mushroom & truffle studded goat cheese pizza

Heckyeahwoman purchased gifted me the Gjelina cookbook for Christmas this last December. I soon learned that Gjelina is a fancy restaurant in Venice, California. I've never been there. The food - from the recipes and pictures - appears to be gourmet, fancy, wonderful, hip, cool - everything I am not (riiiiight). The recipes look delicious and challenging. I was both chomping and champing at the bit(s) to dive into them.



That champing and chomping furiously present-tensed itself the other night, Wednesday the 25 of February. This is a review of the night in question.

We created the dish in the title: mushroom & truffle studded goat cheese pizza.

You may know that we live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. This is important because the recipe called for truffle goat cheese (what?!). Not surprisingly, they don't have it at Woodman's, well, not the one here in town anyway. So we improvised by adding truffle oil to the goat cheese. We also improvised by using a pre-made pizza crust mix. Likely blasphemy to the author of the cookbook, but week night time is not infinite and the dough making process seems to be approaching infinity. In the future I would like to try my (our) hand at doing it from scratch.

The recipe itself was simple: crust, truffle goat cheese, Fontina cheese, cremini & chantarelle mushrooms, and a little seasoning/olive oil. Also: oven, baking sheet, bowls and other utensils.

A note about the truffle part of the goat cheese. We had to make our own, and we did that by mixing (a very small drizzle of) truffle oil with the goat cheese. This gave it a better, easier-to-work-with consistency - crumbling easily, for quick breaking up and sprinkling over the pizza. Surely this was due to a chemical reaction that I am not prepared to google or explain. The Fontina cheese (taking the place of a traditional Mozzarella here) was great, though it could have likely been used even less sparingly than the recipe suggested (we are from Wisconsin).

As for the previously mentioned fancy mushrooms, they too were not found at Woodman's, so I just used the fanciest sounding I could find, can't remember the name, but they were different in texture than your white or portabella varieties. And about that crust: we used a box crust, Jiffy brand I believe. It actually turned out superb. Heckyeahwoman handled this part and created a rectangular thin crust that wound up perfectly crispy.

One thing you might notice here is a lack of food photography. Well you know what, when the pizza came out of the oven, it's status changed pretty much immediately from "uncut pizza sitting on the oven" to "fucking devoured". It was instantaneous, so I didn't have time to much more than snap a pic to My Story. That, and everybody thinks they're a goddamn photographer now. Not me. And probably not you either. Different story for a different time.

Shoot, and I forgot the Thyme leaves as garnish.

Gjelina has a bunch more pizza recipes (non-pizza too, quite expansive), but it sounds like we're gonna give this one an encore before we try something new.