Onboard Cooking: Trail Pizza (No, not that kind)

This was a wonderful culinary side trip, and we thought we’d share it with you. Near where we are moored on Middle River, just a bit north of Baltimore Md, is the lovely little nature center at Marshy Point. We’ve come to love Marshy Point. It has some great hiking trails, wonderful views of the water, and an astonishingly active nature center full of exhibits, a whole range of programs and workshops, a great staff, and an entertaining host of rescued critters including ducks, chickens, and a turkey, that live at the center.

One of the coolest programs we hit there recently involved foraging for, making, and wood firing pizzas using wild found toppings.

No one said getting Cattail tuber was easy

Not even for John, who is presumably used to this. Mucky stuff.

John, one of the excellent staff there, first took us on a walking tour of the trails and cultivation sites to collect ingredients. Some of the stuff local to here included cattail root (which grows near you. No, seriously, I don’t think there’s anywhere on the planet where it DOESN’T grow that isn’t permafrost or outright desert), wild carrot (also known as Queen Ann’s Lace), dandelion leaf and root, wild onion, and the star of the show this afternoon, Jerusalem Artichoke (also called Sunchoke. . . .actually the name is a total misnomer. It’s not an artichoke and has nothing whatsoever to do with Jerusalem. The plant is a sunflower relative, and early Italian settlers to the New World called it girasole, Italian for sunflower. The English, typically, mispronounced it. ).

Jerusalem Artichoke and a bit of wild carrot

We brought our booty back to the center and constructed a couple of pizzas from provided pizza dough and tomato sauce and cheese, then off to the Center’s outdoor earthen oven—made from locally dug clay— to fire them up.

Ready to go

If you’re not familiar with wood fired earthen ovens, these things are HOT.

Eat your heart out, Surface of Venus

Temperatures nearing 900F are possible, and they retain heat for hours. There’s no chimney, no grate, no nothing. You build the fire in the center of the oven, and when it’s hot, you rake the coals to the side, use a wet mop of strips of cloth to swab out the ashes, hit the center with a bit of corn meal (which prevents sticking and lets you know if the oven is hot enough/too hot.

Move the coals

swab the oven floor

In they go.

If it burns immediately, you need to cool things off a bit), and then slide the pizzas off of the peel and onto the floor of the oven. At those temperatures, it only takes a couple of minutes.

All done

Yeah, I know it's too hot, I'm slicing it anyway.

The results were surprisingly delicious (The turkey and a couple of the chickens hung out just to see if maybe we dropped something. They were not disappointed.).