Quail, Sage, and Mushroom Pizza
The pizza oven we have allows us to cook small, 12-inch pizzas, which are big enough for one person to eat, but if you're willing, it's enough to share. Usually, we'll cook several different ones, then try slices from all of them. With this one, though, I pretty much ate the whole thing by myself, although Tami did get a small bite. Our pizza oven has a gas option, but we just fill ours with lump charcoal and wait for it to get hot, which usually takes about 30 minutes. The temperature needs to be around 450 to 500 degrees. You could also cook these in a conventional oven using a pizza stone. We've even cooked some on the outside grill. The recipes I'm posting here will be for these small, personal-sized pizzas, if you want to make bigger pizzas, you might need to double the recipe or roll the dough out a little thinner, but doing so could make it a little harder to work with. The ingredients for this dough are rough estimates but should get you close. I use these measurements, then adjust the flour or water based on the consistency of the dough. My wife likes to measure everything out by weight on a scale, which would be the proper way to do it. You might need to add some flour to firm it up if it's too soft or add some water if it's too hard. It needs to be supple, but not so much that when you pick it up, it runs through your fingers like slime. It should be firm enough that when you press on it, it gives but tries to hold its shape.
In total, I made five different pizzas that I'll try to post throughout this month, hopefully, one each week ... kind of a summer of pizzas theme. I have this Quail, Sage, and Mushroom Pizza, a Buffalo Pheasant Pizza, Southwestern Chukar Pizza, Mediterranean Partridge Pizza, and then finally, a Middle Eastern Partridge Pizza.
For this pizza, instead of using a traditional tomato sauce as a base, I made a bechamel sauce. I originally had planned on adding some cheese to this sauce, but since I was making several different pizzas and wanted to use this sauce on a couple of them, all with different cheeses, I decided to keep the bechamel neutral and add my different cheeses as a topping instead. The cook time on these pizzas is only about 8 minutes if your pizza oven is hot enough. With the Quail, I just par-cooked it in a skillet with a little bacon grease. I didn't want it cooked all the way through, just enough that it could finish off in the pizza oven. I also sautéed the mushrooms in some olive oil and sprinkled them with a little kosher salt when they were done.
About the Author : Jeff Davis
Visit authors website | View more articlesYou may think cooking and recipes don’t have much to do with a website dedicated to hunting dogs ... but really, why do we hunt? Sure, we enjoy watching our dogs work in the field and being outdoors, but ultimately, hunting is about survival and feeding our families. We might as well try to do it well. I'm not a chef and definitely no food authority ... but I do like to eat and enjoy cooking. After searching for people willing to share their recipes on Gundog Central, without much success, I decided to try to do a few on my own, with my wife Tami's help. The recipes I share here are things I like to eat and have made here at home. I've tried to include step-by-step instructions with each meal describing exactly how I did it, but my method may not be best, if you decide to try a recipe posted here, please use whatever technique you think works best, I'm simply sharing how I did it. You'll see a lot of recipes where I've tried to make things from starch, when I could have just used store bought ingredients, simply because I wanted to learn how something was done. My goal is to continually update these recipes as I learn new things and techniques. These are my attempts at creating good, home cooked food, that I would like to eat! If I'm sharing it here, my family and I enjoyed it and I believe you will too.
Related Aritlces
Quail Saltimbocca
I have this herb garden in my backyard that's overrun with beautiful Basil. In the middle of it are these two lonely, but healthy sage plants. I was looking from something I could do with that sage and decided on making a Saltimbocca. If you're not familiar with a Saltimbocca, it's thin meat, generally veal, that's rolled up with Prosciutto and Sage, lightly fried then cooked in a pan sauce of white wine and butter. In my last recipe post, I made a Pheasant Saltimbocca, and it was delicious, but after finishing that recipe, there were still some things I wanted to try with it, so I decided to attempt a quail version of it. A classic southern recipe is Quail wrapped in bacon, and since Prosciuttos is a cousin to Bacon, I thought the pair would be great together in this recipe. Fruits generally also pairs well with Quail, so I added some sliced peaches and cook them with my wine sauce, then topped it off with some Mozzarella cheese! It turned out great, I just wish my Quail had been a little meatier.
Smoked Chukar White Lasagna
We live on a small acre sized lot, in the middle of town, not a lot of room to have your own garden. It takes me about fifteen minutes to cut the grass. I wanted to plant my own garden, but I lived to far from the family's farm to do it there, so I built a small, raised bed garden in the backyard. It's three beds, roughly eight foot by ten foot each. In the beginning, I justified building it, thinking that I'd easily be able to get enough groceries out of it to justify the cost ... man was I wrong. Somehow, I keep finding new ways to put money into it. I have the lumber cost and all the dirt that I moved in to fill up the beds, plus I installed an irrigation system, so it'd self-water itself. I even installed a solar panel to charge some batteries to power a camera to take still images of the garden while it grows, so I could create a time-lapse video at the end of the growing season. Plus, I installed the world most boring live web cam, so I can remotely check the garden any time I wanted. I'll soon be adding temperature sensor for the air and soil, a humidity probe, and I plan to add a weather station to record rain fall amount and wind speed. To say that I've gotten carried away with my little garden project would be an understatement.
Chukar and Mushroom Pie
A recipe inspired by a trip to London, this chukar and mushroom pie features a savory, creamy filling covered in a buttery, flaky crust. For the best results, I urge you to track down Dufour Classic Puff Pastry. Dufour is miles better than Pepperidge Farm, which I’ve always found bland. It’s worth the splurge.
