Recipe Pizza

Recipe Pizza

• A simple, homemade pizza - all made from scratch.

• Please chose good ingredients (e.g. don't use cheap cheese) and you will have a pizza that is so much better than anything you can buy frozen.

• One of these 11 inch pizzas comes in at under 2 pounds

INGREDIENTS : FOR THE BASE
500g flour (plain flour, we are using yeast here!)
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons dried yeast
1/2 teaspoon sugar

FOR THE PIAZZAIOLA ( the tomato stuff to cover the base )
one onion
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 clove of garlic
1 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
1 teaspoon oregano
a couple of leafs of fresh basil
1/4 teaspoon of salt
a pinch of freshly ground pepper

TOPPINGS (per pizza) (use any cheese and topping you like, this is just an example)
one mozarella cheese (also nice: reggiano parmesan and medium cheddar)
2 slices of parma ham
2 slices of salami

Oven, pre-heating, temperature,

• The type of oven you will be using has a huge influence on the outcome of your pizza. The best oven you can use is the old electrical type oven where you can set the heat to only come from underneath - that is ideal for pizza. Gas and fan assisted electrical ovens aren't very good - you might end up with a soggy pizza with burned cheese on top.

• Oven temperature should be full blast - whatever oven you have. Make sure to pre-heat for quite a bit that you really have the maximum temperature that your oven get attain.

• I have a lovely Smeg cooker with two ovens - one fan assisted and the other one a "traditional" electric oven which I can set to only heat the underside of the oven which works great for pizza.

• Alternatively, you can use something like a Cobb Barbecue which also works well as all the heat comes from underneath.

PREPARATIONS :

Put the flour into a bowl

Mix the yeast with the sugar and 50ml of the lukewarm water and stir, let sit for 10 minutes until it develops a nice foam on top

 Add the olive oil and salt to the flour

 This is what the yeast will look like after 10 minutes. Now add the yeast to the flour, oil and salt and add the rest of the lukewarm water (250 ml). Mix with your hands and knead until you have a smooth dough 

which should look like this! If you have any left-over dough, you can easily freeze it - I always make a bit more and keep the rest in the freezer for a quick supper

 Cover the dough with a clean, dry dish towel and let it sit for an hour.

 In the meantime, prepare a simple pizzaiola - chop the onion and the garlic, fry in the olive oil, add the tomatoes and the spices. Let simmer for half an hour to reduce the moisture, take a blender to it and then let it cool down.

  This is what the dough will look like after it has risen. Now is the time to preheat your oven to full blast.

  Take 1/3 of the dough ...

 and spread it out into the pizza pan with your fingers. Let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes so it can rise again. If you want a very thin and crisp base, roll out the dough with a rolling pin instead of spreading it with your fingers.

Chop the mozarella.

 Chop up your toppings - I'm using ham and salami here.

 Spread the piazzaiola - best done by putting it into the middle and then moving the pan quickly back and forth.

Put on your toppings ...
Don't overdo it on the topping side - stick with 2 or 3 toppings and don't put on too much. An overloaded pizza isn't any good.

 and then put on the cheese. Put into the pre-heated oven for approx. 20 minutes. If you find that your cheese starts to burn before the pizza base is done, put the pizza into the oven without the cheese for 5 minutes and then add the cheese - this is a hint I got from on Dianne Wilson - thanks Dianne!

 20 minutes later - and look at that

 Here is quite a different pizza - no pizzaiola, and lots of different vegetables with a cheddar cheese topping. Just to prove the point, we will bake this one on a Cobb barbecue 

This is the result after 15 minutes under the closed lid - an incredibly crispy pizza - made on a barbecue! No idea if this will work on any other kind of barbecue but a Cobb - let me know if you succeed on another one.

HOW TO COOK HAMBURGERS :

Cooking Light Pizza

Cooking Light Pizza

• I absolutely love cooking. I try and home cook most nights of the week (as I do love eating out too!). If in need of recipes then Cooking Light Recipes are fantastic and we all know that the magazine is well illustrated, thoughtfully laid out and generally full of great information. But like any magazine they are a little pricey and I know I can’t always afford to pick a copy up. So where can you get free Cooking Light Recipes?

• Luckily for us… The Cooking Light website is laden with loads of awesome free recipes for us to try ourselves at home. The website is also laid out nicely and thoughtfully, very much like the magazine.

• You can find all sorts of recipes in many many types and for many budgets. There are even plenty of vegetarian recipes for people like me.

• One of my favorite recipes from the Cooking Light website is the Spinach and Ricotta Pizza. It’s veggie, pretty cheap and feels like a much more high end meal than say mac and cheese or beans on toast (as us English eat)!

• I do however make a few variations to this already awesome recipe. Here is the Cooking Light

INGREDIENTS :
1 portion Homemade Pizza Dough
Cooking spray
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
3/4 cup New York–Style Pizza Sauce
2 tablespoons grated fresh Parmesan cheese
1 1/2 cups loosely packed baby spinach leaves
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 1/4 cups (5 ounces) shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese
1/3 cup part-skim ricotta cheese
2 plum tomatoes, cored and thinly sliced

PREPARATIONS :

• Firstly I use my own pizza base recipe that can be found here: Quick Flat Bread.

• Then I use my own homemade tomato sauce but I simmer it for a little longer to thicken it up. Sometimes I blend it smooth sometimes I leave it chunky. This recipe can be found here: Spaghetti Sauce Recipe.

• It’s really easy to make and can varied depending on what you have in the fridge.

• They also have some other great recipes including burritos, pastas, salads and much much more. You can search here: Cooking Light Recipes.

• So… have you made any of these meals or snacks using recipes found either in the Cooking Light magazine or website? As we all know they are almost always of the highest quality and if you make them as intended you will rarely get bad results…. If you do on any recipes I would love to know. I love making Pizza, Pasta, Curry, Mexican Food of all sorts and although I steer clear of them, I love the dessert recipes too. Especially chocolate based ones!

• You may also be interested in another recent post of ours about Pampered Chef Recipes, another fantastic cooking and recipe resource.

HOW TO COOK HAMBURGERS :

Cook's Illustrated Pizza

Cook's Illustrated Pizza

• Can you make better-than-takeout deep-dish pizza at home, in a reasonable amount of time?

The Problem

• We began our quest for a good, homemade deep-dish pizza because most of the deep-dish pizzas to be had at restaurants or from takeout services simply aren't that good. Many of them, unfortunately, are oily disks of tasteless, soggy, heavy dough, overwhelmed by even greasier toppings.

The Goal

• Because these pizzas are 75 percent crust, we wanted a recipe that would give center stage to a crust that was really good: rich-tasting, slightly chewy, and golden brown. We also wanted a recipe the home cook could produce in a moderate amount of time. We didn't want anyone wishing they'd gone for the greasy takeout version instead just to save time.

The Solution

• The secret to a perfect crust came from an unlikely source: a potato. Also used in a recipe for focaccia dough that we liked, the potato contributed moisture as well as extra richness and sweetness to the dough. We cut down on the time required to ready the dough for baking by putting it in a barely warmed oven for the first rise. While the first rise usually takes an hour, this dough was ready to work with in only 35 minutes. Covering the pizza pan with oil before loading it with dough made for a densely caramelized crust that looked and tasted delicious. Finally, to keep the toppings from weighing down the crust and making it soggy, we precooked it for 15 minutes, giving it a chance to rise and firm up a bit. This practice ended up benefiting the toppings as well, which now had just enough time to heat through and melt or brown.

Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza Recipe

• Deep-dish pizza was born in Chicago, where it boasts a distinctively rich, flaky, biscuit-like crust. The problem? No pizzeria in Chicago would tell us how to make it.

The Problem

• Bad deep-dish pizzas are doughy and tasteless, while recipes for the good versions are staunchly protected by the people who make them.

The Goal

• We wanted a facsimile of the best of Chicago deep-dish pizzas: a thick crust with an airy, flaky inside, lightly crisp outside, and a rich taste that can hold its own under any kind of topping.

The Solution

• The recipes we came across in our research sounded an awful lot like classic pizza dough: Combine flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, and yeast in a large bowl, then add melted butter and water, transfer the ingredients to a stand mixer, and knead them into a dough. Allow the dough to rise, divide it in half, and let it rise again until doubled in size, then press the dough into a 9-inch round pan on a baking stone in a 500-degree oven. Our first impression when we followed these steps? Not bad. The butter flavor came through, and the cornmeal added a nice earthiness and crunch, but we wanted a crust with more flake and less chew. It occurred to us to try laminating. This baking term refers to the layering of butter and dough that creates ultra-flaky pastries through a sequence of rolling and folding. After melting part of the butter, we mixed it with the dough, allowed the dough to rise, and rolled it into a rectangle. We spread the remaining butter over the surface and rolled the dough into a cylinder to create layers of buttery dough. To amplify this effect, we then flattened the cylinder into a rectangle, divided it in half, and folded each half into thirds, like a business letter. There was just one small setback. All that handling caused the temperature of the dough to rise, so by the end of the process, the dough had warmed so much that almost all of the butter had melted, leading to a crust that was more tender and breadlike than flaky. The solution? Moving the dough into the refrigerator for its second rise so that any butter that had melted or gotten overly soft could firm up again. Our only additional tweak was adding oil to each pan to crisp the edges, which worked so well that we didn’t even need to use a pizza stone. With our crust all set, we considered the pizza’s other components. We favored freshly shredded mozzarella for its smooth texture and the way it formed a consistent barrier between dough and sauce. And we decided to use a thickened version of our Quick Tomato Sauce, which creates surprisingly complex flavor in a mere 15 minutes from canned crushed tomatoes. Spread over the cheese, this bright-tasting sauce won rave reviews from tasters.

HOW TO COOK HAMBURGERS :

Cook Pizza Dough

Cook Pizza Dough

• Ultimately, a good pizza results from the balanced union of a well-cooked crust and appropriately selected toppings. The crust can be thin and crisp, risen and light, or thick and chewy, depending on how the dough is. The toppings can range from a simple combination of coarse salt, fresh herbs, and olive oil, to a spicily sauced, sausage-studded, cheese-and-vegetable melange.

INGREDIENTS :
1 tablespoon dry yeast
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 2/3 cups warm water
2 tablespoons olive oil
7 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 cup whole-wheat or rye flour
1 tablespoon coarse salt or 2 teaspoons fine salt

PREPARATIONS :

• Proof the yeast for 5 to 10 minutes in 1 cup of warm water and a pinch of sugar, until the yeast dissolves and the liquid begins to appear creamy.

• Add the remaining water and 1 1/2 to 2 cups flour, including the whole-wheat or rye flour. Beat this well (a hundred strokes) until it’s smooth and soupy, and then let it stand for 10 to 15 minutes, until it’s bubbly and swollen. Add the salt and olive oil and proceed to stir in the rest of the flour by the cupful until the dough is stiff but still slightly sticky. Tip: Stir the dough in the same direction so that the gluten strands retain a smooth, consistent pattern.

• When the dough begins to form a cohesive mass that’s thick enough to hold its shape, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and let it rest. Meanwhile, clean and oil the bowl. Knead the dough, turning it clockwise by quarter turns and sprinkling a little flour on top and on the surface underneath before folding it over. Add just enough flour so the dough doesn’t stick and tear. (A dough scraper is invaluable for lifting the mass of dough cleanly from the counter.) Kneading takes about 5 to 8 minutes. When the dough is smooth, springy, and pliant -- earlobe-soft -- return it to the oiled bowl, cover it with a damp cloth, and let it rise until doubled. This generally takes between 35 and 45 minutes at 70 to 75 degrees.

• After the first rise, you can form the crust, assemble the pizza and bake it immediately or punch the dough down and let it rise again before baking. This doesn’t substantially change the resulting crust, but it gives you more time if you need it before baking the pizza. Or, you can refrigerate the dough for several hours or up to two days. In this case, give it a final punch down after it has chilled for about 40 minutes and put it in a plastic bag.

• By letting the dough mature in the refrigerator, the gluten ripens and relaxes and the dough becomes less sticky, and will stretch farther when working with it. With this refrigerated dough, you can obtain a thin, crisp crust, or a thick, chewy crust, depending on how thin you roll or stretch the dough when forming it, and on whether or not you allow it to warm up and rise before baking it. A thick crust made from chilled dough is likely to have larger air bubbles and be less delicate and more chewy--rather like the difference between regular and sourdough breads.

OPTIONS FOR THE CRUST:

•  For a light, risen crust, use a freshly made dough, although you can use a chilled dough. For the highest, puffiest results, add 2 teaspoons more yeast to the recipe and use the dough within three hours of making it. For a finer-textured crust, simply roll it out thinner and let it rise to the same height. Let the dough rise until it’s puffy, and fingerprints disappear when dough is pressed. This takes about 10 minutes with freshly made, room-temperature dough, or about 15 minutes with chilled dough.

• A thick, chewy crust can be made either with fresh or chilled dough. Stretch or press the dough to about 1/3 to 1/2 inch thick and let it rise just slightly. Whether you’ll end up with a thick and chewy crust or a light and risen one depends on how thick you roll it out and how high you let it rise.

• For a thin, crisp crust, use dough straight out of the refrigerator. Roll it out as thin as you want it -- usually about 1/4 inch -- and get it into the oven within minutes, before it has a chance to rise.

• Assemble the pizza on an oiled, rimless cookie sheet. A third of the recipe will make a 12- to 16-inch round crust, depending on how thin you roll or spread it. Lightly form the dough into a ball and stretch it out. First, hold it vertically by one edge and turn it in your hands, allowing gravity to stretch it as you turn it. Then lay it on the cookie sheet and press out the dough, starting from the center. Be careful not to tear or poke holes in the dough. A floured rolling pin is handy for rolling out thin crusts. If the dough springs back, let it rest a minute or two, or chill it in the fridge, and then continue to work it out.

• Arrange the toppings, usually three to four items, so that they don’t overlap. Apply the cheese a little more than halfway through the baking process. By adding the cheese when the crust is just lightly browned, you can tell when the topping is sufficiently cooked and also avoid overbrowned, leathery cheese and an undercooked crust. Those toppings that don’t need much cooking, like blanched spinach or asparagus, paper-thin prosciutto, or steamed shellfish, also go on at halftime, along with the cheese.

• Bake pizza in a very hot oven -- 475 degrees -- on a heavy baking sheets and on a baking stone. Check the pizza during baking and rotate it if it appears to be cooking unevenly. Lift the crust to see how it’s cooking underneath. If the bottom is still pale while the top seems almost done, turn the oven temperature down and leave the pizza in longer.

• When the crust is lightly browned and the toppings are cooked, sprinkle on the cheeses. Then bake the pizza an additional 8 to 10 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and bubbly. By this time, the crust will be perfectly done.

HOW TO COOK HAMBURGERS :