Homemade pizza

09 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by Zoli in bread, italian, kids, pizza sauce, quick and awesome, Sauces, the basics, tomato sauce, Vegetarian

Tags

delia smith, easy pizza recipe, homemade pizza dough, ricotta, vegetarian dinner

If you’re daunted by homemade pizza, don’t be. It takes about 15 min to prepare the dough, an hour to rise while you do something else and another 15 min to cook. If you are home by 6, you can eat by 7:30. It’s cheap and you didn’t have to go anywhere.
Not having a pizza stone or a brick oven fireplace, this is my favorite pizza dough recipe (from Delia Smith’s ‘How to Cook Book One’):

Ingredients
makes 2 pizzas
350g plain or bread flour
8 fl oz of hot water (boil the kettle and mix with cold purified water to get the right temp)
2 tsp dried active yeast
1 tsp sugar
2 tbs olive oil
1 tsp salt

Quick garlicky tomato sauce
3-4 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
1 tin of plum tomatoes or 1/2 a large tin
olive oil
fresh or dried basil
salt and pepper
1 tsp sugar
dash rice vinegar (optional)

1) Mix dry ingredients together. Drizzle the olive oil and mix again.
2) Add the water and mix with a wooden spoon till roughly combined.
3) Dump on a clean work surface and knead for a few minutes until the dough becomes a soft squishy ball. It’s ok if at first it isn’t all sticking together. You shouldn’t need to add any extra flour to your work surface.
4) Place in an oiled bowl and cover tightly. If the covering is loose, the dough will develop a ‘skin’. Keep in a warm place for an hour until about doubled in size. An option is to warm the oven slightly, then turn off the heat and put the dough in there.
– While it is rising, make a quick sauce or use a homemade sauce you made earlier.
– Heat up olive oil in a sauce pot and gently fry the garlic for a few seconds.
– Add in the tomatoes and seasoning. Use a potato masher to break up the tomatoes.
– Cover with a lid and simmer on a medium heat for about 15-20 minutes.
– Blitz with a handheld blender.
– Taste and adjust seasoning.
5) Check on the dough after an hour. If it has risen nicely, Punch down, then gently knead again and cut in two.
6) Flour the work surface and then roll the dough out into the shape of your pan (circle or rectangle).
7) The best technique is to roll the pizza dough into a small circle shape and then a) pick up the small circle of dough, hanging on to the very edge so that the weight of the dough stretches itself. b) Move along all the outer edge with your fingers, letting the dough stretch out all sides. This is easier than flipping it up into the air! c) Place the dough back onto the work surface and roll out as big as you like. The dough should now be smooth and pliant. I recommend rolling out quite thin for a thin crispy pizza. Repeat with the other half of dough.
8) Sprinkle baking trays with corn meal to keep the pizza from sticking during baking. No need to use oil.
9) Bake on a high heat (400F) on the upper racks for about 10-15 minutes.

The kids had a split tomato-cheese with ricotta-cheese pizza and we had green chard, ricotta and kalamata olive

Fresh tomato sauce

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by Zoli in italian, kids, pasta sauce, pizza sauce, the basics, tomato sauce, Vegetarian

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

basic red sauce, farmers market, fresh tomatoes, pasta sauce, pizza sauce, tomato sauce, tomatoes

My husband brought home a crate–a CRATE–of tomatoes from the farmers market. He purchased the lot for $10 but it was obvious the low price was due to their undeniably, indubitably overripe condition. What to do but make a tomato sauce? As I’ve written before, yummy and quick tomato sauce from a can of plum tomatoes will always suffice, but there is a differently delicious taste to be had with fresh sauce. And it’s not like it’s that much harder. You don’t need to watch it or nurture it or care for it in any way. You just need to be home.

What you will need:

Lots of tomatoes
1 or 2 onions (depending on how many tomatoes)
3-6 garlic cloves, crushed or sliced
Olive oil
splash of vinegar or wine
tbs sugar (optional)
fresh or dried basil
salt and pepper to taste
extra virgin olive oil to finish

1. Peel, slice and chop an onion, or two onions if you are using as many tomatoes as I did. I used one very large onion for about 15 or 20 tomatoes. Some of my tomatoes had mold growing where they had split. I chopped that part off and used the rest.
Disclaimer! It is best to boil the tomatoes for a few seconds in order to peel them, and it is probably best to discard the pulp and seeds. Not my style though. Way too finicky for a weekday. In my sauce, it ALL goes in.
2. Smash a few plump garlic cloves with the flat of your knife and take off the peel. No need to chop what shall disintegrate after four hours of cooking.
3. Heat up a good glug of olive oil and gently fry the onion and garlic ‘for a spell’. When soft and translucent add in the mountain of tomatoes. Bring to a boil and then turn down to simmer.
4. Cook and cook and cook.
5. When things are beginning to resemble a tomato soup, add in the seasoning.
Depending on the kind of and flavor of tomatoes you may not need vinegar or wine for the tang, or sugar for the sweetness. I started with the basil and salt and pepper, then came back a half hour later, tasted and reassessed. A tbs of red wine vinegar went in, along with a tbs of sugar. After a little more simmering I could have eaten this stuff on its own. Just delicious.
But keep on cooking. You want the sauce to reduce as much as possible and get richer and richer. After about four hours I blitzed it with a hand-held blender, added a glug of extra virgin olive oil, and was pretty much done. I now have about 8 jars of sauce–most of them in my freezer. We’ve had it on pasta, roasted mushrooms, eggplant and pizza so far.