57. Pizza
Who doesn’t love pizza?
With the extra time of being at home with lockdown, and not having to commute, this has become a fairly staple midweek meal in our house. The dough needs an hour to rise and then it cooks in 10-15 minutes. It’s just so tasty and I can’t wait to have this again.
Makes 2 thin pizzas.
Ingredients
For the dough:
250g plain flour or bread flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 a 7g dried yeast sachet
1 tsp caster sugar
1 tbsp olive oil
For the tomato sauce:
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 small onion, finely diced
1 garlic clove
400g can chopped tomatoes
1 1/2 tbsp tomato puree
1 bay leaf
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tsp sugar
some fresh basil
For the toppings:
Dealer’s choice!
Method
First make the pizza dough. Sieve the flour and salt into a mixing bowl, or an electric mixer with a dough hook. Make a well in the middle.
Add the yeast, sugar and oil to a jug of lukewarm 160ml water, and mix to hydrate the yeast. Pour this into the well and mix until fully incorporated as a dough. Knead either by hand on a lightly floured surface or with the electric mixer with a dough hook attachment until smooth and elastic. If using an electric mixer, this should take around 7-8 minutes, or about 10-12 minutes by hand.
Place the ball of dough into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with a clean tea towel. Leave to rise for an hour until doubled in size.
In the meantime make the pizza sauce, using this BBC Good Food Recipe. I halved the quantities so there wasn’t too much.
Once the dough has risen, preheat the oven to 220C and lightly flour two baking trays
Lightly dust a surface with flour and roll out half the dough into a thin circle that is about as large as your tray will allow. Transfer to the tray and top with pizza sauce and toppings of your choice. (I had goats cheese, anchovies and capers.) Repeat with the other half of the dough.
Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes depending on how thin you have managed to roll your dough. Allow to cool for 2 minutes before slicing and serving or risk burning your mouth like somebody did here…
