Tonight, I wanted a change of pace for our weekly homemade pizza. I usually make the standard red sauce, though occasionally, I’ll make a white sauce with flour, but tonight, I wanted something easier and with less carbs. Enter sun-dried tomatoes and buttermilk.
Followers of this blog probably know I love cooking with buttermilk. It’s one of my magic ingredients. This time, I sautéed onions, garlic and a little thinly sliced eggplant (about 1/4 cup of 1/8 inch slices cut into chunks), then added some capers, caper liquid and a little brine of green olives. To that I added quartered artichoke hearts, cut into smaller pieces, and sautéed a bit longer. Then I added some sun dried tomatoes with some of their oil and a few tablespoons of buttermilk.
The buttermilk will separate and become more liquid as soon as it gets hot, but that’s all right. The eggplant and sun dried tomatoes absorb most of the liquid, and I added a little more buttermilk before I was ready to spread the sauce on the pizza crust.
Then came my toppings of zuccini, mushroom, black and green olives, and spinach. Of course, any topings would do. Cover this with a liberal amount of mozerella cheese and bake until the cheese starts to brown.
Tonight’s pizza came out quite good, and this sauce seems a little lighter than some. I’ve made a white-sauce pizza with a flour and milk or buttermilk sauce, which is creamier, but a little heavier. And I’ve made a sauce with crushed tomato and a little buttermilk mixed in. With the sun dried tomatoes, this is somewhere between a white sauce and a red sauce, allowing the olives, capers, and other toppings to really stand out
Kendall Dunkelberg 