Sunday, February 12, 2012

Fun with Pizza

Once before I had some friends over for a wii night and solved the problem of feeding them by making individual pizzas (base, sauce and cheese) and letting them put their own topping from a selection in little bowls. It worked really well. This was over 4 years ago and the last time I made pizza. It has been way too long. This time a load of lads turned up to watch the match and pizza was perfect especially as Simon and I had been talking about having pizza again.

 Dad makes pizza all the time. He make a thick base with a similar tomato sauce to mine except that he uses mainly oregano whereas I use basil. He also uses edam instead of mozzarella and it give a very flavourful pizza that is fantastic cold. Mam has a few photos of pizzas he's made over the years and you can see the recipe evolving which is really interesting.

I never understood the Italian aversion to pineapple on pizza until now. Dad's oregano based sauce and pizzeria's rather thin and flavourless sauces are fine with pineapple (it actually work great with the saltiness of the edam). My basil based sauce clashed rather unpleasantly with pineapple but hey it's all about experimenting.

The base was made in me breadmaker. While we're on the topic I cannot recommend a breadmaker enough. If you are able to make your own bread by hand that's fantastic but many people don't have the time or indeed the inclination. Personally I've grown up with homemade bread and it's one of the things I missed the most when I moved out of my parent's. They are not that expensive and definitely pay for themselves in no time (though there is the risk that you'll eat a half kilo of bread everyday). The bread does not keep for that long (no preservatives) but it's great toasted and perfect for bruschetta.

Anyway I made the dough following the recipe in the breadmaker booklet but increasing the quantity of flour to 4 cups and that made enough for 3 large pizzas. I put mixed herbs in the dough.

You can use however much of whatever herbs you want. You can also add garlic (dad always does and it's great) but I wanted to make it really tomatoey.

For the sauce I used:

  • 2 largish onions
  • 2 tins of chopped tomatoes
  • 2 tsp of dried mixed herb
  • 2 tsp of dried basil (remember that the oils in basil are quite volatile and dried basil does not have as much flavour as fresh but it is the other way around for most herbs)
  • a generous squeeze of tomato puree
  • salt and pepper
Sweat the onions in olive oil then add everything else (give the tomato tins a rinse with a bit of water and through that in too). Simmer the sauce for a while (about 15 mins).

Roll out the dough to your preferred thickness and spread with the tomato sauce. 

I used slices of mozzarella balls (Aldi and Lidl both have very affordable ones) for the cheese topping. I had a range of toppings in bowl and Simon and Karl topped the pizzas for me (we totally overloaded the pizza but they were delicious).
  • ham
  • chicken
  • sweetcorn
  • red and green peppers
  • onions
  • pineapple
  • chorizo
  • jalapenos
  • bacon bits (also Aldi/Lidle)
And we baked them at 200 degrees Celsius for about 25 mins (check after 20).



For the first pizza we used bacon, chicken, peppers and onions with sweetcorn on one side (Simon hates it) and drizzled it with BBQ sauce.



For the second we used chorizo and onions with jalapenos on one side (they are a bit too hot for me).



For the third and final one we used onions, peppers and ham with sweetcorn on one half and pineapple on the other (Karl hates pineapple).





1 comment:

Tereza {Drastic Plastic} said...

I love homemade pizza, the best pizza in the world.

You have a really cool blog here. Do you want to follow each other, I would love that.
Tereza
http://drastic-plastic-fantastic-plastic.blogspot.com/