Put It In the Pot

I'm sort of in love with my ramekins. They are deep, oven-safe, durable little wonders that have been housing all sorts of things lately. Most recently, I made these funky little pizza pot pies -- kind of a wacky riff on the standard pot pies (which have certainly had their own turn in the ramekins). The idea, I'm sorry to tell you, was not my own. I wish that I had thought up this insanely, oddly delicious pocket of love, but, unfortunately, the creator was someone else. A few months ago, I first tried them at the Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Company, which is this little restaurant on Clark Street near the zoo. We had just been to see the monkeys, and perhaps I was just in monkey delirium, or simply starving from traipsing around the zoo at night in the middle of winter, but the pizza pot pies we had at this place were amazing. Really unusual, but really incredible.

First, let me set the stage. This restaurant is old and quirky. It's in the narrow garden unit of a brick walk-up, so it's a bit like going into a basement. The ceilings are low, and everything is made of the same honey-colored glossy wood -- the tall-backed booths, the ceilings, the bar, the walls -- nearly everything. This makes it feel both cozy and like a really crowded tree house. There are even wooden shingles around the periphery of the ceiling, so you can never figure out if you're inside or outside. The walkways are narrow in this place, and there's just not a whole lot of, well, space. Which makes it quaint but also can make a diner feel sort of panicky and claustrophobic. The restaurant has been around since the early 1970s, and was, wonderfully enough, opened by a lawyer whose last name was Beaver. At the time, it was decided that this establishment would be "Chicago's most exciting restaurant concept in many years." The concept is, in this day and age, not the most unusual, since pizza places are a dime a dozen around here, but the way they make their pizza is the truly exciting part.

It's called a pizza pot pie. It's an individual serving of either a half pound (certainly adequate) or a full pound (yikes). Into a ramekin goes an Bible-sized slab of mozzarella cheese, then sauce (with or without sausage, but it all has whole mushrooms), then the crust. As it bakes, the crust poofs up all around and over the ramekin edges, and creates a dome, like the roof of a Smurf house, minus the red and polka dots. When the top has poofed, and the innards are cooked, the friendly server forges his way through the narrow aisles to bring it to you. This is what happens: the server puts a plate down, slides a knife around the inner edges of the ramekin, and then inverts the pizza onto your plate. It ends up like a cup of crust with cheese for a lid, and the sauce is all inside. Get it? Pizza. When your knife and fork go in, the sauce starts to slowly seep out and onto your plate, just like hot, tasty lava.

I set out to make these the other day, and, honestly, they ended up looking not very much like the ones at the restaurant. They were, however, incredibly palatable (perhaps, dare I say, even better than the restaurant's version?!) and successful. I started with my trusty ramekins, a hot, hot oven (gosh, maybe 475 F?), and the rack in the lowest position. I made a batch of pizza dough (the kind I told you about recently) and I made a sauce to serve as the lava. Remember the magical red sauce? It was one batch of that sauce, plus some garlic and oregano. (The dough was rising while I made the sauce.) Once the sauce was nearing the end of its cooking time, I added quartered cremini mushrooms and half a bag of frozen spinach, and cooked it down a little more until the mushrooms had softened a bit.
Then, the ramekins were greased with spray oil (this helped them slide out later) and shredded mozzarella went in. I put the whole tray of ramekins into the oven for about five minutes to melt the cheese a little, but you could certainly skip this step, I think.
Once the cheese was melty, I pulled out the tray and added the special sauce.
Then each one was topped with a piece of dough. If you are so inclined, you could certainly divide up your pizza dough into six balls and then roll each one out so that they are all actually round. I settled for odd rectangle shapes, but they were kind of cute in their irregularity. Then each piece was folded onto the top of a ramekin, and into the oven they went, for about 12-15 minutes or so.
Keep an eye on them, and when the crusts are browned and the insides are gurgling about, then it's time to pull them out. NOW comes the fun part. Inversion. The flipping of boiling hot foods with your bare hands! Just slide a knife around and flip it over onto your dish. My cheese decided to stay inside the ramekins sometimes, so I just scooped it out. Since they were on the bottom oven rack, the cheese got nice and brown.
There she is! Golden perfection. Sort of sloppy, but really quite good. Sort of a party trick, and sort of a throwback to your tree house childhood, minus all the wooden surroundings and tin-can telephones.