Pizza
Don’t get me started. When I see what is offered under the name ‘pizza’, it makes me want
to cry. There are so many cheap and nasty examples. The ‘best’ one I ever saw though nearly
made me crash as I drove past an Indian restaurant that had the proud boast in the window
‘Original Balti Pizza’. Also, you cannot microwave pizza. Glad we got that sorted out.
A home-made pizza is streets ahead of some other pizzas, which we all know and so I
won’t mention, but my message is that the Americans did not invent them, they’re from Naples.
In Naples, you can still buy pizza by the metre and how cool is that? One metre or two?
Pizzas are really straightforward to make as you don’t need to leave the dough to rise. You
simply mix the ingredients, knead (10 minutes by hand or with your bread machine) and roll it
out. Put some mozzarella and tomato on the base and then the toppings of your choice. You can
pile your pizza with as many toppings as you want and you can make them much healthier and
better quality than shop-bought pizzas. This is one of those times when canned tomato is better
than fresh for the base, though you can put fresh on as a topping.
You can use normal fast-acting bread-making yeast, but if you go to your deli and ask for
pizza yeast, they will usually be able to supply it – it is a raising agent rather than a yeast. Makes
2 large pizzas
Ingredients:
450 g strong white bread flour
290 ml water
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
1 sachet (9 g) pizza yeast or fast-acting
bread-making yeast
If you have a bread machine, add all the ingredients and use the ‘dough’ setting, which will
mix and then knead the dough.
If doing it by hand, on a worktop or table, make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients,
pour in the wet ingredients and mix all the ingredients together starting from the centre until you
have a nice dough ball. Knead it for 10 minutes.
Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 7/220°C. You can use the dough straight away without
letting it rise or rest. Divide into two or four balls and roll them out until you have a thin base.
Home-made pizza can be oblong or square if you don’t have a round pizza dish, by the way.
You don’t have to, but I like my bases nice and crispy, so I put them in the oven for 3–4 minutes
before putting the toppings on.
The key thing is to always start with a tomato sauce (passata, tinned chopped tomatoes or
a home-made tomato sauce), then the cheese, and then the toppings. In my opinion, Cheddar
is superb on pizza because of its strong flavour. Yes, not very traditional, but exceptions can be
made for good taste!
I’m not sure how you learn these things but you just know the order in which things go on
top of a pizza. So you wouldn’t put ham and then onion, but onion and then ham. Capers and olives always go last, as do anchovies. You don’t put cheese on fish pizzas. With bresaola and
rocket pizza, these two ingredients go on raw after the pizza is cooked. Anchovies go with both
meat and fish pizzas. Black olives on pizza, not green. Beer with pizza, not wine.
I usually put tomato, cheese (Cheddar and mozzarella) and some sliced red onion, and then
my other ingredients can be varied. I made pizzas last night and we added some mortadella and
capers and served the pizzas with a drizzle of chilli oil.
*taken from the book ‘From Seed to plate’ by Paolo Arrigo, published by Simon and Schuster