You Want Pies With That?: Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza

This marks my inaugural entry into the You Want Pies With That? monthly baking challenge.  This month looked like a good one for tossing my hat into the ring, because the theme is "Pizza Pies," a genre with which I am very intimately familiar.  Last year financial circumstances forced me to do a LOT of on the fly cooking, and more often than I liked to admit I was slapping together leftovers to create some kind of pizza.  I always had cheese and ingredients for pizza crust on hand.

Of all the variations I made, the one that made the most satisfying comfort food-ie version was this one: a cheeseburger pizza.  It's also probably the least healthy, so I haven't made it in ages, but I think it's worth sharing. I do it rather haphazardly, so I hope this is followable!

First, I cook some sort of burger meat.  Ground turkey or chicken are what I usually have about the house.  Beef is of course totally fine too. I put in a little salt and pepper while it cooks.  I also usually brown some diced onions, but to my mortification I found I have none today--what in the world?  I usually have 2 or 3 bags of frozen diced onions in the fridge--so I put in a few minced onions instead.

Then, since I had no onions and needed this to be special for y'all somehow, I cooked a couple slices of bacon.

 I do this for my culture!

Now that the cooking's done, moving on to the sauce.  This is non-negotiable item #1!  Don't use tomato sauce;  you won't get the "cheeseburger" taste!   DO NOT.

I blend ketchup (about 1/8 c here) and about half that amount of mustard and relish (about 1 T each).  This is very mustardy.  I like mustard better than ketchup so that's cool with me.  You should taste to see if you like it and adjust accordingly.

Then I prep the dough.  I do know how to make my own dough--and I think I make a fairly kickbutt pizza dough--but I just got back from driving all over the Northeast in four days so please cut me some slack.  I will admit that I bought dough from my local fancypants grocery.  Don't judge me!

I like to roll/stretch my dough on a lightly floured silpat.  The flour is not really necessary but it makes me feel better.  The silpat allows me to just flip the dough onto the pizza peel, where I then dress the pizza.

Before putting the pizza on the peel, I dust it liberally with cornmeal.  This makes it easier to get onto the hot baking stone.

 

Now I do: sauce, then meat, then mozzerella cheese.  I'm going to go with about 1/2 cup here;  this is a fairly small pizza.  I crumbled one slice of bacon--you could certainly go with bacon bits instead--and then about an ounce of cheddar diced up.

Nonnegotiable item #2:  American cheese. Yes, that's right, good old pale, bland, plasticy, processed cheese food.  A cheeseburger is not really a cheeseburger to me without this stuff.  It's...well, I don't know what, but not a cheeseburger.  Yes, yes, I know you aren't the sort of person who eats such awful things.  Buy the Kraft kind that is actually largely made with milk if you must (I do) but you need this.  I'm gonna use a slice and a half here and for laziness's sake, slice into strips.

Kind of festive, no?

Put pizza on stone, bake till brown and bubbly and and apply to face.