Squash Pizza

"You know", said the farmer's market vendor, "I just made some pizza using delicata squash instead of the tomato sauce. You should try that".

The Gargoyle was intrigued. Being part-dragon, the Gargoyle often finds that a conventional tomato sauce leads to accidental fire breath, which is both embarrassing and hard on the furniture, so any options to replace that ingredient immediately get attention.

"Cut it in half and microwave for 4 minutes. Slice it thin, and just cover the dough, sprinkle with cheese, and add whatever toppings you like". Sold.

---

The Gargoyle had attempted pizza once before. That time, refrigerated dough was purchased at a Trader Joe's. The goal was largely to test the methodology.

Lessons included:

• don't forget to let the dough come to room temperature before trying to roll it, because it doesn't like being rolled cold, and if it tears it won't re-form quite right

• the "new" second-hand outdoor grill does not keep temperature well at all

• it's hard to transfer pizza from where it was rolled to the pre-heated stone, the answer to which turned out to be, roll it onto parchment paper and transfer it together with the paper.

In that attempt ricotta was used instead of sauce, which was ok, but likely would have been better had one added more salt and maybe some herbs of some sort to it.

---

This time, Wegmans pre-made dough was located near their little pizza shop and purchased. (Spoiler, verdict: Trader Joe's is tastier.) The instructions said to put it in a large bowl, coat it with a tablespoon of oil (didn't say what kind, so a versatile flavorless vegetable variety was chosen just in case) and let it defrost for a goodly number of hours if frozen or to come to room temperature for an hour otherwise.

"Large bowl" turned out to be good advice - the darn thing more than doubled in volume in the hour or two it was left on the counter, which the Gargoyle took as the signal to get on with rolling it before it escapes and stomps over suburbia kaiju-style.

The intimidatingly large dough was divided into halves, because the pizza stone ain't that big.

Ain't in a gorgeous future pizza

The squash was halved and microwaved as per instruction. Its middle was scooped out, skin was left on (because delicata skins are edible), and half of a squash was sliced into crescent-shaped pieces about half a finger's width and placed onto the rolled dough, attempting to maximize coverage.

A farmstand improbably had fresh squash blossoms for sale! They got sauteed with garlic using this recipe from Kitchen of Youth with relative faithfulness.

The pizza was then sprinkled with shredded cheese labeled "pizza mix", ceremoniously decorated with ricotta and alternating sauteed and pickled squash blossoms and admired for a moment, because it sure wouldn't look that pretty ever again.

Less dramatic flare but plenty of taste

The oven was preheated to 400 with the pizza stone in it, but not kept at that temperature for very long, because who's got the time. The parchment was moved onto the stone with practically no incident.

The pizza was cooked for 20-ish minutes, extracted and sampled.

Verdict: anywhere where the squash was not covered by cheese it was not pleasant at all. The covered squash was all right, although a little too al dente. The sauteed squash blossoms indeed proved wonderful as a pizza topping.

But also, half of dough split two ways is almost but not quite enough to make a full meal.

---

There was still a second half of the dough and the second half of the delicata squash awaiting their fate.

The half-squash got microwaved for another 2 minutes. The dough was hand-stretched because it seemed pretty amenable to the process. It did not come out in nearly as tidy a circle as the rolled dough above was.

The dough was then covered with bits of squash: same thickness as before, but now each semi-circle also cut in half to have smaller puzzle pieces to better cover the dough with.

Cheese was sprinkled until the bag was empty, which was not quite sufficient for optimal coverage. To continue the squashy theme some previously grilled zucchini slices were unearthed from the depths of the fridge, chopped into approximately 1"x0.5" blocks and tossed on in a much less organized manner. With no more squash derivatives on hand, for a salty note some sliced olives were tossed on, and extra ricotta glopped anywhere where nothing else had already landed.

Not so pretty, but still plenty tasty

Verdict: the extra two minutes tremendously improved the delicata texture. Future variants should involve playing with seasoning it.

Running out of cheese is not recommended.

While the Gargoyle likes fairly thick crust, the sides got way too poofy - not sure if it was because the dough now got too much rest or because stretching differs from rolling.

Grilled zucchini is a good topping.

While half the dough is not enough food, all the dough might be too much... Which allowed confirming that it's still good in "cold pizza for breakfast" mode.