'Oh Bring Us A Figgy Pizza...'

Gosh, whatever should I do with these old dried black Mission figs, this smidgen of goat cheese, this leftover Brie and all these walnuts?

Make a pizza, of course.




I hallucinated it on my own, but it's not an original idea. There are recipes for this type of thing out there on the web, which I found after I made this one. I soaked the figs in ruby port all day long in the fridge to plump them up, and then snipped them in half. They were pretty hard and dry. I have a container of quark cheese around, so I used a little of that for the 'sauce'. I was wondering if that lactic acid astringency it has would come through (which is the main reason I'm not a big fan of yogurt), but it made a nice moist base and you couldn't taste any of that yogurtiness after it was baked. All the flavors came together nicely. Some chopped up Brie, crumbled goat cheese, caramelized onions, plenty of walnuts, a drizzle of olive oil, salt and pepper. Then a sprinkle of fresh rosemary after it came out of the oven.

This went very nicely with a big green salad with fresh orange segments. It's well worth making again, but maybe with newer, moister dried figs. You can almost never find fresh ones around here (Sabine, I often think fondly of your tree). The partial whole wheat crust was good, and it's my standby, but I'm thinking semolina flour or a little cornmeal in the dough in future versions. Because there will be more pizzas. Oh, yeah...