Pizza or Focaccia? Crispy Purple Kale, Feta, Red Onion, Black Olive & Garlic on Some Seriously Good Crust (Whatever it Is)

 I seem to be having a hard time naming things lately. Take this dish. Is it a pizza? Is it focaccia? Plain old bread? And if it is pizza, is it Sicilian? Chicago-style? Deep dish? Sigh. I'm not sure.  Maybe I'll call it a fopizza.

Ultimately it doesn't matter I suppose, as it tasted exactly the way I wanted it to - crunchy on the outside, soft and pillow-y on the inside:

Plus, I have become obsessed with baked kale chips lately, and I figured the only way I could make them even better was to plop them on something doughy. I was right!

Making this was an object lesson in the profound effect that weather can have on dough. Apart from my culinary class, where we have a toasty proof box, I hadn't made a yeasted bread since the great Mid-Atlantic Snowpocalypse, and back then, in the middle of winter, I had to wrap my dough in blankets and put it by the heater and wait ... and wait ... and wait for it to finally proof.

Not this time! The yeast were practically jumping for joy in the sticky heat, as you'll see. For my fopizza dough, I used the Sicilian-style recipe at Robbies Recipes, except rather than knead by hand, as I usually do, I used my stand mixer, which took a lot less kneading time than the suggested 15 minutes.  In fact, the gluten developed to the proper stage in about 7 minutes - you can check this by taking a small amount of the dough, gently stretching it out, holding it up to the light and looking for the developed gluten strands. It's called the windowpane test:

If the dough breaks before you can stretch it, it needs more elbow (or mixer) grease. Next, it was time to cover my dough and leave it in a warm place to  double in size - according to the recipe, this should have taken about 90 minutes. Well, in under an hour my dough went from this:

... to this:

Yikes! This caused a bit of panic, as my toppings weren't ready yet and I was afraid my dough was going to over proof and be ruined. So Poppa Trix and I got our hustle on and prepped those toppings lickety-split.  (Luckily I had to let the dough rest for about 10 minutes once I rolled it out, which bought me a bit more time.)

My baking sheet was a tad smaller and more shallow than the one called for in the recipe, but it worked out.  First, I brushed on some olive oil and laid down some fresh garlic:

Next, red onions:

Followed by purple kale, which I very lightly tossed with olive oil:

To finish it off, feta cheese, black olives, and sea salt:

Thirty (or so) minutes later, after baking in a 400 degree oven,  out popped the fopizza of my dreams:

That krispy purple kale combined with the chewy dough, salty olives, sweet red onion,  and briny feta was the perfect bite. Well ... bites.