Pizza at Home - Hawaiian Pizza done two ways

Sunday night means it's another chance to make pizza! I've made so many different pizzas this year, but I can hardly believe this one didn't get its own special night yet. It's ones of my favorites. 

Love it or hate it, we're going to be making Hawaiian Pizza tonight!

My favorite dough was originally based on an Artisan dough recipe, which wants you to make it 24 hours in advance. I've modified it so that I can mix everything together just a few hours before it's time to make pizza. 

2 cups of flour, 3/4-1 cups water, 1 Tbs oil, 1 tsp salt, 2.5 tsp yeast, 1 Tbs sugar. Mix it all together with a spoon until it just comes together. No extensive kneading of the dough here. 

About 45 minutes before it's time to make pizza, I punch down the dough and then split it into individual bowls so it can rise again. 

As for toppings, you know what goes on a Hawaiian pizza, right? 

Back in 1962 in Ontario Canada, Sam Panopoulos decided to try mixing savory and sweet, and ultimately coming up with the Pineapple Pizza. In his original experimentations, he used ham and bacon as his savory component. For the sweet, pineapples from a company called Hawaiian. The name Hawaiian Pizza is based on the brand of pineapples he used on his original pizza pie. 

But we're not just going to make 1 kind of Hawaiian pizza today. I want to try something else too. Looking for different recipes in preparation for this week, I saw that Spam is heavily associated with Hawaii too. My 2nd pizza tonight will be a Spam and Pineapple pizza. Let's cook!

I cut 1 inch strips of bacon and fried them in a pan. I made sure to take them off the heat a couple minutes before they were completely finished. They'll cook a little more on the pizza inside the oven. 

As for the Spam, it's ham, and it's just okay when it's cold. 

It's much better when it's fried. I used the bacon grease to give it even more delicious flavor. 

For the pineapple, there's always the option to use a canned pineapple, but tonight since it's available, I want to use something fresh. But how do we get all that delicious pineapple out of the tough skin? Luckily Theresa has a tool for that. 

This pineapple slicer comes in three different sizes. Just pick the one that best matches the size of your pineapple. Lop off the top of the pineapple, line up the center of the cutter with the core, and then start twisting. 

You start at the top twisting your way down. It goes from this...

To this. When you reach the bottom, give it a pull straight up. 

I'll cut some into rings, and cube up a few others. 

When you're done, the inside of the pineapple looks like this. The core is left. There's juice pooling in the bottom too. Hey kids!

Have you ever had pineapple juice more fresh than this? 

It's pretty delicious. Hey, nice shirt Theresa. 

There's the standard pineapple that's used in the regular Hawaiian pizza. For my 2nd pizza, I'm doing something special. Brown sugar caramelized pineapple rings. Mmm. 

I coated them with brown sugar and put them into the pan. 

They released a whole bunch of juice. A lot more than I was expecting. In the end, I was just hoping they'd re-absorb a bit more of that brown sugar. 

Time to make the pizzas! Theresa said she's happy that Sundays are always taken care of. 

I floured my parchment and set out to stretching my dough. I work it from the center out to the sides, trying to maintain some puffiness on the edges. 

The first pizza went into the oven looking like this. Pineapple, bacon, and Canadian bacon (Sam Panopoulos was from Canada, right?). 

My second pizza. Fried Spam and caramelized brown sugar pineapple rings. 

And even though in a 2019 survey of Americans, 24% claimed that pineapple is one of their least favorite toppings, no one in this family agrees. We are all fans of this sweet and salty combination on our pizzas. 

The original Hawaiian pizza was delicious, though after baking, I realized I probably went a little heavy on the cheese. I'll need to keep an eye on that in the future. 

And the Spam and Pineapple pizza turned out wonderfully!

Richard absolutely loves pineapples on pizza and thought that this was one of my best nights of homemade pizza. Theresa thought they were both delicious too, and was surprised by how much she enjoyed the Spam and Pineapple pizza. 

I wasn't too sure what to expect from that Spam and Pineapple pizza either, but the extra extra sweet pineapple and the extra salty and savory Spam were a very good match. 

Hawaiian Pizza made at home was a big success!