Pizzapalooza

Our previous excursions into personal pizza creation have been discussed in previous posts, and lately it's been a veritable pizzapalooza around our place! We recently discovered a new crust recipe that makes a thick but fluffy pizza and doesn't take forever to rise.  Wanting to try it out we put together a "ranch" pizza that uses ranch dressing instead of tomato sauce.  Here's the base of the pizza:

After poking thoroughly with a fork to avoid bubbling, Megan began the building process by adding on sliced green and red bell peppers and diced tomato.

Before getting thrown in the oven the pizza is topped off with bacon crumbles and a heaping handful of shredded mozzarella.

The end product was probably one of the best pizzas we've made at home, easily on par with our famous buffalo chicken and blue cheese pizza or the amazing garlic and pepperoni pie. With the thicker crust it ended up being as filling and delicious as a stuffed pizza from Papa Murphy's, and at a lower cost to boot.

Since the ranch pizza turned out so well we decided to use the crust recipe again for my recent birthday celebration.  We took 1/4 of the crust mixture and used it to create garlic cheese sticks. Here's a shot of the sticks getting brushed with garlic butter:

And then sprinkled with cheddar cheese of course:

The end result: buttery, cheesy awesome! We heated up some of the leftover butter/garlic mixture and used it as a dipping sauce, much like the sauces included with pizza at Papa John's.

With the remainder of the crust everyone made their own personal sized pizza, using a big pool of fantastic topping options.  Working this way everyone got the exact kind of pizza they wanted, and it didn't end up taking any extra time to bake.  Cristal put together this more traditional pie with tomato sauce (made from canned tomatoes pureed and then reduced down with balsamic vinegar), pepperoni, and mushrooms:

Megan wanted something very similar to the ranch pizza, so here she is starting off with a thick layer of cheese.

Next up came the extravaganza of veggies, including tomato slices, red bell pepper, black olives, and poblano peppers.

I like to take my pizzas in non-traditional directions, and couldn't decide between two different styles: so of course, I made both!  This is the base for my half cheeseburger/half rueben sandwich pizza. The reuben side uses thousand island dressing with Italian seasonings and fennel seed so it has a bit of the pizza taste and a bit of the rye bread taste. The top is then sprinkled with sliced corned beef and sauerkraut. The cheeseburger side uses a mixture of regular yellow mustard and ketchup, with traditional pizza seasonings thrown in. I personally used Morningstar Farms brand soy beef for mine, but regular ground beef tastes good on it as well.

The cheeseburger side then got slices of tomato, some onion, poblano pepper, and pieces of bacon. You can get really creative here and put just about any burger topping you want, from mushrooms to avocado.

For a final cheeseburger twist, the left side of the pizza is finished off with a few sliced dill pickles, which offer just the right amount of flavor to remind you where the inspiration came from.

Here are the finished pies, starting with Cristal's and working down through Megan's and on to my dual topping pizza:

Amazingly we still had crust dough leftover, so the next day we made personal pizzas again. I loved the reuben so much I had that again, but then changed up the other side to be a barbecue style pizza. The base sauce is barbecue sauce with pizza seasonings, and then the toppings include chicken, peppers, and lots of onion.