Last weekend GloriousShoes shared a link with a recipe for French Bread Pizza. Looked easy enough. I’ve made pizza from scratch before, so I know the dough is the hard part. I did a quick run down of the ingredients: garlic, butter, olive oil, red pepper, oregano, cheese, tomatoes and a few simple other things. I knew this would be part of my dinner menu this week.
I’m a doofus and ended up buying stewed tomatoes instead of crushed and decided to add Italian sausage. Fixing my stewed tomatoes was easy – I threw them in the food processor until they were the right consistency for pizza sauce. Rouse’s didn’t have any ground Italian sausage so I bought the brat kind and just took the casing off. No big deal – I’ve done this before. Cooking the sausage (heh) added a little bit of time to this recipe that probably would have only taken 30 minutes.
Other than that it was a pretty easy process. Preheat the oven to 425º. Cut the French bread in half as if you were going to make a sandwich out of it. Mince the garlic, melt the butter and olive oil in a sautee pan. Cook the garlic until it’s soft, but don’t brown it. Throw in the oregano and red pepper flakes with the garlic. Once the garlic is soft, put in the parsley/basil mix and a good pinch of salt. Stir it a little bit and then remove from heat. You should squish the bread a little bit with a cookie sheet. I guess you don’t have to do this, but the bread might curl up a bit in the baking process.
You want to brush about half of this garlic goodness on the slices of bread, then put some cheese on each slice. Put this in the oven until the cheese is a little melty. Meanwhile, add the tomatoes to the rest of the garlic/butter mixture. Let this cook until the tomatoes have reduced the sauce is rich. Probably about 10-15 minutes. Once the sauce has reduced, put some on each bread slice. My layering went like this: sauce, meat, cheese. Maybe next time I’ll do sauce, cheese, and then meat.
Let this bake until the cheese has melted/browned to your liking. Let it cool a bit and boom. You’ve got dinner.
Was this recipe easy? Pretty easy, yes. I complicated it a bit by adding sausage and screwing up with the tomatoes.
How long did it take? It was probably 45 minutes from the time I started cooking the sausage until I was eating.
How did it taste? Really good. Dare I say it was even better when I ate it for leftovers. I put the leftover pieces in a toaster oven and the bread was the perfect amount of crunchy.
Would I make this again? Sure thing. This was really easy and quick. I’ll add it to my “I don’t want to spend a lot of time cooking dinner” list of things to make.
All photos courtesy of clarity83.
