Fried pizza!

I’ve been enjoying Jamie Oliver’s new cookbook, Jamie at Home, and I give it two thumbs up, especially if you’re a gardener. It’s a beautiful cookbook with lots of full page color pix and page after page of tips on how to grow the difficult stuff, like asparagus or mushrooms.

The pizza dough and subsequent preparation were the easy steps. Jamie’s “quickest tomato sauce” was the real bitch, because I don’t enjoy pushing tomatoes through a sieve (and cleaning the sieve afterward wasn’t much fun, either). This recipe produces an intensely tomatoey sauce, though, almost like straight tomato paste, but tastier of course. I’m sure you could substitute the pizza sauce of your choice, but for the record, here’s my scaled-down version of Jamie’s recipe.

olive oil
about a dozen leaves of fresh basil
one 28 ounce can of stewed tomatoes
salt and ground black pepper
3 cloves of garlic, peeled

In a non-stick frying pan, add some olive oil and then the garlic, thinly sliced. When the garlic begins to turn color, add the tomatoes, basil, salt and pepper. When it comes to a boil, strain the sauce through a sieve into a bowl, and press the tomatoes through the sieve using the back of a wooden spoon. Be sure to scrape the “tomato mush” off the far side of the sieve. Return the sieved mixture back to the frying pan and cook it down until you have something that looks about right for pizza sauce.

For the pizza dough, I cut Jamie’s recipe in half and came up with the following. He calls for “strong white bread flour” whatever that is, and mixes it with some semolina, but I used bread flour and it worked just fine.

3.5 cups of flour
1/2 tablespoon of salt (he calls for sea salt)
1/2 tablespoon, heaping, of yeast
1/2 tablespoon brown sugar (he calls for raw sugar, whatever that is)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1.25 cups lukewarm water

Jamie gives a rather tedious recipe for working the liquids into the flour. I threw everything into my Kitchenaid with the dough hook and I let her rip. A few minutes later, I had a nice dough ball. I put it into an oiled bowl, flipped it over to oil it all around, and covered with plastic wrap. Popped it into the garage which in Bakersfield is always a warm place for letting your dough raise. Gave it a good hour for the yeast to do its thing.

I should note that I do indeed have sea salt, so I put my half tablespoon into my spice grinder, which lately has been used to grind fennel seed. Nice flavor addition to pizza dough, in my opinion.

The rest of this is easy as can be. Divide the dough into six balls, roll each one out on a floured board to about a six-inch diameter, and fry each one 30-60 sec per side until a bit golden. I used a combination of butter and olive oil. Top with tomato sauce and other goodies, and finish under a hot hot broiler.

I used tomato sauce, caramelized onions, prosciutto, fresh basil, and mozzarella cheese. Jamie’s recipe calls for buffalo mozzarella, halved cherry tomatoes, fresh basil and some dried oregano. Obviously you can do whatever you like for the toppings.

These were big enough that one for each of us was a pretty full meal, and I have three leftover mini-pizzas (just the rolled-out dough) that I’ll fry up tonight to accompany my dinner (chicken seekh kebabs). I wish I had more leftover caramelized onions,as then I could make a sort of onion kulcha with my leftover dough.

Enjoy!

D.

Walnut, October 10, 2010. Category: Food.

About Walnut

View all posts by Walnut