BBQ Chicken Pizza

Wow – I just went through 108 blog entries for Cinnamon Rolls/Sticky Buns. That’s a lot of buns on the internet!!! And now that my right arm and shoulder are sore from so much clicking, it’s time for a new recipe!

I have realized lately that my stack of cookbooks is way too underused. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that they don’t get taken off of the counter often to be read, and to have the pictures salivated over, but I don’t make a lot of recipes from them. I think it’s mostly because I end up planning on what I’m going to make for dinner while I am at work, and there is the internet filled with millions of recipes, and my cookbooks are sitting at home lonely. I went to Barnes and Noble on my birthday a few weeks back and bought a few new cookbooks, and it got me thinking. I have about 10 cookbooks on my “I want to buy right now” list, but I can’t justify it because I have not even been utilizing what I already have. So I have come up with a personal challenge – or my own personal “blogging event” if you will. I am allowing myself one cookbook purchase a month, but I have to make at least 3 recipes from that book in the month. At the end of the month, I will write my own personal review of the book. After all, you can’t adequately judge a book by making only one of the recipes and basing the whole book on that recipe. Now, I am not a cookbook critic by any means, but this will just be a personal opinion on the book. And to be honest, most of the books I want have already been raved about on other food blogs, so most likely, the cookbooks will get good reviews! I will hopefully make it to the store today to buy my first choice for the month of October – which (if I do make it to the store) I will announce tomorrow.

That being said, the recipe I am posting about today does not come from October’s cookbook, but it does come from a cookbook! I believe I received this book – Top Secret Restaurant Recipes – as a Christmas gift many years ago. It is full of popular chain copy cat recipes – everywhere from Olive Garden to Red Robin. I have looked through the recipes many times, but have never made anything from the book. It’s not full of pretty pictures (like most of the cookbooks I love to look through!) but he does draw diagrams of how the food is put together. Not really necessary, in my opinion, but something to look at nonetheless!

I was craving pizza one night, and have not made homemade pizza before. I know, I know – who has not made homemade pizza before? Well, my excuse is that I never had a baking stone, and I didn’t want soggy crust, so it was always Papa Johns. Well, I found a partly used gift card to Bed, Bath and Beyond that we received for our wedding, so a baking stone was one of the items purchased with that gift card.

I decided to make the California Pizza Kitchen Original BBQ Chicken Pizza. This pizza dough is supposed to rest in the fridge overnight, but really, when I want pizza, I want it now! I ended up making the dough before work (it went together really quickly) and setting it out to rise for a few hours. My husband was not working that day, so he was assigned to put it in the fridge after a couple of hours. That night when I got home, I took it out of and let it rise again for about 30-45 minutes. Throwing the rest of the pizza together was a cinch, and before we knew it, there was homemade BBQ chicken pizza on the table.

This recipe is extremely good. The pizza dough was good, but because I have seen recipes that come together a lot faster, I probably will keep looking for the perfect, quick pizza dough. I would say that overall, this pizza was just as good – or better – than going to California Pizza Kitchen. And the baking stone? I think it makes all the difference. Pizza crust just doesn’t taste like pizza crust when it is cooked on anything else!!

California Pizza Kitchen Original BBQ Pizza
From Top Secret Restaurant Recipes

Crust:
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon warm water (105 – 115 degrees F)
3/4 teaspoon yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup bread flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 tablespoon olive oil

Topping:
1 boneless, skinless chicken breast half
1/2 cup Bullseye Original bbq sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons olive oil
1 cup shredded mozzarella
1/2 cup grated Gouda cheese (smoked, if you can find it)
1/2 cup sliced red onion
2 teaspoon finely chopped fresh cilantro

Start the dough one day before you plan to serve the pizza. In a small bowl or measuring cup, dissolve the yeast and sugar in the warm water. Let it sit for 5 minutes until the surface of the mixture turns foamy. Sift together the flour and the olive oil and yeast mixture. Use a fork to stir the liquid, gradually drawing in more flour as you stir, until all the ingredients are combined. When you can no longer stir with a fork, use hour hands to form the dough into a ball. Knead for 10 minutes. Form the dough back into a ball, coat it lightly with oil, and place it into a clean bowl covered with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise for 2 hours. Punch down the dough and put it back into the covered bowl and into your refrigerator overnight. Take the dough from the refrigerator 1 to 2 hours before you plan to build the pizza so that the dough can warm up to room temperature.

Cut the chicken breast into bite sized cubes and marinate it in 1/4 cup of the bbq sauce in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.

When the chicken is marinated, preheat the oven to 500 degrees F. Heat a small frying pan on your stove with about 1 1/2 teaspoons of olive oil. Saute the chicken in the pan for about 3 to 4 minutes or until no longer pink.

Form the dough into a ball and roll out on a floured surface until very thin and 10 inches in diameter. Spread the remaining 1/4 cup of bbq sauce evenly over the crust.

Sprinkle 1/2 cup of mozzarella and all of the Gouda cheese over the sauce.

Add the chicken next, then the red onion. Sprinkle the remaining mozzarella around the center of the pizza. Bake the pizza for 10 to 12 minutes or until the crust is lightly brown. Top with cilantro.

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