California Pizza Kitchen BBQ Pizza Or My Take On It

If you have ever been to a California Pizza Kitchen, I hope you have ordered their BBQ chicken and gouda Pizza (called The Original BBQ Chicken) because it is delicious. It is great to dine at CPK, but I have figured out a way to make the pizza at home and it really is just as good!

BECKY’S CPK BBQ CHICKEN PIZZA

Please read the recipe through before starting as there is some prep work involved.

One pizza crust – now there are a lot of ways to do this. My grocery sells pre-made crusts as well as nice soft dough you can make a crust from and there is always Pillsbury with their ready-made dough in the refrigerated section of your store. You can also make your own. I taught you how to do this last summer when I made the Rosemary Pizza Crusts.

Lay the dough on a cookie sheet. Top with your favorite BBQ sauce (I love Cincinnati’s Montgomery Inn Sauce) and spread to the edge. Don’t overdo it – this pizza is not as mellow as a traditional pizza. Top with about 1c. shredded mozzarella. Next, top with 1-2 chicken breasts you have already roasted and diced into small pieces. Now, here, we vary from CPK and we add my FAVORITE ingredient – BACON! Fry about 6 slices of bacon in a pan, drain and chop and layer on the pizza. Top with sliced or shredded smoked gouda cheese, then drizzle with more BBQ sauce. Cook in a 425 degree oven about 15 minutes until cheese is melted and bottom of crust is nice and brown.

CPK adds sliced red onion but I personally feel it can overpower the cheese and chicken and let’s face it – I just love bacon way more! I think this would be a great cocktail appetizer – cut the pizza in small squares and serve with drinks. Your friends would love it!

Becky's Perfect Pizza Recipe

This recipe will make a variety of different shaped crusts: 6 thin, irregularly shaped crusts, 15 appetizer size pizzas, 3 nice dinner size pizzas, OR just one large crust!

½ tsp. salt

2 tsp. honey

2 tsp. olive oil

1 ½ tsp. crushed rosemary

2 ½ c. flour

1 c. warm water (NOT TOO HOT, but really warm)

1 ½ packages dry yeast or 2 cakes yeast

Put the salt, honey, rosemary and olive oil in a large bowl. With your wire whisk, blend in the warm water until honey is dissolved. Sprinkle the yeast on top. Let sit for about 20 minutes so the yeast can “proof” or get a bit bubbly.

Add the flour and mix until all is blended. Turn out onto a floured surface and gently knead for one minute. Return to bowl. Drizzle a little olive oil on dough, turn and drizzle a bit more so dough has a slight coating. Cover with a clean kitchen towel and let rise in a warm place. In the summer heat, this is not a problem and will create a super nice soft dough. In the winter, the dough will not rise as much, unless you are my mother and keep your house at 85 degrees year round. Sometimes in the winter I preheat my oven, turn it off and let the dough sit on the open door. Let the dough rise one hour.

Time to make the crusts! Heat your oven to 350 degrees. Remove dough from the bowl and cut in half, then cut each section into 3 pieces. Of course this depends on how many pizzas you are making. Roll each section out on a floured surface and place on large cookie sheets that you have sprayed with cooking spray. I usually get three sort of long and narrow crusts from each piece. Repeat until all crusts have been rolled. Using both oven racks, bake pizzas for about 7 minutes, then switch cookie sheets and bake about 4 minutes more. Only the bottoms and a bit of the edges will be golden. If you over-bake, it is OK – but remember, you will be baking again when you put the toppings on.

Store crusts in the freezer in a jumbo plastic bag. When ready to use, prepare your toppings and go for it! There is only one pizza sauce that is store-bought that I like and it is Contadina Four Cheese. It tastes as good as when I make it myself. Top with pepperoni, sautéed mushrooms, black olives, red pepper pieces and I use both crumbled feta and mozzarella slices. Anything you like will do. When topped, bake at 375 degrees for about 10 minutes until cheese is melted. YUM!

Becky's Perfect Pizza

I love pizza! I love thick crust and thin crust and everything in between. I really think pizza is my all-time favorite food. (Oops, I forgot about bacon – now THAT is perfect food).

I have been making homemade pizza since I was a pre-teen and used boxed hot roll mix. Over the years I have tried many yeast to flour to water ratios as well as dried yeast, rapid rise yeast and cake yeast. The yeasty taste and smell are so important. It makes you realize it is homemade—frozen pizza just can’t capture that specific aroma.

I will share my perfect pizza recipe in the next blog and I hope you will give it a try. Read on for a pizza story and a few ideas.

My son is the perfect pizza fan. He likes a thin crust, plain (cheese and sauce only) and he likes it often! When he went away to college and then law school I would make up a double batch of dough every two weeks. On Sunday nights, I would roll out the dough into 12 thin crusts and bake until it was just a tiny bit golden. Monday mornings would find me at the post office with a priority mail box in hand full of pizza crusts. Off to Boston or wherever he was at the moment they would go. I mean this is one lucky kid. I even used to regularly mail him homemade cherry pie in a special container. My friends would make fun of me for going to all that trouble, but the worst part was standing in line at the post office. Too bad this was a number of years ago and they didn’t have the self-mail stations you can now use day or night.

The crusts are delicious, can be frozen, then topped with your favorites and baked for a very short time.

I have made the crusts tiny (cut out with a cookie cutter) for appetizers with fresh basil and mozzarella toppings. I have also rolled the dough into larger individual crusts and had friends over to create their own specialties and I have made giant pizzas with great success.

WOW! I am making myself hungry. Let’s have pizza tonight!!