What do you do with leftover bbq meat? You make Buckeye Mountain BBQ Pizza.

Pizza and beer grew up and matured together. Around 10,000 years ago we gave up hunting and became farmers. Wheat and barley were among the first domesticated plants. Crush up the grain, add a little water, throw it on a hot rock and you have the first flat bread. Warm up some grain in water, wait awhile, you get beer. The grain contains natural sugar and yeast spores are floating everywhere. This creates spontaneous fermentation. The byproduct we are intrested in is carbon dioxide for bread making.

Pizza dough needs a little time to develop flavor. Mix up the ingredients, cover, and store in the fridge for up to 5 days. Each day allows more flavor to develop in the dough through fermentation. After six days, the dough flavor may become too strong. If you want to make pizza after one day, do not refridgerate. Just leave the dough rise overnight at room temperature.

• 4 cups bread flour
• 1 ½ cup water
• 2 Tbs oil
• 1 Tbs sugar
• 4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp yeast

Two to three hours before you want to make pizza, divide the dough in half,roll them into balls, and cover them so they rise. If you own a pizza stone, place it in your oven or on your bbq pit at 500 degrees an hour before cooking the pizza.

Transfering the raw pizza with a big pizza paddle can be a bit tricky. The way we do it at Buckeye is, first lay down some parchment paper, put a tablespoon of oil in the middle and spread it around. Carefully, so as not to deflate it, lift one of the dough balls in the middle of the oiled parchment and starting in the middle, gently press down, away from you and outward with your fingertips. After the dough is about 6 inches around, flip it over. Press and spread with your fingertips while turning the parchment paper in circles. You should be able to get the dough 12 to 14 inches around.

Have ready your pulled pork, chopped brisket, italian sausage, chopped onions, olives, peppers, and cheeses.

The two things that will make your pizza taste great is the long fermentation of the dough and a blend of good cheese.

The dough just gets a little tastier each day through fermentation. If you wand pizza sooner, you can mix the dough and let it sit on the counter over night. One day without being refridgerated will give some good flavor.

Cheese – DON‘T BUY THE CHEAP STUFF – get some buffalo mozzerella, fontina, gouda, parmesan, and/or provalone. The cheap brands are pretty much flavorless. I‘d rather use four ounces of good cheese than a pound of the grocery store brand. I always use at least three different cheeses for flavor.

Now that the pizza dough is spread out, toss on the meat and whatever veggies (less is better), pour on your favorite bbq sauce, and top with the cheese. Slide your pizza peel (big paddle) under the parchment paper and slide the pizza along with the paper underneath onto the stone. The parchment paper is embedded with oil so it will not burn. If you don‘t have a pizza stone or peel, turn a cookie sheet upside down, hold it level with the counter top and slide the parchment and pizza onto it. Place the upside down cookie sheet and pizza into the oven. Depending on your oven it takes around 12 to15 minutes to bake.

Thin Crust
For a thin, crispy pizza, roll out some dough with a rolling pin as thin as you can. You should be able to read through it. Now roll out another ball of dough the same size, keep it as thin as you can. Put one on top of the other. Get a fork and poke holes about ever inch or so. This is called docking. Oil up a cookie sheet, put the dough on it and place into a hot oven for 5 minutes the remove it and let it cool on a rack for ten minutes. Put the crust back on the cookie sheet and add toppings. Place it back into the oven for about 12 to 15 minutes. Doubling up the crusts leaves some air gaps between them so the bottom layer can get crispy and the top layer keeps the bottom on dry.

Sicilian
For a Scicilian pizza, use all of the dough. Put plenty of oil in a cookie sheet. Spread the dough out on the sheet, cover the dough with some plastic wrap and place another cookie sheet on top. Let it rest for 1 hour. Top the dough with sauce, cheese, and pepperoni and whatever else you like. Put the pan on the bottom shelf of an oven preheated to 400 degrees. Turn up the oven to 500 degrees. This is a pizza where the bottom will be thick, and very crunchy as the bottom kinda fries in the oil.

 Neopolitan

The Neopolitan pizza is so specialized, in Italy, there are laws against doing it incorrectly. But if you want to make a Neopolitain-style pizza, you‘ve got to have a really hot oven. It‘s baked at around 900 degrees for 90 seconds. The crust is soft and flexible, like a blanket. The center is soupy. You eat this pie with a knife, fork, and spoonin Naples, Italy.

Focaccia
The original pizza, it is simply flat dough baked with a few toppings. Oil, anchivies, garlic, feta, etc.

Pizza History:
Almost every culture has versions of flatbread. Leavened and/or unleavened. Some would use a flat bread as a plate. Eat the food on top and then eat the plate (called a trencher during the middle ages in Europe).

The soldiers in the Persion army would each carry some small river pebbles with them. They would gather the pebbles together and form an oven floor to cook flatbread at the end of the day. Roman sodiers would cook flatbread on their sheilds then add cheese.

In small villages throughout recent history, one large communal oven was built and the women would bring their dough to be cooked once or twice a week. They would build a fire in the stone oven and flatten out a small piece of dough to throw in to see if the floor was hot enough. While the bread was baking, small flat breads drizzled with honey would be baked and offered to the kids as a treat.

Around the Mediteranean olives, garlic, onions, and herbs were cooked on flatbreads. Sometimes little fishes or some roasted lamb were added. Bread ovens were first built by the Greeks, though, in central europe, some ovens have been found that are 30,000 years old and were used to roast mammoths. That‘s a big oven.

Pizza, as we know it today, is usually topped with tomato and cheese. So, the modern version of pizza started around the 16th century when europeans killed millions of native americans and stole their tomatoes.

Tomato plants are similar to a plant called nightshade. The Germans had myths that nightshade was used by witches to turn people into werewolves. They called the tomatoes Wolf Peaches and were afraid to eat them.

By the 17th century they had become a food staple and the earliest recipe was found in a cookbook published in 1692 in Naples, Italy.

In the 1800‘s in Naples, flatbreads with tomato, garlic, anchovies, and cheese were popular with the poor.

In 1861, Queen Margherita visited Naples in 1889. She was seved an assortment of pizzas from the city’s best pizzeria, founded in 1760. Her favorite was topped with red tomato sauce, white mozzerella and green basil, representing the colors of her flag. The pizza was dubbed pizza Margherita.

The origin of the word Pizza is unknown though the first recorded use appeared in 997 CE in a text from Gaeta, Italy, which states that the local bishop recieved 12 pizzas from a tenent every Christmas day.

The first Pizzeria opened in the the United States was Lambardi‘s in 1905 in Manhatten NY and served mostly the italian community. After World War Two was over, the soldiers in the italian campain increased the demand here in the US and Pizza became very popular.

The first chain pizzaria: Shakey‘s Pizza opened in 1954. Sherwood Shakey Johnson‘s nickname resulted from from nerve damage caused by a case of malaria he contracted during the second world war. Shakey personally played dixieland jazz piano and banjo to entertain patrons. Back in the 60‘s, my family would head to Shakey‘s in Kansas City on Friday night. They had a piano player and a banjo player knockin out the tunes with the words projected on the wall for sing-alongs, Kinda the first Karaoke. The pizzas were made in view so we could watch the dough being tossed in the air to strech it out.

The second: After borrowing $600 from their mom, Dan and Frank Carney bought some secondhand equipment and opened a 25-seat pizza parlor in Wichita, Kans., in 1958. The two brothers called the place Pizza Hut partly because the sign they bought didn’t have space for more letters.

The original Pizza Hut building.