After months of developing, testing, refining and re-developing we're proud to announce that the "Ditka" is officially on our Specialty Pizza menu.
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| Finished "Ditka". Like our other pizzas, the sausage is beneath the cheese to prevent it from drying out during cooking. |
A few of you have had a sneak peak (and taste) of this pizza as we've offered it for a couple of limited runs, but now that our recipes and procedures are honed we're ready to offer it full time.
The idea for this pizza began on one of the weeks that we were offering Italian beef sandwiches. We had made a batch of roasted sweet peppers, and the aroma of them was so phenomenal that I had to put them on a cheese pizza and give them a try.
I loved the taste, but thought that, as a pizza, the overall flavor fell a little flat. What it needed was a little heat. Not enough to send somebody running for water, but enough to add just a little kick. Some crushed red pepper flakes did the trick, but I started to realize that the taste I was after was that of a Chicago-style sausage sandwich.
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| Finished spool of Sweet Home Chicago's new spicy Italian sausage |
What followed was a months-long process to develop a brand new spicy sausage. And not just any sausage, but I knew this pizza would be perfect using a cased sausage. Could we buy it? Of course, but that would go against the grain of everything we hold dear - making food from scratch. No, we were going to make and case it ourselves.
Over the next few months we tracked down new equipment, dove into generations-old Calabrian cook books, brought in new products including all natural casings... I even spoke with an Italian sausage maker in Calabria. We made, tasted and tweaked over and over again - cutting down pork shoulders at a nearly alarming rate.
We finally found the ideal recipe, but now the problem was production. A 20 pound batch of sausage - from initial pork shoulder to final cased product - took close to 4 hours. At that rate we could never get it on the regular menu.
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| Homemade spicy Italian sausage layered on a thin crust pizza just before mozzarella |
After working with the sausage for a couple of months we found ways to make our production more efficient, and with the repeated practice got much faster at casing this new product. We're finally confident that we can make enough of this to meet demand for this pizza.
The sausage, like most Italian sausages, is heavily dosed with paprika, giving it it's distinctive red tone. The heat comes from a balance of red and black pepper and the ever-present fennel seed provides the distinct Italian flavor.
The sweet peppers are simple yet divine. Just like Mom taught me to do, they're slow roasted in the oven with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic and oregano.
While the pictures here a Thin Crust, this pizza is available in our Stuffed variety as well.
