clam pesto pizza

To say that I'm a fan of seafood would be a major understatement. By and large, I'm fairly successful in eating very little red and white meat, but seafood is one thing that I know that I could never give up completely.

I could rattle off a Forrest Gump-esque list that soliloquizes all the ways and manners in which I love all kinds of seafood - not just shrimp - but for everyone sanity (and limited attention span), I won't. I'll just say that we have crabs for Thanksgiving in lieu of a turkey, and leave it at that.

So.

Within the last couple of years, I've been lucky eough to have a monetary and gastronomic lifesaver nearby: Trader Joe's.

Specifically, two ingredients: the pizza dough, and the basil.

Let's break this down for a minute.

The pizza dough, which comes infused with all of the herby/yeasty/premade (and therefore lazines enabling) goodness: is less than $2.

The basil: comes in one boatsized denomination, which is not so great when you picked it up to make basil mozzarella sandwiches, but is the perfect amount for making pesto. In fact, I am fairly sure that it is humanly impossible to actually go through an entire box of the stuff without resorting to the "quick!-make-pesto-before-it-all-goes-bad!" strategy. All told, it's not too expensive to make amazing simple pizzas for dirt-cheap, and deluxe slightly-more-complicated pizzas for not too much more.

This pizza falls into the second category. I actually made this a few weeks ago (obligatory referral to the bleating excuses that I have made in previous posts affirming that yes, I AM still cooking, but yes, I also similtaneously am too lazy to blog most of the things I make). I wasn't even going to post the recipe. But the next day, when I brought in my leftovers, I was met with a universal reaction of disgust.

CLAM pizza? I might as well have brought in roadkill sandwiched between two pieces of Wonderbread. I found myself constantly having to defend my (apparently) odd recipe choice. I didn't think it was that strange.

Really.

I'd had clam pizzas at lots of places, usually with some incarnation of white sauce. Granted, I knew that this was not exactly something that you could pick up at Little Caesar's, but I certainly didn't think the combination strange enough to warrant an involuntary gagging sound. It's just like the clam sauce that you would have over pasta, people! The same basic meat+sauce+carb combo is still intact, I promise! It's just a slightly different variant! Now would you please put away your torches and pitchforks?

Given the reaction, I figured I really had no other choice but to blog it, with the hope of alleviating prejudice for the poor overlooked clam pizzas of tomorrow.

Obviously, if you are not a clam fan to begin with, this recipe is not for you. But on the off chance that you are fond of an occasional plate of Spaghetti alle Vongole at your local Italian restaurant, I beg you to consider this:

Pesto Clam Pizza
(pesto recipe adapted from the amazing 101 recipes)

INGREDIENTS

• 1 package of Trader Joe's refrigerated pizza dough (I like the herbed version, but the whole wheat is also quite good)
• 1 large bunch of basil leaves
• 1 head of garlic, separated into peeled cloves (from the above picture, you can tell I used two, but you all know my feelings on garlic at this point)
  
• 1/2 cup grated parmesean cheese
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
• A few tablespoons water
• 1 6.5-oz can of chopped clams
• 3 tablespoons dry sherry
• dash of white flour
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 1/4 cup mozzarella cheese (optional)
  

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Take pizza dough out of the fridge and let rest on the counter. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2. Mince a third of the garlic. Add 1/3 of the basil leaves and chop them into the minced garlic. Add the next third of garlic along with 1/3 of the parm cheese. Mince until integrated. Alternate chopping the remaining basil, cheese, and garlic into the mixture until the final overall consistency is a fine mince.

3. Drizzle in the lemon juice and olive oil, and stir. Add a few tablespoons of water as needed, in order to achieve a thick pizza-sauce consistency.

4. Open the can of clams and drain the clam juice into a medium-sized saucepan. Add the dry sherry and stir over low heat for 1-2 minutes. Stir in a dash of white flour to help the sauce thicken.

5. Turn the heat to medium-high, stirring occasionally, until the clam-wine sauce has thickened. Add in the reserved clams and stir until heated through. Remove from heat, salt and pepper to taste if needed.

6. Use olive oil to grease a baking sheet (or use a pizza stone if you are lucky enough to have one) and hand-stretch the pizza dough to an approximate 12" diameter. Bake in preheated oven for 5 minutes.

7. Spread the pesto mixture in a thin layer over the semi-baked crust, then spread the clam sauce mixture over that. Sprinkle mozzarella cheese over the top, if desired.

8. Put back in oven and bake according to the package until the crust has browed.

Convinced yet?