As featured on Recipe Club's Pizza Night episode

New-England-Greek-Style Spicy Chomper Pizza
Daniel Cutler

In my early years as a cook I would use Serious Eats SO much as a jumping point for developing dishes (I sometimes use it now as an established chef as well, but less so). For this recipe, I’m using this dough as the base but gussying it up a bit with a few techniques I've picked up along the way, including baking the dough with provolone cheese wrapped around the entire bottom and sides to create a frico crust.

Then, I adapted a pizza we serve at Ronan called “Spicy Chomper”. It is basically a spicy pepperoni pizza, but the pepperoni - or in this case, spicy salami Calabrese - is ground in the meat grinder for full coverage.

Dough Recipe
I turn to Serious Eats' New England Greek Style Pizza Recipe

400 g (14 ounces, about 2 1/2 cups) bread flour
4 g (about 1 teaspoon) instant yeast
8 g (about 1 tablespoon) kosher salt (or 1 1/2 teaspoons table salt)
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
260 g (about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons) water

Sauce
For each #10 can of tomato we drain off as much water as possible then food process the tomatoes with:

28g salt
166g extra virgin olive oil (we use court Truly or Graza drizzle)

You'll use about a cup for the Chomper, but you could go up to 1.5 if you like it saucy

Toppings
1 cup scamorza
1/2 cup fresh whole milk mozzarella diced
3/4 cup ground salami Calabrese or pepperoni
1/4 cup pecorino romano/calabrese blend
1/4 cup parmigiano reggiano

The dough recipe above calls for baking a very high temp, but, since were doing the frico on the crust, I lowered the temp to 400 and bake time adjusted to 18-22 minutes depending on the you’re oven and if you have convection fan or not. Everyone’s oven is a little different but I check after 9 minutes and rotate the pan once. After the second 9 minutes I just keep and eye on it until its ready.

It has to rest for about 10 minutes before I chisel out the beast and cool for another 6 or so minutes so we don’t burn our mouths on molten pizza lava (which everyone has done before and will continue to do forever because we are impatient for pizza lol)

Finish with another sprinkle of parm and some Calabrian chili oil.