Deconstructing/Reconstructing Caliente's Big Fat Greek Mediterranean Pizza

Caliente Pizza and Draft House is our favorite pizza joint here in Pittsburgh. And our favorite style is their Big Fat Greek Wedding pizza that used to be called their Mediterranean pizza. Either way it is amazing. It is a "white" pizza with a mix of interesting toppings - garlic butter sauce, artichoke hearts, agrodolce tear drop peppers, kalamata olives, baby spinach and feta, provolone and mozzarella cheeses all on top of their secret recipe long rise dough. 

Since we love this pizza we thought we'd try to make it at home ourselves because why not? All the toppings are easily available except one - the agrodolce (sweet & sour) tear drop peppers and their taste is very important to the overall flavor of this pie. Luckily they have them at a local super market otherwise we would have had to look for them on line.

Here is what they look like - 

We made a few changes/tweeks that we felt could make this even better - 

1 - We added crisped up thin sliced hot soppressata, an Italian hard sausage. If you cant find this where you live, don't substitute with pepperoni, just leave it out. It has it's own unique flavor.

2 - We used arugula instead of spinach because we had some arugula that needed to be used up. No other reason.

3 - Their crust simply can't be duplicated so we used a premade Boboli crust. But next time we'll make our own and give the dough a good slow long rise.

Feta cheese crumbles - 

Sauteed and caramelized artichoke hearts -

Handful of Kalamata olives sliced in  half -

Crisped up pieces of soppresotta

Boboli crust but home made would be better -

Roasted a head of garlic the day before and squeezed out the soft sweet cloves with butter, salt and a little olive oil to make the garlic butter -

Brush the roasted garlic butter over the crust -

Add the artichoke hearts first -

Then the arugula and the feta cheese -

Then the olives and the soppresatta -

Then the mini sweet and sour pepper drops -

Mozzarella and Provolone cheeses loaded and ready for the oven -

Baked in a 450 degree oven for 12 minutes.