Over the last year I've become quite proficient at making home made pizzas, if I may say so myself. My favourite kind of pizza is thin base wood oven baked, but of course I don't have a wood-burning oven at home. So I purchased a pizza stone and I use the technique of getting this stone as hot as my oven will allow before tossing the pizza onto it, and letting it cook in five minutes flat.
This technique is absolutely incredible. You get a really nice crispy base, and the toppings cook and crisp up just perfectly.
Of course the pizza stone doesn't do all the work. Just like with my breads, I put a lot of effort into the pizza dough. It's all about the way you put the ingredients together, first adding the basic recipe of flour, salt, yeast, oil and cold water and, as the dough firms up, slowly adding dribbles of olive to help bind it together and develop the gluten. I know how to knead the hell out of a dough, but why bother when I have the Kenwood to hand? So I let that dough hook knead and knead my dough, for about half an hour, adding more oil every time it looks a bit dry. Annoying that oil is so expensive, cos I sure get through it quickly!! Anyway, once the dough has been kneaded to perfection, I give it a good three hours at least to rise and let that gluten develop. And that, my friends, is the trick to dough!!
So back to the point of this story. The other day, boyfriend asked me to make pizza on Sunday, and he also asked to allow him into my kitchen to act as sous chef, and basically learn the trick to such tasty pizza. Turns out I like teaching boyfriend things like that, because I can also use it as an excuse to make him fetch, carry and put things away around the kitchen. Like a sous chef!!!
Turns out boyfriend only actually wanted to watch me make the dough, and wasn't much interested in helping me prepare toppings and stuff. I was ok with that though - it's a small kitchen and frankly I enjoy being in there by myself, with an episode of Pretty Little Liars playing on my tablet. Nothing better!!
Moving onto toppings. I happened to have some leftover pork and also uncooked Maltese sausage in the fridge. I decided to make a BBQ pork pizza, and a maltese sausage pizza. So the toppings were as follows:
BBQ pork:
chopped pork, marinated in a mixture of BBQ sauce, honey and worcestershire sauce
chopped yellow peppers
chopped onion
grated cheddar cheese
Maltese sausage:
chopped sausage
capers
green olives
grated gbejna
chopped onion
chilli pepper
And of course, under all these toppings goes my home made tomato sauce. I always wing this a little, but this time it contained fresh chopped baby plum tomatoes, tomato concentrate, olive oil, garlic, worcestershire sauce, parsley, salt, pepper, and a lot of love!!! It comes delicious.
I think you all know how the rest of this process goes. Roll out the dough, add tomato sauce, toppings, a drizzle of oil and cheese. Slide it onto the baking hot pizza stone and *voila!!* home made pizza cooked in five minutes. And delicious!!! Check out the piccies below...
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| BBQ pork pizza |
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| Maltese sausage pizza |
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