Any Way You Slice It | Summer Tomato Recipes

In the current season of Weekends with Yankee, we visit the headquarters of the King Arthur Baking Company in Norwich, Vermont. If you’ve never been, imagine a mini college campus completely devoted to baking, with classrooms, a café, and a store stocked with everything from pizza ovens to baking mixes. Now imagine visiting that campus on a beautiful sunny day, beginning with a stop for fresh vegetables and herbs from the farm just down the road and ending with pizza fresh out of the oven.

My longtime friend Jessica Battilana writes and edits cookbooks at King Arthur, including her team’s latest, The Book of Pizza. For our TV segment, she taught me the secret of making Detroit-style pizza, the thick-crust pie baked in a rectangular pan and topped with a glorious abundance of cheese—and even sprinkled down the sides of the crust, where it crisps and caramelizes while baking. This pizza style emerged in the 1940s at Buddy’s Rendezvous in Detroit, Michigan, where it was baked in steel pans like the ones used to hold small parts at nearby auto plants.

Making pizza dough is easy, but I know that many people prefer to buy it at the supermarket, so I developed the following cheese-and-tomato pie with that in mind. (You can always make it with your favorite homemade dough, though.)

For the second recipe, inspired by Vermont’s fresh produce (the farm we visited is called Crossroad Farm), I developed a crispy chickpea, feta, and tomato salad that’s quick and simple to make but hearty enough for a summer meal. If you’ve never roasted chickpeas before, prepare to be delighted. When dried well before roasting, they come out nutty and crunchy, the perfect match for the season’s sweet tomatoes.

Get the Recipes:
Weeknight Detroit-Style Tomato Pie
Tomato, Crispy Chickpea & Feta Salad with Garlic-Honey Vinaigrette

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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