Homemade pizza: bacon, chicken, barbecue sauce

One thing that I've managed to get reasonably good at making from scratch in the last couple years is my own pizza. Any simple white bread recipe can be used to make the dough for the crust; a decent tomato sauce takes a couple hours to make. Even so, it's not quite a routine thing. My mate and I still, I'm a little ashamed to say, buy pizza from the freezer compartment.

Today, though, with a long weekend day to occupy myself and some thawed-out chicken thighs to be used up, I made a different sort of pizza from what I usually make: barbecue chicken pizza with bacon, using a homemade sauce. Well, sort of homemade. Basically it's gussied-up ketchup that I threw this and that spice and flavoring into until it tasted OK:

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Ingredients

1½ cups generic tomato ketchup
4 tablespoons brown sugar
4 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon mustard powder
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
several grinds of black pepper
1 teaspoon liquid smoke

Directions

Heat all these ingredients together in a saucepan at a very slow boil for perhaps ten minutes. That's it.

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Beyond that, there's not much to say about making the pizza itself. I've used a bunch of different recipes to make crusts, most frequently the basic white bread recipes out of the 1975 edition (i.e. the last good edition) of The Joy of Cooking or out of The Fannie Farmer Baking Book. This time, though, because I was going to make the dough and then refrigerate it overnight before use, I employed Alton Brown's crust recipe from the "Flat is Beautiful" episode of Good Eats, except using ordinary active dry yeast bloomed in the warm water instead of the "instant" yeast he recommends. (Honestly I don't see what the point of "instant" yeast is. It's more expensive and you save maybe five minutes of times at most.) Brown divides his recipe of dough in half but I split it in three instead. Smaller pizzas mean less guilt upon eating a whole half of one.

The topping is simply bacon cut up small and browned, whence chicken thigh meat--I buy boneless and skinless thighs from the freezer compartment--is cut up fairly small, salted and peppered, and then thoroughly cooked along with the bacon before all the excess fat is drained off. Roll out the dough thin, apply a couple of tablespoons of barbecue sauce with a ladle, cover it with shredded mozzarella cheese, add some of the bacon and chicken along with some freshly chopped onion, bake the result until the edges of the crust are just starting to brown (about 19 minutes), and you've got a tasty pizza.