Pizza Bread

Remember pizza Fridays in grammar school? I feel like anyone who went to public school had pizza Fridays, but maybe it was just my school district. Whatever. Let's pretend we all had pizza Fridays, okay? Anyway, I used to particularly love French bread pizza Fridays and today's post is inspired by those memories.

The bakery inside of my local market makes really good bread so every weekend, when I do my grocery shopping for the week, I'll take a walk through the bakery section and buy still-warm loaves of fresh bread. I go around, gently pressing each kind of bread until I find one that has the perfect amount of "give" where the crust is firm and crisp but the inside is fluffy enough to respond to my loving squeeze.

I love the Italian bread, in particular, because it's the perfect vessel for making pizza bread. By the way, I don't know why we started calling this "pizza bread" in my house but it's in my vocabulary now and that can't be helped.
Ingredients:
Italian bread or French bread - something with a good hearty crust
tomato sauce (regular or bolognese)
shredded cheese
+ toppings
*I'm not giving exact amounts because it's pretty intuitive. And if you don't think it's intuitive, maybe you haven't consumed enough pizza in your lifetime... and you need to fix that.

So, to assemble your pizza bread, just spread on some sauce, sprinkle on some crushed red pepper flakes right onto the sauce (if you so desire), dump on some cheese, add any other toppings you might like (I used sopressata), and then place the pizzas on a sheet pan and bake in a 450F oven for 10 minutes or until the cheese is melted and the bread starts to get toasty. RUN ON SENTENCE ALERT!
Childhood French bread pizzas move out of the way! The grown-up version is here and it is good. I like to sprinkle on a little extra crushed red pepper and some hot sauce. Oh, and pickles make a great accompaniment.
Here's the (kind of stupid and pointless) recipe page:

Comments