Little City's Sausages

Last week we visited friends in Carmel Valley who have a wood-fired pizza oven in the back yard. Wanting to bring some fixings, I picked up some of the housemade Italian sausage with fennel and the hotter Calabrese from Little City Market in North Beach.

Saturday night we created all manner of pizzas for our dinner out on the deck. Yet, my favorite was the breakfast pizza Sunday morning with sausage, carmelized onion, and a whole egg cracked on it. It's done when the white sets and the top of the yolk just starts to develop a cooked spot or two. The nubs of Calabrese are the redder pieces on the right side and the mild Italian is on the left. The sausage was partially cooked in a skillet before it went on the dough and in the oven.

The runny yolk married with the sausage and onions moistening the crust was just awesome.

Link: http://www.chowhound.com/topics/show/19817#66997

Image: http://home.earthlink.net/~melainewon...

What I would not give for a pizza - especially at this moment - with sausage and egg, thus combining in one fell swoop multiple favorite food items. Melanie, it's times like this that your food pictures are just cruel. (g)

Can't help you at this very moment, but when you're in the City next, try Pizzetta 211. The idea for this breakfast pizza came from their ham and egg version.

The difficult part was trying to share it. There's not a neat way to cut this into four slices and get enough yolk on each. The next iteration had two eggs on it, but by the time the larger amount of egg had cooked sufficiently, this one was pretty crispy.

We ran out of pizza dough (this was the leftovers from Saturday's dinner) before we could test our concept for v. 3. But I'll describe it anyway in case someone wants to try it. Our idea was to make a bigger diameter pizza and use two or three eggs. The eggs would be separated and contained by dams of sausage marking off each serving portion. (g)

It was way fun to stick stuff in the oven to see what would happen. We cooked up some great thick cut bacon putting it in a cast iron skillet. It was weird that it cooked and browned on the top first, then we turned it over to cook the other side.

More of our breakfast handiwork - on the left are apricot halves roasted with a bit of butter and brown sugar. In the 700 degree oven, the very ripe apricots quickly turn to a jelly-like consistency. The right shows a cinnamon apple with goat cheese pizza.

Image: http://home.earthlink.net/~melainewon...

I would recommend their polenta sausages. You need to heat them slowly so they do not split, but they are awesome.

Also, I used to get sausages there made with balsamic vinegar.

Getting the recipes is not easy.....

Thanks, I'll try those next. I also noticed some opaque plastic-wrapped packages of sausage in the case imported from Italy, don't recall the name - wonder if anyone has tried those?