Italian Sausage Pizza

Sorry I haven't posted in the last few days. We've been eating out of the freezer, so nothing new. Last night I thawed a whole wheat cornmeal dough ball left from making the Ginger BBQ Pizza and the remaining Italian sausage from the stuffed acorn squash to make an Italian sausage pizza.

I didn't allow the dough enough time to come to room temp and rise properly though. Hence, our wee yeasty friends were a mite sluggish. I'll just say that it was no great loss, we just had more of a (dense) cracker crust this time round. If you're thawing out dough, make sure to let it sit on your counter for a gooooood while. Even though it had completely thawed in the fridge overnight, two hours on the counter still wasn't even close to being enough time.

I made a pizza sauce using no-salt added diced tomatoes (liquid and all), a dash of garlic and onion powder, a pinch of Italian herbs (or herbes de Provence), a pinch of red pepper flakes, a dash of Worcestershire sauce and a smidge of agave nectar. Cooked down and then buzzed with a stick blender in the pot to make a nice thick sauce. I will add that I'd originally started with a can of Italian herbage-afied tomato sauce and regular tomato paste. This mixture was sooooo salty I could hardly taste any tomato! I could only imagine how bad it would be after cooking it down further. I dumped almost all of it out of the pot and then started again, retaining ~1/4+ cup of the original mixture, then adding the other ingredients from above.
Much better! I like to keep no-salt added tomato products in my pantry so that I can better control the amount of salt going into our dishes. I like salt, but when you're also adding pancetta, Parm, canned beans, etc. to a dish it tends to get too salty for my tastes.

The rest of the pizza consisted of 1 1/2 links of Italian turkey sausage (probably about 8 oz., squeezed from the casing and cooked up in a skillet with a little olive oil), sliced Mozzerella cheese, and thinly sliced red onion. I topped the whole pizza with freshly grated Parmesan after it came out of the oven.

I'd waited too long already for the dough to warm/rise (read: erin's blood sugar was dropping and she was getting pissed off) that we were so hungry by the time the pizza was done, we devoured the whole thing with no green salad in sight. I ate way more than I should of and had the tummy ache to prove it. Although, The Monster will contend it had more to do with the bag of carob chips I polished off post-pizza, while anxiously watching a Survivor challenge. ;-)