Tag Archives: pizza

Friday food links – 19 Feb 2016 – and a homemade pizza recipe

Gorgeous but freezing run this morning

It has been a real where-did-the-week-go week.  My kitchen saviours have been the freezer and the oven timer. From the freezer came a container of Chinese-flavoured braised pork, which made the most of a vegetable fried rice. Also from the freezer, I dredged up a container of beef stew, which was mostly mushrooms and shallots in rich gravy. Some boiled potatoes and wilted cabbage were all that was needed there. And then Tuesday was a pasta bake with cheese sauce, some scraps of broccoli, spinach and spring onion and pancetta, which also did duty as leftovers last night. I made the sauce and cooked the pasta and veg in the afternoon when E was occupied, and put it into the oven with the timer set so it switched on with a delay, and was ready 15 minutes before we were sitting down to eat.

Recipes:

  • Homemade pizza – see recipe below
  • Leek and potato soup in the Thermomix
  • Two ingredient microwave chocolate pudding – from Stephen Harris (a bit dark when made with 70% chocolate, but would be good with something milder).
  • Slow cooker caramelised onions – from Slow Cooked

Without a recipe:

  • Beef stew from the freezer, with boiled potatoes and savoy cabbage
  • Fried rice with chinese pork
  • Cheesy pasta bake with pancetta, broccoli, spinach and spring onion.
  • Fish and oven chips

Reading:

Recipe: Homemade Pizza

Homemade pizza

I have tried any number of ways of making pizza at home, but my oven doesn’t really get anything like hot enough to attempt to replicate a real pizza oven, so I’ve gradually adjusted to the idea that homemade pizza is rather like oven chips – still good, but not what you’d get in a restaurant.

This means I have come around to a process that is as low effort as possible, but still produces something tasty with a crust that’s fairly thin and crisp on the edges and base. This is largely inspired by Smitten Kitchen’s approach in her cookbook.

The most important step is stretching the dough. Each time you stretch and work the gluten, it gets springy and wants to contract back. So stretching and shaping is best done in gradual stages, letting the dough relax in between. This makes it easier to get the dough really big and thin.

The other trick is to do the stretching on the baking sheet you use to bake it. You will lose something by not putting it directly onto a hot surface, but I think that’s outweighed by the ease of not having to slide the dough around.

 

Dough:

  • 300g strong white flour
  • 1 tsp dried yeast
  • 1 tsp sea salt
  • 180g water
  • 1 tbsp olive oil

Toppings:

  • small box of passata
  • 1 packet pre-grated mozzarella
  • 1 pack fresh mozzarella
  • toppings

Prepare the dough a couple of hours before you want to have dinner. Alternatively, you can prepare it the night before, and put it in the fridge. In that case, it helps to get it out of the fridge a bit before you want to bake with it.

Weigh out the flour and add the yeast and salt. Mix briefly together, and then add the water and oil. Stir everything together, or use a mixer with a dough hook.

Then knead everything for about 5 minutes, either by hand or in the mixer. Try not to add any extra flour. You can also use a food processor, with brief pulses.

Put the dough into an oiled bowl and cover with cling film. Leave at room temperature to rise (it doesn’t need to be somewhere warm).

When you are ready to bake, preheat the oven to 250C or as hot as you can get it – my highest temperature is 220C in a fan oven.

Divide the dough into two pieces, and shape into balls. Pat the dough out into a rough rectangle or oval, or use a rolling pin. Do this in stages, leaving the dough to rest for at least 5 minutes under a tea towel before trying to roll or stretch the dough again. This helps to get it really thin without breaking it or having it spring back.

Sprinkle a large baking sheet with cornmeal/polenta or semolina, or line it with baking parchment. Put the dough onto the sheet, and stretch the edges again to fill the sheet as much as you can.

Top the pizza with passata or tomato sauce, cheese and any other toppings. Bake at 220C for 10 minutes, until the edges are lightly browned, and the cheese is melted and bubbling.

Leave to stand for a couple of minutes before cutting into pieces.

Friday food links – 22 Jan 2016

Lunch: Sunday vat of soup with cooked chicken added, leftover Zuni bread salad with extra radicchio and crumbled Lancashire cheese #leftovers

I’ve been trying out a Hello Fresh box this week. [disclosure: I haven’t been given anything for free by Hello Fresh, or been approached by them to write this post. I don’t do that sort of thing here.] If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid their marketing bombardment, they are a recipe box delivery company. You get three recipes delivered each week, along with all the ingredients to make them, in just the right quantities. This means everything from fresh prawns to leeks to sachets of balsamic vinegar and tiny bottles of oil. The only things missing from my box were salt, pepper and vegetable oil.

I’m still not convinced by this model, especially for already competent cooks, but I will write another post when I’ve thought about it some more. My first impressions are that it is useful to have the decisions about which recipes to make made for you, and it’s also useful to have just enough to make the recipe and no more. For instance, one recipe came with a mini-block of feta. Normally, I would end up with half a packet unused, which would gradually go off in the fridge. But the recipes themselves tend to require more attention and steps than my usual weeknight fare.

Apart from those three recipes, the rest of the week was all about slow and patient cooking: salting chickens for roasting a day and a bit ahead of time; roasting a head of cauliflower for an hour on a weeknight; making a big pot of soup to last the week. For me, that’s a much more satisfying form of ‘easy’ cooking, and not much more time consuming.

Recipes:

  • At the weekend:
    • Zuni Chicken bread salad
    • Five O’Clock Apron apple flapjacks
    • Honeyed rye bread and a Sunday Vat of soup (sweet potato and butternut squash) from Anna Jones’ ‘A Modern Way to Cook’
    • Ham, cheese and leek scones from ‘The Violet Bakery Cookbook’
  • Three from Hello Fresh:
    • Firecracker prawns with Chinese leaf and rice
    • Butterflied chicken with leeks, feta and tomatoes
    • Steak stir fry with broccoli and noodles
  • Whole roasted cauliflower – from the New York Times. Served with meatballs (from the freezer) in tomato sauce.

Without a recipe:

  • Chicken, cheese and avocado quesadillas
  • Meatballs in tomato sauce

Reading:

Friday food links – 3 July 2015

Salad for dinner. Yes, it has chicken, bacon and egg in, but still a salad!

It has been a hot and sunny week in London, a heatwave in English-weather-speak. A taste of living in a different climate, and a chance to try out those holiday eating rhythms at home, or to pretend we live in the Hamptons, or Santa Monica, or Italy. Lots of tomatoes and cucumber. Watermelon. Avocado. Ice cream or lollies for desserts. Some grilled meat, but nothing needing the oven. For once, it’s a relief to relax into the wather, knowing that it’s not going away tomorrow, and to feel that the ice-cream stash in the freezer is justified (for once).

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Chopped cucumber and tomato salad
  • Tacos with black beans, leftover pulled pork and avocado
  • Meatballs (from the freezer) with tomato sauce over pasta
  • A big Cobb salad, or something approximating it (see photo above)

Reading:

Fast food: pizza

I am not a fan of Domino’s pizza (unlike my husband) and will go to some lengths to avoid it. So when I feel the urge for pizza at the end of a hot day, and have some energy in reserve, I go ahead and make  it at home. The only tiresome part about this is the production line nature of it – I tend to make small ones, which means a tantalising wait between mouthfuls as we wait for the next one to bake.

Tomato sauce:

  • 1 can tinned tomatoes
  • 1/2 jar passata
  • 1 garlic clove, sliced
  • 1 tsp olive oil
  • 15g butter
  • 1 tsp fresh thyme

This is loosely based on Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce recipe. Simply put everything in a saucepan together and simmer slowly for about 30 minutes. Make the dough first, and then pull this together while it rises.
Pizza dough

I have been using this recipe from a Guardian cutting for years. You can make it, put it into an oiled plastic bag in the fridge and just take portions out and bake pizzas all week long. Or you can take the leftover dough and shape it into rolls or foccacia and bake it as bread.

  • 500g strong white bread flour
  • 200 g/ml warm water
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 packet (7g) instant yeast

Put all the ingredients into a bowl and mix until there is a single shaggy mass. If this doesn’t happen, add more water until it does – if it’s too sticky, add a little more flour. Knead for a few minutes until the surface of the dough becomes very smooth. (I use my KitchenAid mixer with the dough hook for this – by hand is fine, or you can also use a food processor). Cover with a tea towel and leave to rise for about an hour (perhaps longer if it’s cold).

Divide the dough into anything between 4 and 8 pieces (depending on how large you like your pizza), and roll each piece into a little round ball. Set aside again, covered with a tea towel, for 15 or 20 minutes while you prepare the toppings (grate cheese, slice veg, etc.). Preheat the oven as high as you can get it, with a thick baking sheet in the bottom of the oven.

When you’re ready to go, remove one ball at a time, flour a worktop and roll out firmly with a rolling pin, picking the dough up and rotating it between rolls, to make sure it doesn’t stick. Try and get it as thin as you can. Spread with a spoonful of tomato sauce, your toppings and finish with salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil.

Use a flat baking sheet (or anything else heatproof without a rim), sprinkled with a little polenta, to slide the pizza into the hot oven and onto the pre-heated baking sheet. Bake for about 8 minutes, or until it looks ready.

Repeat with each subsequent ball of dough until you’re so full you can’t move. 🙂