BBQ Chicken Pizza from Scratch

When I make pizza at home, I usually just take the shortcut of pre-made crusts. This weekend, I decided to finally try my hand at making a pizza entirely from scratch. I used the recipe from The Pioneer Woman for California Pizza Kitchen's BBQ Chicken Pizza.  Oh, buddy. It was a good one.

Ingredients for crust (makes two pizzas):

• 1 teaspoon of instant yeast
• 1 and 1/2 cups of warm water
• 4 cups of all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/3 cup of olive oil

Ingredients for toppings:

• Pre-cooked chicken
• About 1/2 cup of BBQ sauce
• Salt
• Fresh Mozzarella
• Red Onion
• Fresh Jalapeño
• Roasted Red Pepper Strips
• Cilantro

The steps...

I forgot to take a picture of the first step (and probably the most important). 

Take a bowl of 1 1/2 cups of warm water, and sprinkle the teaspoon of instant yeast on top. (I didn't mix it in, just let it sit while I went to the next step.)

Put 4 cups of all-purpose flour into my mixing bowl.

Then, add 1 teaspoon of salt to the flour.

I turned the stand mixer on low, and then poured in the water/yeast mixture, and the 1/3 cup of olive oil.

I thought I put 1/3 cup of olive oil in this measuring cup, but then took a picture and realized it was about 1/2 cup. Oops! I just didn't quite use it all in the dough. 

I let it run on low until it looked about like this:

A sticky, doughy mess. (At this point, the smell of the raw dough took me back to my childhood, when my grandpa owned a pizza place. Fun times!)

Then I put a bit of the extra olive oil into a bowl, so the dough wouldn't stick. 

(John took this picture, obviously. Not sure what's going on with my hair, or why I wasn't wearing my cute apron!)

And then plopped the dough in the extra bowl!

I covered it with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for about 2 hours. (The original recipe said to refrigerate for at least 1 hour, up to a day or two.)

(For some reason, I'm always interested in what other people's fridges look like, so here's a quick shot of mine. I didn't fix anything up, obviously. John had helped me load the fridge after grocery shopping immediately before this; hence some of the labels aren't turned out perfectly like crazy Jacki does!)

Two hours later, I was ready to start assembling the pizza. I started by pre-heating the oven to 425 degrees.

This shredded chicken was leftover from a whole chicken I cooked again this weekend. (That's becoming a weekend habit!) I kept pouring in some BBQ sauce and mixing it up until I was happy with its bar-be-que-ness.

That looks good to me.

Then I sliced a red onion. I only used about 1/4 of it. First, I cut off the ends:

And then cut in half:

And slice very thinly.

I drizzled some olive oil on my pan:

And then took half of the dough (the recipe above makes two pizzas, but we only need one for the two of us), and spread it out onto the pan, and drizzled a little more olive oil and sprinkled a bit of salt on top.

Then I spread a light layer of BBQ sauce on the dough.

And topped with very thin layers of mozzarella cheese.

And added my BBQ chicken.

With some red onion.

And some jalapeños (in hindsight, went way too light on these!)

And popped it into the 425 degree oven. 

But, whoops! I quickly discovered that I forgot to put some of my roasted red peppers on top! So I pulled it out and added those to the party. (I take them out of the jar and squeeze each piece with a paper towel before adding to the pizza; otherwise they can be too watery.)

Then I put the pizza back into the oven for about 13-15 minutes. 

Here's the beautiful, somewhat strangely shaped pizza when I took it out of the oven. (You could call it "rustic".)

I sprinkled on some chopped cilantro just before we ate it.

Mmmmm.

John did the cutting honors (and I took this terrible picture of it).

Yum, yum, yum!

We both enjoyed it a lot! 

John said he would have liked the sauce and the toppings to go further to the edges, as he isn't a huge fan of crust on its own. But I thought this crust was delightful. John described it as almost tasting like a biscuit, and I agree (in a good way!). I'm actually not the biggest BBQ fan, so I'm excited to try this crust with different sort of pizza toppings. 

(And now that I've got another dough ball in my fridge waiting for me - maybe I'll do that soon! Haven't decided if I want to freeze that or just cook it this week. When I planned meals for this week, I didn't realize that this recipe was enough for two pizzas.)

What other sort of pizza should I try to make with my leftover dough?