April in New York. Cool grey days of drizzle and rain showers, interspersed with gloriously sunshiny warm days when all seems right with the world. New Yorkers celebrate – sidewalk restaurants and cafes fill with people soaking in the sunshine, there are impromptu get togethers in the parks, people are out everywhere rejoicing in being able to be outside after the months of hibernation. It’s one of my favorite times of the year. Life is peeking out of the earth, the birds are all excited in their bright shiny new feathers, the neighborhood tree-lined streets are sheathed in gorgeous white and pink blossoms. And everywhere you look, there seem to be daffodils. And I’m reminded of the William Wordsworth poem from my childhood, which probably every schoolchild was forced to learn, which I quite like now to be honest, for the lovely imagery of nature it conjures:

…I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

…Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

These golden yellow daffodils inspired me to make one of my favorite food items, potato pizza. I know, it sounds odd – daffodils, poetry, and… potato pizza? The brain works in mysterious ways. Anyway… The freshly baked warm thin crunchy bread, coated with delicate layers of pale golden yellow potato slices and onions crisping and curling at the edges, drizzled with olive oil, sea salt and fresh green rosemary – is so simple and comforting, light and just right. It’s rustic elegance.

I’d discovered potato pizza soon after I moved to New York. Until then I’d never conceived that something like it could exist. I remember I was at a party at one of my friend’s places. I was in grad school, had just arrived in NYC a few months before that, after spending my undergrad years in the Boston area. My friend was chic and stylish, and we had hit it off as soon as we met. She had gotten food from a place called Sullivan Street Bakery, and one of the items was potato pizza. One bite of it and I was in heaven. How was it that no one had ever thought of it?

After some years of addictively eating Sullivan Street Bakery’s pizza (which was conveniently located in Soho, a few blocks from my apartment), I discovered that this kind of a simple light pizza was apparently common in northern Italy, in Rome. It’s just that no one in the U.S. seemed to be making it, other than Sullivan Street Bakery.

A few years ago, I decided to try to make it myself. It was pretty simple looking, it couldn’t be that hard. Initially, I used to buy frozen pizza dough from the store, and it turned out quite tasty actually. Since then, once I started baking my own bread, I’ve been making the pizza dough from scratch. So much tastier, and super easy. Enormously satisfying too, to watch the dough rise and double in size, to knead and stretch and pull the dough.

This recipe, inspired by Sullivan Street Bakery’s pizza, is very simple. You have to plan ahead a little bit, allow a couple of hours for the dough to rise before you can bake the pizza. But while the dough is rising, you can go around doing whatever you need to or want to with your day. So I spent 5 minutes preparing the dough, let it sit and rise. I then sliced the potatoes, submerged them in water so they would stay that beautiful yellow color (and not turn red); also soaking the potato slices in salted water helps soften them. Then I went for a run.

When I came back, the dough had risen; all I had to do was stretch out the dough (which is actually a fun process), assemble the potato and toppings, and stick it in the oven. It was all ready when I got out of the shower. The potato, thin crust dough, onion and rosemary smelled heavenly, and the pizza looked really good too! And it tasted fantastic. We had it with chilled white wine (albariño is perfect with it). I like munching on the leftovers the next day. While it’s delicious straight out of the oven, it addictive at room temperature too (in fact, that’s how they serve it at Dean & Deluca’s in Soho).