Winter cravings – Deep dish corn pizza with kale, bacon and gorgonzola

Kale. During the last years when kale recipes spread the food blogger universe I started to appreciate this kind of cabbage. Actually, before all this, I think I haven’t ever eaten kale at all. There is this traditional Northwestern German dish called “Grünkohl mit Pinkel” – but here in the South – you wouldn’t have found kale on a farmer’s market in November … until this hype began…

I never enjoyed kale cooked into a mash in this traditional German way. But I couldn’t warm with kale as raw salad either (I tried), and I find nothing about a green smoothie with kale (I find smoothies in general overestimated, by the way).

But what I like is baked kale. Crisp, paper-thin leaves of kale – resembling in their texture very old paper – that crumble in your mouth and leave a light cabbage flavour.

Add some good Italian bacon and melted flakes of riped gorgonzola cheese, assemble all of it on a base of bread … see, how the idea of this hearty pizza evolved – fitting to the season, its ingredients and what I’m craving around this time of the year?

His opinion: “Could we just put normal ingredients on our pizza again?” … Arrgh

  

What has to be mentioned as well: the bottom of this pizza. Beside the idea to make this as a deep dish pizza, this pizza doesn’t have a regular dough. Inspired by some cornbread recipes I had seen lately it developed into a in-between of pizza and cornbread – thick and fluffy, but with s slightly crumbly texture. I like!

Deep dish corn pizza with kale, bacon and gorgonzola (2 p.)

ingredients
130 g flour, 70 g corn flour, 1 teaspoon active dried yeast, 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1 teaspoon salt

1 stalk kale, 5 slices bacon, 50 g gorgonzola

preparation
Stir together yeast with about 1/2 cup lukewarm water and 2 tablespoons flour in a large bowl. Cover and let rest for 15 min. Add remaining flour, corn flour, olive oil and salt and knead while adding lukewarm water as you need it. Knead for at least 2 min. Leave your pizza dough covered at a warm place for 1-2 hours or until it has doubled in size. Wash kale and cut into chunky pieces.

Preheat oven to 220° C. Grease baking pan (∅ 20 cm) with olive oil, press dough into the pan. Crumble gorgonzola cheese on pizza bottom, then distribute kale and finally cover with torn pieces of bacon. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes.