Chili Cheese Dog Pizza

The other day Fluxxdog and I were discussing meals for the weekend. I mentioned that I would like to make homemade pizza again as it had been a while. I originally thought about making a barbecue chicken pizza. Somehow that thought got transformed into trying something new: Chili Cheese Dog Pizza. Fluxxdog was quite happy to give it a try.

I've made homemade pizza several times before. The dough takes a long time to make, but it is worth it to go for the made-from-scratch stuff over the store-bought generic crusts. The first thing is to heat up milk until it bubbles, then add butter, sugar and cold water. When it cools, I pour it into a bowl with egg and yeast. Then I add some flour and let it sit for 20 minutes.

After this, I add more flour, baking soda, and baking powder. 

It looks like a monster, yes. But then I spend a few minutes kneading the dough, making it look a bit more refined.

Then I cover the dough in veggie oil and line up the sides of the bowl with it as well. I've learned to let the dough rise in the oven on the lowest setting. I also put in a pan of water to keep the dough from drying out.

After an hour, the dough has risen. A lot.

So I get out my two smaller cookie sheets, cover them in parchment paper and spread out some of the dough to make the crusts. I let them bake for a little bit to make them solid enough to add the ingredients. These first two little pizzas will get the Hot Dog Chili. 

While the crusts were baking I decided to dice the first set of sausage hot dogs instead of slicing them. These got added to these first two smaller pizzas.

Gotta admit, as good as the final product looks, they smell even better.

The third pizza will be baked on the bigger cookie sheet. Instead of two smaller pizzas, the last of the dough will be used for an average sized pizza. This time I'm using a regular chili (not the soupy homemade stuff) and I'm slicing the sausages instead of dicing them.

I decided to try to have a little fun with the placement of the toppings for this pizza:

But the final product still looks good:

After the pizzas were made, Fluxxdog tried a slice, walked up to me and said "It's tasty. And it's messy. I like it!" Veonoss also told me that he really liked the flavor. Though we can all agree, next time, just dice the sausage. It works better. As for the sauce, I think I prefer to work with the non-hot dog style chili, but ultimately it still tastes good.

So, all in all, I declare this experiment a success. I encourage you to try it out for yourself. The only drawbacks are that it does take a long time to make and, for me, still tastes "just okay". I'll give this recipe of mine 3.5 hoots and get to work tweaking the recipe to up that to a 4.

                 Hoot!Hoot!

                     Hoo