For a simple, special, and delicious dinner, pizza is an excellent and safe option. And for really good pizza, Polpo has us covered. The pizzas (or pizzettas) come out thin and small enough to make a meal for a single person (at most). The suggested toppings are great as is, but being so small, it is easy to try out 2 or 3 different combos with a single batch of dough. (for example, see the chocolate-yogurt pizzetta a friend and I made in January 2022). The dough is simple, yeasted, and has a flour to water ratio of 8:5 (which is classic for bread, generally). I think this might make it slightly dry for a pizza dough and perhaps is responsible for working well when very thing, although I’m not really sure about this. The pizza dough doubles as a pita dough too – just throw it on your stone or cast iron without any toppings and you are set.

If you have an extra-large cast-iron pan (15″ for a general pizza, but you could do 12″ for these pizzettas) then you don’t need a pizza stone. When using cast iron, my pizza making strategy involves flopping the rolled dough onto the preheated cast iron and quickly throwing on the toppings (a friend can help!) I think I got the cast-iron idea from Cooks Illustrated. In my experience, you can go as hot as your oven will allow.

Stracchino, Potato & Rosemary Pizzetta

I ended up visiting two Italian specialty shops looking for Stracchino. What I heard is that this fresh cheese (which the book says tastes like “spreadable cheese from a tube”) does not keep particularly long and so is often not kept stocked for that reason. Oh well. Taleggio is supposed to be an ok substitute. The resulting pizza was delicious! Notes: Don’t forget to blanch the potatoes!

Olive & White Anchovy Pizzetta

This was also nice, but we missed the fancier cheese. (This recipe just calls for the cheap grated mozzarella.) Maybe try mixing in some different cheese next time. Also, note that the recipe does not bake the anchovies or basil at all; these are added at room temperature after the pizza is removed from the oven, which seems like a decent idea for the basil, but I would not have thought of this for the anchovies.

Joe’s Rating: 7/6 (Potato / Anchovy)
Difficulty: 4/4