Cornmeal Crust

I've been wanting to try making a pizza with a cornmeal crust. I remember a place in San Francisco, near where we lived early on, whose trademark was cornmeal pizza crust. I think it was called Vicolo. We went there for their pizzas many times back then.

I added sautéed mushrooms and ground chicken sausage to top the pizza.

So I modified my current pizza crust recipe by substituting half the flour with cornmeal. I was afraid at first that I had gone too far, but the crust rose well. It even rolled out more or less nicely.

One of the two pizza crusts, after rising overnight in the fridge.

The only problem was that when I rolled it out, the edges cracked. That meant there were many little crevices for liquid to flow off the edge of the pizza. Normally, the edge puffs up a bit and holds the sauce and cheese on the interior of the pie. I think the cracking was caused by the lack of gluten in the cornmeal; less gluten equals less elasticity in the dough.

You can see the cracked edges on the finished pizza.

Some of the sauce and cheese took advantage of the crevices in my cornmeal crust to flow out off the pie and onto the stone. No matter, the pizza still cooked allright and I didn't have any stuck crust in the oven. And it tasted pretty good, although the crust was a lot denser than the traditional all white flour crust.

I'm not rushing to do it again, but it was a fun experiment.