always a win: ripping off cheeseboard

by michelletranny

Anyone who goes to Cheeseboard at least once in a while is familiar with the old favorite: the corn, pasilla chile, onions, feta, mozzarella, cilantro and garlic olive oil pizza with Mexican key limes.

Here’s a few photos I took with the ol’ PnS from when Caro and I went to Cheeseboard during my visit to Berkeley over Spring Break, 2009:

I remember missing the Bay Area so much at the time, with its crisp sun-filled days and wholesome food offerings, and how dearly I wished that I would end up, in Temescal, living with Caro and making our own Cheeseboard pizza once I returned to the states. My wish came true.

May 2010

Taken by Andrea:

How did we make it? Here’s the run-down.

- Preheat the oven to 450. Roll out your dough, transfer it to a baking sheet sprinkled with cornmeal, brush the dough with garlic olive oil (extra virgin olive oil with chopped garlic in it), then pre-bake for 5 minutes.
- Remove the crust from the oven and top with thinly sliced pasilla chiles, thinly sliced onions, grated mozzarella, fresh corn and feta (preferably in that order).
- Pop it back in the oven for 10-15 more minutes, or until the crust is golden brown and the cheese is melted, a bit toasted even.
- Remove the pizza from the oven and top with fresh chopped cilantro. Serve with Mexican limes.

~

July 2010
Pizza night house exchanges with Nina and Meghan had become somewhat of a sporadic tradition. We wanted to get a last one in before Meghan moved to NYC :/.

When I’m looking for pizza inspiration, I like to look at Cheeseboard’s website. Cheeseboard’s Twitter is even better. One of the pizzas that week had summer squash, onions, mozzarella, feta, and basil pesto. This sounded good to me, and we were getting summer squash in the CSA that day, so it seemed like an obvious choice for pizza night (in addition to Nina’s delicious fig pizza. Mmmmmm).

Making the garlic olive oil.

Meghan carmelizing some onions:

Nina’s crust-rolling skillz:

Quick pestos are the best… o’s. I had thought we would be getting basil in the CSA that day too because I’d misread the CSA newsletter like a dummy. Thankfully Ashley and Ken showed up bearing basil of their own and kindly let me use all of it for the pesto.

To make the pesto, I just threw some fresh leaves of basil, parsley, whole garlic cloves, pine nuts, olive oil, freshly grated parmesan and s&p into the mini Cuisinart Dan Dan got for me a few years ago. I blended it and adjusted the proportions to taste. A few observations: I didn’t need that many pine nuts, I needed more olive oil than I was expecting (still wanna be careful when adding it though), and having nearly equal parts basil and parsley worked out just fine (though the CB version was probably more basil-y).


After spreading a generous amount of pesto over the pre-baked crust and topping it with grated mozzarella, I tossed the squash with some garlic olive oil and seasoned it with s&p before putting it on top of the pizza followed by some fresh corn (for good measure) and crumbled feta. My memory fails me but I believe we either layered some of the carmelized onions underneath the cheese or omitted them all together.

Herro fig friend!

We made a third pizza that was very Cheeseboard-like with heirloom tomatoes and corn (and carmelized onions?), which some of us topped with the delicious salad (tossed with my favorite lemon vinaigrette) that Caro made. It was a pizzetta (like the ones they have at Fly Bar next to our new house)!

I layered on as much pesto as I thought possible at the time but I think it would have been better with MORE PESTO. LOTS AND LOTS OF PESTO.