Showing posts with label cream sauce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cream sauce. Show all posts

Monday, March 23, 2009

Homemade Bertucci's Silano Pizza!

One of my favorite pizzas in the whole world is the Silano from Bertucci's, so I decided to try to make it at home the other day. For those who aren't familiar with it, the pizza is a white pizza - it doesn't have tomato sauce and instead is broccoli and chicken and mozzarella cheese in a lemon-cream white sauce.

I cheated and bought a refrigerated pizza crust, but other than that I made it from scratch. Here's what I used...
1 refrigerated pizza crust
1 medium head of broccoli, chopped and steamed until not quite tender.
8 oz of fresh mozzarella cheese, cut into 1/2 inch slices
1/3 lb of chicken, cooked and chopped
1/2 cup of ricotta cheese
1 cup whipping cream
1/3 cup lemon juice
pepper
several tablespoonfuls of grated parmesan

I spread the pizza dough on the greased cookie sheet as directed, and then mixed together the whipping cream, lemon juice, pepper and parmesan cheese to make the white sauce. I spread half the white sauce on the pizza and then added the broccoli, chicken, mozzarella and ricotta (which I dropped in tablespoonfuls on the pizza) and then poured the rest of the white sauce over the top of the pizza. I then baked it according to the directions on the package, until the crust was golden brown. I think it took about 15 minutes at 400 degrees.

Here's my Silano pizza! It came out really well and tasted surprisingly like the Bertuccis version, minus the brick-oven crust of course, but that's hard to do at home.
The next time I make the recipe I'll make a few changes - first, I won't use any ricotta. I mostly used it because I had it on hand and I wanted to get rid of it (Bertuccis version doesn't have ricotta, I don't believe). It didn't really add anything to the pizza, anyway. Second, I wouldn't make as much white sauce and I definitely wouldn't use as much lemon juice (the lemon flavor was a little, um, overpowering). I would probably use 1/2 cup - 2/3 cup cream and only a couple tablespoonfuls of lemon juice. Other than that I thought it came out pretty well. And definitely use fresh mozzarella instead of the shredded stuff...it tastes soooo much better!

Revised ingredient list:
1 refrigerated pizza crust
1 medium head of broccoli, chopped and steamed until not quite tender.
8 oz of fresh mozzarella cheese, cut into 1/2 inch slices
1/3 - 1/2 lb of chicken, cooked and chopped
1/2 - 2/3 cup whipping cream
several tablespoonfuls of lemon juice
dash of pepper
several tablespoonfuls of grated parmesean