Pizzas and piadines

Pizza Hut cold salad 

Every now and then, we like to go out for pizza. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we typically go to restaurants that cook it wood fired style.  When I'm in south Asia, I LOVE to eat at Pizza Hut.

In the 80s and 90s, I remember going to Pizza Hut with my parents and getting my own personal pan pizza as a reward for finishing (yet another) book through the Book It! program (sponsored by Pizza Hut). My sister, father, and I used to have a standing order for breadsticks every time we went there.

Fast forward to now, and in the U.S., it seems that Pizza Hut has become more of a fast food restaurant. They're commonly found inside Target or combined with Taco Bell or KFC. Rarely do I see Pizza Hut restaurants (at least not many in this area) where you can sit down and eat there (instead of just taking it for to go).

In south Asia, Pizza Hut restaurants are still nice (or are at least nicer than some of those I've seen in the U.S.).  I've even seen several that have 2 floors in the restaurant. And as far as deliveries go, they pretty much deliver all night and anywhere in the city. Hungry at 3am?  No problem, let's order Pizza Hut!

Then there's of course the added benefit of watching desis make mountains out of cold salad and then bring it back to the table for presentation to everyone else.  (In our family, there's usually a contest to see who can build it up the highest and mix all the salads up the most.)  I don't want to ruin it for them, but it usually looks disgusting. (They love it!)

Suffice to say, I'm a fan of pizza.  Now, making it at home is a completely different story.  My husband and I used to be the worst pizza makers. On one occasion, we invited friends over to eat our homemade pizza...only to find that it was so undercooked that it was completely inedible! We were motified (thankfully, we weren't defriended), and as I recall, we ate out the next several times we met those friends.

I'd like to think we've learned and grown from that experience (not to mention that we got rid of the pizza stone that we blamed that catastrophe on and replaced it with a few of these Mario Batali personal pizza pans). To be perfectly honest, I for one have done very little (ok, practically nothing) to hone my pizza cooking skills. I do, however, deserve all the credit for rediscovering that our bread maker can make pizza dough. Since then, my husband has been a pizza making machine.

An italian restaurant in our area serves wood fired pizza as well as piadines (or piadini, as they're sometimes called). If you've never had one, it's like a salad on top of a pizza crust (no sauce). Since my husband seems to have perfected his pizza recipe, I thought it might be time for us to give piadines a try.

I found these 2 recipes online: (1) Piadine with Caesar Salad and Roasted Garlic Paste and (2) grilled chicken caesar salad. But what I really wanted was a mixture of both: a chicken caesar piadine.

The following is a rough description of what we did, with the ingredients roughly listed at the end. There are 4 parts to this recipe (all of which are done in parallel). (Don't worry, it looks more difficult than it actually is.)

Part 1: Roasted garlic paste
You can make this ahead of time and save it in the fridge. I used our garlic roaster to roast 1 garlic bulb. For this, I took inspiration from Michael Chiarello's recipe, but it turns out I didn't really need it since I already had the garlic roaster. (If you don't have a garlic roaster, you can probably just follow Michael Chiarello's recipe.) Essentially, I:

1. Cut the tips off 1 garlic bulb (leaving the rest of the garlic bulb intact) and placed it in the garlic roaster.
2. Poured some olive oil over the open ends.
3. Put the garlic roaster in a 350 degree oven for about 45 minutes.
4. Removed the roaster from the oven (saved the olive oil) and let it cool before squeezing the roasted garlic into a bowl.
5. Combined the saved olive oil (from the garlic roaster) in the bowl and mashed the roasted garlic.

Piadine with roasted garlic

Part 2: Piadine crust
Use pre-made (store bought) pizza dough OR make your own. (Since the dough cycle on our bread maker takes 2 hours, we typically make our dough the night and then store it in the fridge until we're ready to cook.) We:

1. Followed the 2 thick or 4 thin crusts Pizza Crust Dough recipe on page 47 of the Toastmaster Bread Maker USE AND CARE GUIDE MODELS TBR15 AND TBR15CAN to make ours. (Our bread maker is the 1.5 lb loaf size--make sure yours can accomodate this before following this.)
2. Portioned out the dough for 3 pizza crusts (or in this case piadines), let them rise for a little bit, and then stretched them out onto the pans.
3. Cooked the piadines for about 4 minutes until they started to slightly bubble up.
4. Removed them from the oven and then spread the garlic paste all over the top of the piadines.
5. Finished cooking the piadines (with roasted garlic on top) for about another 3-4 minutes longer (or until slightly brown) and then removed them from the oven.

Part 3: Chicken

1. Cut chicken into bite sized pieces.
2. Marinated cut chicken with (1 or) 2 Tablespoons KRAFT Classic Caesar Dressing in the fridge for half an hour.
3. Threaded chicken pieces tightly onto 2 skewers.
4. Cooked on the grill. (The KRAFT instructions said to cook it for about 6-8 minutes, ours was more like 15-20 minutes.)

Part 4: Caesar salad
We used a full "head" of romaine lettuce, but I think you could just as easily use one of those bags of pre-cut romaine lettuce. I suggest doing this step of putting the dressing on the lettuce last so that it doesn't get too soggy while the rest of the items are being prepared.

1. Washed the romaine lettuce and then chopped up about half of it into bite-sized salad pieces.
2. Put the pieces into a large ziploc bag and added a little less than 1/2 cup KRAFT Classic Caesar Dressing.
3. Added 1.5 to 3 Tbsp (to taste) parmesan cheese, closed the bag, and shook to distribute the dressing.

Rough ingredients (made 2-3 piadines):
Pizza dough

For garlic paste:
1 garlic bulb
Couple of Tablespoons olive oil (about 2)

For salad:
Romaine lettuce (pre-packaged or 1 "head")
3 Tbsp Parmesan cheese
~1/4 cup KRAFT Classic Caesar Dressing
1.5 to 3 Tablespoons KRAFT Grated Parmesan Cheese

For chicken:
1/2 lb. boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
2 Tablespoons KRAFT Classic Caesar Dressing

Our chicken caesar piadine...YUM!

The piadines turned out great (actually, they were even better than I expected!)! I think I remembered all the details correctly, but if you plan to make this recipe, I highly suggest referring to the 2 online recipes: (1) Piadine with Caesar Salad and Roasted Garlic Paste and (2) grilled chicken caesar salad that I used as guides.