'Nduja is an addictive thing. And as far as I know, there's only one dealer in town. As you can imagine, sometimes you can't always make it there when the craving hits, and you find yourself scavenging desperately around the house looking for something to ease the pain.
Tonight we decided to try and make a 'nduja substitute out of chorizo and red chiles. Basically you take some nice not-too-generic chorizo (I got ours at De Avondmarkt), puree it in a food processor, and saute it in some neutral oil over low heat with processed dried red chiles for 10 minutes or so. Drain excess oil if you like, and salt to taste if you can do so without blowing your head off. You might end up with something that looks like the above, and tastes probably nothing like 'nduja, more research necessary. But whatever chorizo/chile condiment you've ended up with is very good.
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This psuedo'nduja business happened b/c we were trying to reverse engineer the calabrese di spilinga from La Perla. So once we'd made the psuedo'nduja, we were all ready to do the damn thing, and..........
...the oven wouldn't turn on. Gnash gnash. Oven broken. Pizza craving in progress, ingredients assembled, etc. OK, OK. Plan B is stovetop pizza: roll your crust out super-thin and brush a heated iron skillet lightly with oil. Throw pizza in skillet and cook one side a few minutes until it's nice and brown, this will actually be the top of the pizza because you're going to flip it over right now. While the uncooked side is browning, add a little tomato sauce, sliced mozzarella, and some forkfuls of ghetto'nduja to the side that is now facing up. Make sure you don't burn the bottom.
When the bottom is as cooked as you can stand it, then, uh...you've got a problem. The cheese on top isn't melted or bubbly or brown. So get out your blowtorch:
And then celebrate your ability to triumph in the face of hardware failure.
1 comment:
wow. just... wow.
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