BBQ Chicken Pizza

In my continuing quest to use all leftovers, yesterday I found myself stumped by some leftover BBQ chicken.  Tuesday night while we were at dance class, Andy made some BBQ chicken on the charcoal grill, and while it was delicious, there was a bit leftover, yet not really enough to have as leftovers or sandwiches or enchilada filling or…whatever.  But I really wanted to use it, and thinking on it, I thought of BBQ chicken pizza, and the more I thought about that idea, the more I needed to make this pizza.  I’ve grown tired of pizza, to be honest, we’ve been having it a bit, and it all tastes the same, so this, a different pizza just sounded like perfection.

I began with my dough.  I decided to use my All-Purpose Pizza Dough, and use a little more of it so we would have a thicker crust pizza.  As that rose away, I turned my attention to the toppings, and my first puzzle was what to use for a sauce.  As I thought about BBQ pizzas we’ve ordered out, one thing is consistent, they have too much of a BBQ sauce presence- so much that it takes over the pizza.  So I pulled out a bottle of BBQ sauce and measured 1/2 cup, and then I dug around and found a jar of pizza sauce and added half a cup of that.  The combination sounds strange, but when I tasted it, I knew it was going to be perfect.  I chopped up my chicken, diced a red bell pepper and half an onion and then turned back to the fridge for “there’s gotta be something else”.

I saw the bag of spinach and thought about that for just a minute before grabbing the tiniest clove of garlic from the pantry.  I softened that in about 1/2 a teaspoon of olive oil, and then threw in two handfuls ofchopped spinach leaves.  I wilted and cooked that and ended up with maybe 2 tablespoons of chopped, cooked spinach, but I thought it would be enough to give an earthy flavor to the pizza, yet it would be little enough that the kids would simply ignore it.  For the cheese I opted to use Mozzarella for the bulk of the pizza, but at the very end I sprinkled the top with about one cup of shredded cheddar cheese.

The dough was ready, so I lopped off 1/4 of it and used 3/4 of the batch of dough to make my pizza.  My pizza pan is very large- 16 inches maybe? So it makes a pretty large pizza, and a standard batch of dough makes enough for two pizzas.  The smaller piece of dough I baked blind, thinking Zander might want a plain cheese pizza for lunch one of these days.  The larger piece of dough was stretched until it fit my pan, and the pizza went in the oven.

In a word, this pizza was fantastic!  All the flavors combined beautifully, there was sweet, smokey, earthy and salty and every bite was more delicious than the one before it.  What really made the pizza was that Andy had cooked the chicken over charcoal.  If you don’t have smokey chicken to use for this pizza- add a few strips of cooked and crumbled bacon to get that smokiness, because that was the flavor that really made this pizza.  So, so good, I’m planning on BBQ chicken again in the near future so that we can have leftovers to make this pizza again.  It was absolutely delicious, and I wish there were leftovers for lunch.  I believe the two remaining pieces just became breakfast for my husband…