Mushroom and Salumi Pizza

William made mushroom and salumi pizza.  This pizza has William's typical pizza red sauce recipe, made with canned crushed roasted tomatoes, only this time he used a hand blender to crush whole roasted tomatoes since that's what we had.  The sauce also has dried oregano and dried basil in it, and some red wine vinegar and salt.  The pizza was also topped with sliced fresh mozzarella and freshly shaved parmesan, and a drizzle of olive oil.

The mushrooms are the only thing that I prepared.  They are a mix of porcini, black trumpet, and shiitake.  They are actually dried mushrooms, so I reconstituted them by putting them in a pot with enough water to cover them (2.5 cups), and bringing them to a boil and then simmering them for 10 minutes.  I then strained the mushrooms out (pressing the extra juice out of the mushrooms), and cut the larger pieces into strips, and removed the stems from the shiitake mushrooms since the stems of those mushrooms are tough.  I strained the mushroom liquid through a fine meshed strainer, and saved it for later use (I put it in the freezer, and will possibly use it a mushroom soup?).  I tasted the mushrooms and they needed a little bit of something, so I sautéed them with a generous pat of butter (about 2 Tbsp) and a pinch of salt.  They didn't release much water, so I just sautéed them for a few minutes, until they tasted nice but were also still moist but not wet.

The salumi is from Olympic Provisions.  We made two pizzas; the first was half mushroom and half salumi, and the second had both ingredients all over.  The first pizza was nice, but it was slightly lacking something--the salumi needed to be combined with the mushrooms.  We loved the second pizza with the mix of salumi and mushrooms; this was a great pizza and one that we will make again.  The second pizza was William's favorite.  I liked mine with red pepper flakes!