Since childhood, which contained hundreds of hours spent watching Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (apparently, British children in the 1980s were unaware of what ninjas are), I’ve loved pizza. Those steaming, spotted (with what I soon learned was pepperoni) cartoon discs served to arouse the instant feeling of mouth-watering hunger each time they appeared on the screen.
This love affair continued to develop through my teenage years when, on a slim budget, my friends and I used to eat out at La Porchetta, where we’d be astounded at the sheer size of the pizza that arrived in front of us mere minutes after ordering, all for about a fiver. It was also about this time that I realised delicious pizza is a very thin, slightly blackened, crispy affair, as opposed to the doughy mouthfuls I remembered from takeaways earlier in life.
Anyway, all these memories were bought back today when I made my first ever attempt at making a pizza completely from scratch, with the help of a newly purchased pizza stone. Here is a pictorial document of my maiden voyage into the world of pizza making.
First, I laid out all my ingredients in photgenic readiness.
Next, I prepared my tomatoes for roasting. Each have their own little sliver of garlic to make them taste extra delicious.
Then I combined two types of flour, Italian OO and plain old white, some yeast and salt, to which I added warm water and olive oil.
Once kneaded to an encouragingly smooth dough, I popped it in a fresh bowl, ready to rise.
By this stage, my tomatoes had just begun to take colour, so I took them out of the oven…
…and passed them through a sieve to make my sauce. Take a moment to marvel at the magnificent pink spoon P purchased for us the other weekend in Suffolk.
Soon, as if by magic, my ball of dough had grown to twice its original size. The properties of a few grams of dried yeast will never fail to amaze me.
Now, my pizza was ready to assemble, so I rolled it out nice and thin and added some tomato sauce, olives, anchovies and goat’s cheese.
Lo and behold, after a few minutes cooking at the hottest temperature my oven could handle, and a handful of torn up basil and a splash of olive oil later, my pizza was complete. Very delicious it was too.
I realise that hearing about the cooking of someone’s lunch isn’t many steps lower on the banality scale than hearing what they dreamed about last night but, considering the amont of time I spend thinking about, and boring my friends with talk of food, I thought it wasn’t especiially well represented on this blog.
So there!
If you’d like to cook a pizza like this, then do as I did and follow Dan Lepard and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s recipe from The Guardian weekend magazine which can be found HERE.
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