dough, and we wouldn’t even consider doing it any other way. The dough is one of the main ingredients and it can be the difference between cardboard-like crust or a light, thin yet airy and chewy delight. Here, we will list an easy pizza dough, but we do plan to add a bread section later with some other recipes.

So let’s get to the good stuff: smoked salmon pizza… (The way my mother never made it).

Making the Pizza

• 1/4 of pizza dough (recipe here)
• 3 tbs pesto
• 3 tbs mascarpone
• 6 olives, cut in half
• 3 oz crumbled goat cheese
• 1/4 onion thinly sliced
• 2 oz smoked salmon
• pizza stone

We don’t really care about pizza shape.  Well, we’ve decided not to care since we can never seem to get the perfect oval/circle.  So our pizzas have been known to take on odd shapes.  This past weekend, we ended up with a pizza that looked curiously like a mishaped pentagon! Don’t ask.  Still, since the test is in the taste and not the shape, we don’t mind.

Divide the pizza dough into four equal pieces.  Take one piece and roll out on a flat surface until the dough is about 1/6 th of an inch thick.  Don’t be concerned with the shape. You are going for the rustic look, not the uniform shape that is synonymous with the Industrial Pizza Complexes.

Combine the pesto and the mascarpone, and spread evenly on the dough.  Top with smoked salmon in 1×1/2 inch like strips, then onions, olives, and crumbled goat cheese.

Use a pizza peel to transfer the pizza to the hot stone in the oven.  It is ready when the surface is getting golden brown (about 7-12 minutes) – a wide range I know, but it depends on the actual thickness of your crust and the temperament of your oven. Ours is quite temperamental, which means that all baking must be performed with extreme vigilance.