French Bread Pizza

 1 March 2021

Recipe from Cook's Country, June 2020

I recently watched a video demonstration of pizza being made using store-bought French bread. While I had low expectations, mainly about the thickness and texture of the bread, I thought it was worth a try as it promised a quick route to homemade pizza. Even if it wasn't as good as other homemade pizza the convenience could make it attractive. The only way to find out is to try it and I found a recent Test Kitchen recipe for the trial.

The recipe provided several challenges. It specified ¾ cup of crumbled bacon, but how much bacon do you cook to get this much? The bread specified was 24x4 inches (would this fit on a half sheet pan?) but the bread in our supermarket is 13x4 inches. The amount of crushed tomatoes (1½ cups) and pineapple tidbits were odd, not corresponding to the sizes of cans of these commonly available  ingredients. 

But pressing on, 8 slices (14 ounces) of thick-cut bacon were placed in the oven on a quarter sheet pan to cook. While the bacon cooked sauce was made from crushed tomatoes (I mashed and drained petit diced tomatoes), extra virgin olive oil, Italian seasoning, sugar, salt, and pepper. While the bacon cooked, the bread was cut in half crosswise then each piece was halved horizontally. The crust side of the bread pieces was brushed with vegetable oil. When the bacon was done, melted butter was mixed with garlic powder, salt, and red pepper flakes which was then brushed on the cut sides of the bread. This was placed, cut side up, on a sheet pan covered with aluminum foil, the baked in a 450° oven until browned. The sauce was spread on the bread, topped with shredded mozzarella and grated Parmesan cheeses, crumbled bacon, and pineapple tidbits. It was baked at 450° until the cheese was melted, allowed to cool for 5 minutes, then served. We got 2 meals from this recipe. The total preparation time was about 95 minutes, but 40 of these were used to cook the bacon. 

The pizza was not bad and not as bready as I had feared. However, it wasn't good either. We found it to be too spicy and too salty. Preparing it created several leftover ingredients, generated a lot of dirty dishes, and used a lot of paper towels, primarily to dry the toppings. I don't expect we'll be making it again, it was just not convenient enough to make up for all of the negatives.