This morning the hubs and I devoured delicious local bacon from Link 41, fried eggs, and a locally made Niedlov's cinnamon roll, with orange juice and coffee. Scrumptious, people. My husband says this is the best bacon he's ever had, which is definitely a bold statement considering how highly he views bacon. Turns out keeping things simple and old school is not only better for you, but it tastes much better too. This bacon has six ingredients--pork belly and five seasonings. That's it.
If you are ever in Chattanooga, do yourself a favor and go to these two places! Bonus--they are right next to each other so you will only have to make one stop, and you will feel old school buying separate foods at separate stores. This is a good thing. They are experts and know their particular foods like nothin else.
That's all I have of this morning because we devoured everything as soon as it was ready.
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But last night I made a delicious homemade pepperoni pizza that I wanted to share.
So pepperoni is one of our favorite pizzas, but the pepperonis you can buy in stores are fairly gross. They have about 50 ingredients, very few of which are self-explanatory. I love making homemade pizza myself, but have been avoiding pepperonis for the last few months because I didn't know how to resolve that problem.
Then I thought, pepperoni is supposed to be sausage, right? I looked it up on Cuisinart's food processor guide, and it said that to slice meat, have it mostly frozen, but it can be done!
Naturally, I went to my favorite local pig store Link 41 and bought frozen sausage links to do this. I talked to one of the workers/owners there and apparently pepperoni is actually a mixture of sausage and beef, but details shmetails. This sausage was going to be delish.
So this is how yesterday went down.
I took out my dough to relax for about 45 minutes while I began making the pizza sauce.
Although I've been making my own pizza since we got married almost two years ago, I had yet to make my own pizza sauce. This stuff was delicious. And super easy! I just threw it all in the food processor and it was done in a snap!
Next up, slice the frozen sausages with a cleaned out food processor. I think if the links were more frozen and hadn't thawed at all, it would have made more clean slices with fewer little bits, but would that have hurt the food processor blade? I'm not sure. These are just the little bits left.
Then I cooked the "pepperonis". I know they're not perfect, but people, perfection is a mark of the processed food industry! Imperfection just says homemade.
Degreasing. I said they were local and without gross ingredients, I didn't say they were fat-free. It is sausage after all. :)
Roll out the dough, top it with your freshly made sauce, add your pepps, and top with cheese. I add my toppings below the cheese so they don't burn, but if you want them toastier, of course you could do it vice versa.
At 450*, it only takes about 15 minutes. I don't time it, I just keep an eye on it and when it's nice and toasty, take it out.
YUMMM. Oh my word, I think this was probably the best pizza we've had. It tasted more like sausage than typical pepperonis, but they were also thicker than typical pepperonis. I might try hand slicing next time.
I even went back and got the extra pizza sauce to dunk my crust in it. I can't wait to eat the leftovers today! There weren't very many though, no surprise.
I hope your Friday night was just as scrumptious and relaxing! If you want details about how to make this type of pizza, check out Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day: Pizza or their website. The dough recipe I use is for their bread loaf, so I have yet to master the thin crispy crust. I definitely want to try that soon, but the original recipe still makes a great crust with barely any work. Just a few tools, which they go over in their original dough recipe.
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