Mostly Homemade Chicken Garlic Pizza

Back where I come from… isn’t that a Kenny Chesney song? Anyway, in the Pac-Northwest we have this delicious take and bake pizza place called Papa Murphy’s.  It’s an easy thing to grab for dinner on the way home or as a special treat for birthdays/holidays, whatever.  Since moving to California in 2005, I have yet to find anything like this delectable pizza house.  When I was home last November we ordered my favorite pie from big Papa Murphy, Chicken Garlic with extra tomatoes and chicken [go big or go home]!  I had the craving for this pizza a couple weeks ago and decided to test out my new Pampered Chef pizza stone with my own version.  I ran into a couple of snafus but isn’t that the beauty of blogs, I’ll share that I’m not perfect and you’ll like me even more for it, right???? [please say yes]  I convinced my girlfriends to let me come over and watch the Game of Thrones premier and the American Country Music awards with the caveat that I would provide the pizza and they’d very generously share their kitchen with me.  I think they were pleased with the Papa M copycat. 

Ingredients:

Pizza Dough [I used Trader Joe’s whole wheat, enough for 1 large pizza]

1 cup Greek yogurt

1 teaspoon minced garlic

2 Tablespoon ranch dressing seasoning

1 teaspoon white wine

1 teaspoon coarse black pepper

2 green onions

2 Roma tomatoes

2 cups cooked chicken breast

1 generous cup of mozzarella cheese

1 generous cup of cheddar cheese

1 generous cup of Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  If using a pizza stone, place the stone in the oven during the preheating process for about 10 minutes.

Remove pizza dough from fridge and let it sit for about 15 minutes before handling it. I would call this homemade pizza but I cheated and bought the dough.  Maybe next time I’ll attempt dough from scratch. 

Mix together Greek yogurt, garlic, ranch dressing seasoning, white wine and black pepper. 

Cut the chicken breast into quarter sized pieces or whatever size is to your liking.  I wasn’t very ambitious and I purchased precooked just chicken from Trader Joe’s because it’s so easy.  If I had leftover chicken this would be a perfect way to use it up and it would probably be much tastier! 

Chop up the green onions.

Chop up the tomatoes. There are two ways you can do this- keep the seeds and tomato innards in the mixture or you can remove them.  I excluded them because they tend to make things more soupy on the dough- ain’t nobody got time for that!

Now comes the most laborious task of shredding all that delicious cheese.  I purchased pre-shredded mozzarella because when I’ve used the fresh log in the past it gets all wilty and sad within minutes of shredding it. I did hand shred the cheddar and Parmesan. Yum!

Here’s where I made my mistake… I rolled out the cold dough onto a cold pizza stone, apparently the internet says to throw the pizza stone into the oven while you are heating the oven to slowly bring the stone up to melt your face off temperature.  Allegedly you can possibly crack your stone if you put a cold stone into a very hot oven.  Thankfully that didn’t happen to me but the pizza took FOREVER to cook all the way through.

Anyhoo… Roll your dough out onto the pizza stone, I added a smidge of olive oil to the stone (I don’t think that’s necessary either- probably aided in the extended cooking time).

Spread your mixed up white garlic sauce onto the pizza. I would suggest using enough to fully cover the pizza but not too thick that the pizza is swimming in sauce. There’s a fine line between “saucy” and “all I can taste is sauce.”

Add Mozzarella. 

Add chicken.

Now add cheddar and Parmesan cheese.

Add tomato & green onion and if you have any leftover cheese, feel free to toss that on top. A little more cheese never hurt anyone, you’re already eating pizza- this is not diet food, people!

Toss that bad boy into the oven at 400˚ for 20 minutes and you should have the cheese bubbling and golden by that time. If it isn’t behaving like I’m telling you, allow it a couple more minutes to get with the program.  I had to leave mine in for about 10 more minutes, could’ve been a fluke or something to do with the crazy amount of times opened the door to peek at it.  I. Was. Starving.

Here he is in all of his big Papa glory.  [Throw yo hands in the air if youz a true playa!]

Also... Happy Mother's Day to all of you wonderful mothers out there.  I was lucky enough to spend the last 5 days with my Momma [and Poppa] in Hawaii.  Such a nice, relaxing vacation in paradise!