Nº 20: Berkeley-Inspired Pizza

with corn, pesto, zucchini, potatoes

Good morning.

Have I told you about my year in Berkeley? Here’s a summary: sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a grand, pink-brown-purple Victorian house not far from Chez Panisse (which I never entered during that year; the closest I came was living with Alice Waters’s assistant); not sleeping, night or day, towards the top of the UC campus’s tallest building (which housed the architecture department) — instead, building 3D models in a laptop, always surrounded by the same twelve people; a lot of uphill running (there must have been downhill, too); waiting by the laser cutter while its ray zapped shapes from my laptop screen onto a huge sheet of chipboard; rarely escaping across the bay to a café in The Mission to build 3D models on a laptop; and then — ah, breath of fresh air — slices of Cheese Board pizza on sunlit Thursday evenings, sitting on the grassy median between lanes of Shattuck Avenue. Also: remembering, as my vegetarian classmate slurped her second bowl of chestnut velouté, that I’d made it with beef stock.

The pizza is what’s stuck with me the most. The Cheese Board has one option per day. My favorite would include corn kernels, thin slices of potato, a mixture of cheeses from the pizzeria’s neighboring cheese shop/bakery, topped with a lime wedge for squeezing. A single item on the menu, and always a line around the block: genius. If ever I were to open a food business of my own, I thought, this would be my model.

Make my take on this pizza and I’m pretty sure you’ll understand why it’s what I looked forward to most all week during my time in Berkeley.

Brian

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CORN, ZUCCHINI, PESTO PIZZA with LIME

(Cheese Board, Berkeley-Inspired Summer Vegetable Pizza )

As with any pizza dough, you’ll want to give this one plenty of time to develop flavor and gluten; be sure to plan ahead and get the dough going a day (or, at the very least, several hours) before you plan to serve it. And, though it only takes a few minutes’ work, you can make the pesto days in advance if you really want to minimize the pizza-day requirements.

As for quantity, I always double the pizza dough recipe and (after the refrigeration stage) freeze 2 pizzas’ worth in an airtight bag for future use. Thaw overnight in the fridge or for a few hours at room temperature. Same goes for the pesto; I’d make double and reserve half for pasta or vegetables over the next couple of days.

Yield: 2 (individual) 12-inch (30-cm) pizzas
Active time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Total time: 5 hours 15 minutes to 30 hours 15 minutes

INGREDIENTS: