Saturday, September 26, 2009

Friday Night is Pizza Night

I promised several people, eons ago, to give them my pizza recipe, but somehow never got around to it. So here is my recipe for the dish we eat most often at our place. It is THE meal to have on a Friday night, but also what I throw together if I have to feed more than four adults at short notice (since making two is hardly any more taxing than making one). I always have these ingredients on hand: Canned artichokes, bell peppers, shredded mozzarella, frozen spinach, tinned tomatoes, which makes this an easy dish to put together. The secret is in the preparation of the dough.

To make the dough mix these dry ingredients in a bowl:
250 grams of flour (sometimes I use tipo 00, sometimes I use spelt. Anything goes.)
3 tsp fresh yeast
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar

Add:
1.5 deciliters warm water
dollop olive oil

- Mix well, before kneading gently with a sprinkling of corn flour on the table. Let rise for an hour in an oiled bowl.
- When the dough has risen, I dump it on a big piece of baking paper, and working from the middle and out, use my fingers to spread it out until it's roughly the size of the baking sheet. May take a little practice, so just use your roller if you need it.
- Then, dump one can of chopped tomatoes on the raw dough, smooth it out with a spatula and sprinkle salt on top.
- Bake for about 20 minutes in a very hot oven (about 250 Celsius).
- When the tomato has a thickened appearance, and the crust sounds a little bit hollow, take it out of the oven and add your additional ingredients.

I use:
- sliced onion
- chopped, canned artichokes
- sliced bell peppers
- thawed frozen spinach, fried in a little oil, with garlic
- sliced black olives
- shredded mozzarella
- occasionally, I finely slice chorizo sausage as pepperoni.

This is all negotiable though, the main point of this pizza being that you prebake the dough with the canned tomatoes. After that - it's a free for all.

2 comments:

Elijah Shannon said...

THIS LOOKS BRILLIANT! Basically, whenever I read either of your blogs I want to live in CPH. Now I want to move there so I can eat your pizza. I know, I know, the whole point is that I can now make it here in San Francisco! And I will! But it would be much more fun to share with you and Mikael and having the kids running around...sounds like a perfect evening to me.

P.S. I'm going to have to either get metric measuring instruments or figure out how to translate...also, have you tried this with whole wheat flour?

Anonymous said...

Well, you've had it, so you should know!

To the right, I have a link called "convert me". It's the perfect converter, because it converts even different kinds of foodstuffs in volume, quantity etc. I always use whole spelt flour. Though when kneading I do add corn meal to the mix for a little crunch.