Potato and Leek Pizza

This potato and leek pizza reminds me of the crusty top of a scalloped potato casserole placed on a thin crispy pizza crust.

This potato and leek pizza starts with an easy no knead crust. I mixed the dough around eight o'clock at night, and made the pizzas around noon the next day. It's a totally flexible dough. Once your dough has risen, you can shape it into rounds, wrap it, and refrigerate it for up to three days.

If you want to have a little pizza party and make pizzas with different toppings, you can easily reduce the ingredients in the toppings recipe and make the rest of the pizzas with toppings of your choice, especially if it's family pizza night.... potato and leek pizza for the grown ups, and pepperoni pizza for the kids.

I love lean breads and pizzas with deeply burnished crusts that come from a wood fired oven. There is so much flavor imparted from the charred crust. This technique for baking pizza helps you achieve a similar result.

The technique for making this pizza involves heating a a baking stone for 30 minutes at 500 degrees F, and then broiling the empty stone for another 10 minutes to get it screaming hot. Then, you broil the pizza if you have a gas oven with the broiler at the top, or bake and then broil the pizza if you have an electric oven.

By the way, you can also bake this pizza in a covered grill with a baking stone. It works great and the pizza is ready in about 3 minutes!

The potatoes and leeks in this pizza are blanched or briefly boiled to just soften them prior to topping the pies. To get really crispy potatoes, be sure to dry the vegetables as best you can. I drained mine on paper towels, and then ran them through a salad spinner prior to tossing them with the gruyère, rosemary, and olive oil.

The sauce for this pizza is a little bit of béchamel, or white sauce, which is a mixture of milk, butter, and flour with a bit of salt and nutmeg. White sauce was the first thing I learned to make in my seventh grade home economics class for making macaroni and cheese. If I'd known it had a fancy French name like béchamel, my 12-year-old self might have paid more attention.

After spreading the sauce on the stretched out dough, you top it with a mixture of the potatoes, leeks, and Gruyère.

When this pizza is placed in the oven, the edges of the crust puff up beautifully, resulting in airy holes. The center crust ends up thin and super crispy. 

As for the topping, the potatoes crisp up nicely as well. Regarding the shaping of the dough, I found that lifting it up in the air and stretching it while suspending it on my floured knuckles worked the best.

About the parchment paper that you see in the photo above: I have a terrible time sliding pizza onto the baking stone without it getting misshapen, so I use good quality parchment paper under the pizza. In this case, the oven is way too hot for the parchment to survive for long, so when it starts to get pretty brown, but not yet disintegrated, and the crust has risen and is set on the bottom, I pull the pizza out of the oven with the peel, quickly pull out the parchment, and place the pizza back in the oven. If you're better at sliding pizza onto the baking stone, by all means, skip the parchment!

I must say, this is one of my favorite pizzas, and for leftover pizza fans, this one is great reheated at 375 degrees F for about 15 minutes.

I love the combination of potatoes and leeks. If you are intrigued by the flavors, you should  Potato and Leek Pie, and Irish Leek and Potato Soup.

If you love the idea of potato pizza, you should also check out Pizza di Patate and Loaded Baked Potato Pizza. 

Did you know that October is National Pizza Month? In celebration, a few of us have gathered together to bake pizza! After the recipe, be sure to check out the rest of the recipes. 

Yield: 4 10 inch pizzas

Potato and Leek Pizza

INGREDIENTS:

Pizza Crust

• 500 grams (3 3/4 cups) unbleached all purpose flour
• 1 gram (1/4 teaspoon) instant or active dry yeast
• 16 grams (2 teaspoons) salt
• 350 grams (1 1/2 cups) water

Béchamel Sauce

• 243 grams (1 cup) whole milk
• 57 grams (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, cut into chunks
• 9 grams (about a heaping tablespoon) all-purpose flour
• 1 gram (1/8 teaspoon) fine sea salt
• pinch of ground nutmeg

Potato and Leek Pizza

• 300 grams (2 smallish) Yukon gold potatoes, sliced paper thin
• 360 grams (3 3/4 cups) chopped leeks, white part only
• Salt
• 4 pieces of the pizza dough, shaped
• 8 to 10 tablespoons béchamel sauce
• 120 grams (about 2 cups) grated Gruyère cheese
• Leaves from three rosemary sprigs, and freshly ground black pepper
• Extra virgin olive oil

INSTRUCTIONS:

Pizza Dough

1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, yeast, and salt. Add the water, and mix with a dough whisk or your hands until all of the flour is absorbed.
2. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for about 18 hours, depending on the ambient temperature.
3. Dust your work surface with flour, and scrape the dough out onto the counter. Divide the dough into four equal pieces, and shape them into balls. At this point, you can shape your pizzas, or wrap each dough ball with oiled plastic wrap and refrigerate them for up to three days. Be sure to bring them to room temperature before shaping.
4. Shape the dough into a 10 inch disk, either by gently pressing it out on a floured surface until it reaches 10 inches in diameter, or by pressing it out into a 6 inch disk, and then picking it up with your floured hands and pulling it and turning it in the air with your knuckles under the dough. Place the dough onto a floured pizza peel.

Béchamel Sauce

1. Add 1/3 cup of the milk and all of the butter to a small saucepan. Heat over medium-low, stirring until the butter just melts. In the meantime, whisk together the rest of the milk with the flour in a bowl.
2. When the butter is melted, add some of the warm milk and butter to the cold milk and flour. Add the ingredients in the bowl into the saucepan and whisk. Add the salt. Cook over medium-low, whisking constantly, until it reaches about 180 degrees F and is the thickness of heavy cream. Add the nutmeg, and allow to cool (it will thicken more as it cools). This can be made in advance and refrigerated.

Potato and Leek Pizza

1. Put the pizza stone in the middle of your oven, about 8 inches from the broiler. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F. Once the oven reaches 500 degrees, turn on the broiler for 10 minutes.
2. While the oven is preheating, place the potato slices in cold salted water in a saucepan, and bring to a boil, drain the potatoes, and set them on a paper towel lined plate and set aside.
3. Bring a saucepan to a boil, generously salt the water, and add the chopped leeks. Boil/blanch for about 2 to 3 minutes, until just tender. Drain and dry with paper towels.
4. In a large bowl, mix the potatoes, leeks, Gruyère, rosemary, and a generous amount of black pepper. Add a drizzle of olive oil and toss the ingredients until evenly distributed.
5. Spoon 2 to 2 1/2 tablespoons onto the shaped dough, and spread evenly, except for about an inch of the rim. Top with 1/4 of the potato leek mixture and spread evenly.
6. Transfer the pizza to the oven. If your oven is top broil gas, broil the pizza for 4 to 5 minutes, until charred and bubbly. If your oven is electric, bake at 500 degrees F for about 5 to 8 minutes, until the rim is puffed and starting to turn light brown. Switch to broil, and broil until the crust is charred and the topping is bubbly. Remove from the oven, slice, and enjoy immediately. Repeat with the other three pizzas.

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Created using The Recipes Generator

Recipe adapted from My Pizza by Jim Lahey. If you like pizza, get this book.

Here are more wonderful pizza recipes:

• Buffalo Chicken Naan Bread Pizza by The Freshman Cook 
• Margherita Pizza by Making Miracles 
• Mediterranean Flatbread Pizza by Everyday Eileen 
• Shrimp Prosciutto and Mushroom Pizza by A Day in the Life on the Farm