How to Make Better French Bread Pizza | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji i'm at home and i'm going to be making some french bread pizza so actually garlic bread pizza is more like it um so this is based on a recipe i wrote for serious eats like i don't know 10 years ago i'll link to it um so we want to start with a piece of french bread and this is just like your you know generic supermarket french bread it's not like a fancy baguette although i mean you could do it on a on a baguette i suppose but really what you want is that kind of fluffy crusty uh supermarket style french bread that you know the type of bread you would never actually find in france so one of the tricks i found here is that normally when you make french fried pizza you take your bread you put sauce on it you put cheese and you bake it that works fine um i find that it ends up making the bread a little bit soggy so what i like to do is take it put it on a tray like this um put another tray on top and then press it down with some amount of weight if you're small you might even put your full weight on there you want to compress it down until it's about two-thirds of its original height all right like that and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna essentially make garlic bread so i'm gonna start by taking a few cloves of garlic [Music] um i i made this this for uh pizza night friday night is pizza night at our house and we always do well not always but we frequently do different styles of pizza and last night it was um french bread pizza and i posted on my instagram and people were like oh make a video so i had all the ingredients left over so i'm making it again and we're going to have it for lunch again my daughter likes a ton of garlic mainly because she likes to make people smell her breath after so garlic we're going to smash it let me get a skillet going here so we're going to heat up a little bit of butter a couple tablespoons of butter and a couple tablespoons of oil olive oil extra virgin now this is exactly how i would make garlic bread if i were making garlic bread and in fact we are going to start with garlic bread and then we're going to transform that into pizza we don't even really have to let that melt i'm just going to go in with a pinch of oregano dried oregano a little pinch of red pepper flakes more or less depending on how hot you like it and then this garlic after smashing it do a quick chop i love these chinese cleavers for doing garlic like this that extra weight and the size makes it really easy to smash them all right and that garlic's gonna go in here and now we're just gonna let this cook a little bit we don't want the garlic to brown or anything um we definitely don't want those butter salads to brown or at least i don't i mean but i just want the raw garlic edge to be sort of tamed a little bit and for the garlic flavor in that oregano and red pepper flavor to get infused into the fat so just a light sizzle is all you need um of course you know if you want it if you want that sort of sweeter brown garlic flavor go for it um if i were making garlic bread i would be very careful about that because by the time you finish completely toasting your bread the garlic could end up burning but in this case we're going to cover with a little layer of cheese so even if you get it nice and golden brown there's no real risk of it burning at all so go for it however you'd like all right [Music] that's about it now i'm going to take my bread and i'm going to use half of this mixture not all of it but about half of it and i'm going to spread it on the two bread halves and again if i were going for if i were making like full full-on garlic bread i would use all this mixture and i would spread it really you know be very careful careful to get it over every surface here um but in this case you don't have to be that precise just like that is fine [Music] now i'm going to add tomatoes to that infused garlic oil mixture this is actually i had a can of rayo's tomato sauce that was half open and that was open and half empty in the fridge so that's what i'm using here um but the recipe calls for just regular old canned crushed tomatoes or you can use uh whole peeled tomatoes and crush them yourself um and that's totally fine also you can you know basically any any kind of sauce or crushed tomato product will work here whatever whatever sounds good on your pizza is gonna work and we'll just let that simmer a bit so while that cooks down i'm going to start with a little cheese so this is the other secret little protective cheese layer so that the sauce doesn't completely soak into the bread so initial cheese layer here this is um i'm using a combination of uh mozzarella and monterey jack um because i find that if you can't find if if i had found just plain old full fat mozzarella i would have used that um but low fat you know skim meth skim part skim or all skin mozzarella doesn't melt too nicely so i when i can only find part skim i like to mix it with some monterey jack which melts really well so that's what i got here um and and for this type of pizza you can also feel free to use um pre-shredded cheese you know pre-shredded cheese it has cellulose added to it so that it doesn't like anti-caking agents usually potato starch or cellulose and that can affect the way it melts so it's not ideal but for this kind of like super simple dish french bread pizza you know who cares if it's perfect all right so that's gonna go in the oven for about five minutes um this sauce is gonna simmer down for about five minutes and so i will see you back again after that cheese has been melted all right so i think that's been about five minutes i know someone's gonna like look at the time stamp on the oven and tell me uh whether it was really five minutes or not but it's all right around five minutes is what matters all right so we got our sauces ready our cheese has been lightly melted sauce is going to go on top of the cheese oh by the way that oven was at 425 i have it on with convection which helps uh with even brownie and helps melt that cheese a little faster um but it'll work fine and then even without convection on and also this will work fine in a toaster oven oh and i'm sure someone's gonna ask me about this as well in the comments but um you saw i used i used pre-peeled garlic from a jar um there are some cases where i would use fresh garlic um you know if if the garlic wasn't being cooked into a sauce like this i would have used fresh garlic somewhere somewhere where the garlic is really going to be sort of the primary flavor i would use fresh garlic because it just tastes better um pre-peeled garlic has been blanched in order to remove the skins more easily so it doesn't have quite as much flavor as fresh garlic the only thing i would never use personally is pre-chopped garlic because garlic once it's been chopped so garlic cells and onion cells all alliums actually they have these precursor chemicals in them that don't combine until after you chop uh after you chop them open and they combine and turn into the um into the sort of well in the case of garlic it's allison it turns into a what gives garlic its pungency um and it's and it's aroma um with onions it gives you the it turns into those chemicals called lacrimaters which are what make you um sort of tear up when you're cut cutting onions um once those garlic cells have been ruptured that stuff is gonna form and then it's gonna start to dissipate um which means that pre-chopped garlic never has much actual garlic flavor um so i tend to avoid pre-pre-chopped garlic i know a lot of people use it for convenience um and if you've used it in the past and you like it and you find it convenient then i'm not you know who am i to tell you not to do it um it's just something i personally avoid but you can feel free to do whatever you want all right cheese on and i'm going to finish it off one of these i'll do plain pepperoni because that's what my daughter and my wife will like i'm sure um and the other one will do with my favorite topping combo which is pepperoni and pickled peppers i got pickled jalapenos here you could do pickled banana peppers whatever oh these are these mini these are hormel mini pepperonis um i like them because they they cup um you know cuppy cuppy pepperoni has become like a sort of a thing now right um i remember when i when i was at serious eats um and we used to write about pizza um one of our readers submitted a a cuppy pepperoni haiku um so it's like a decade ago and back then it was much harder to find cupping pepperoni um but i love cupping pepperoni so much that i did i actually did a long article about what makes pepperoni cut curl and cup up and it's actually much more interesting than i thought it would be the answer is not obvious i'll link to the article but it turns out the real reason why pepperoni cups um has to do with the way they are stuffed um so with non with casings that are not very stretchy um so typically that means natural casings um made from intestines casings that are not very tasty when the diameter of the stuffing machine is much narrower than the than the casing and what ends up happening is again kind of got this u-shaped um pattern of um densities within the within the casing so the very center of the pepperoni is actually more dense than the um than the layers on the outside um and and this pattern you can actually you know if you take a naturally a natural casing pepperoni stick cut it and have lengthwise you can actually see the pattern um where where the um the filling started to get stuck on the sides of the wall and then it continues to get pushed down the middle and so it builds in this kind of shape so that when you then cook it um that shape gets exaggerated and that's what makes a pepperoni cup um it does nothing to do well very little to do with the thickness um not much to do with the temperature gradient in it etc etc but um uh yeah i'll link to the article it's way more interesting than you think all right pepperoni jalapeno cheese back in the oven this is gonna go in there for another about seven or eight minutes um so get in there all right i'm gonna give those like another 30 seconds in there it's all gonna depend on your oven and on your taste um you know i got this parsley give some parsley real fine mince you can use basil if you want um you could use fresh oregano you could use no herbs at all i like adding a little bit of parsley to mine um well i say i like i also like adding other things too i'm using parsley because it was in my fridge and i don't have any basil and i got some pecorino romano um you could use parmesan again you could use nothing at all use the stuff in the green can if you want all right let's pop these out you see how those pepperonis got nice and cuppy there i love it my favorites are these little guys i get the little cuppy edges on them a little crispy edges all right pizza hot a nice non-soggy garlic bread pizza let's finish it off with a sprinkle of parsley and i'm just gonna do a little pecorino i like to do parmesan you know hard cheeses after the oven very light dusting oven just for that little teeny hit of flavor at the end you can also do a tiny bit more olive oil fresh olive oil for flavor all right and there we have it some delicious french bread pizza probably the most complicated french bread pizza recipe you've ever seen but you know if you want greatness it takes a little work how's that look to you that looks pretty good to me yeah me well how many you want a little pepperoni here you go buddy come on his back leg bothers him so i don't make him sit all the way here you go bud all right everyone guys gals non-binary pals i will see you next time thanks for watching uh stay safe wear a mask and um yeah see you next time bye bye hey everyone it's kenji there are 22 million kids in this country that rely on school lunches for nutritious meals and with schools closed now more than ever organizations like no kid hungry can use their support so i'm asking you to join me click the link in the description below to donate some money no amount is too small or too big thank you very much and stay safe bye [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 449,700

Rating: 4.9661512 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: AMJsNIXBnt8

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/midnightsalers]

He mentions pre-peeled garlic, but I remember reading this article about them: https://www.ft.com/content/1416a056-833b-11e7-94e2-c5b903247afd. Are there certain brands that don't import the garlic?