Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Twice Baked Pizza






The day our local pizza delivery shop closed was a sad, sad, day for me.
The borough of Kingston is not exactly teeming with 'takeaway' food options. Zok rose to the challenge and started making pizza from scratch. With a bit of help from our friend Liz.

Getting the yeast to activate, and the temperature correct for a good, fluffy, dough is the only tricky part of this meal.
Zok says that the he prefers the 'instant, dried' yeast, which we keep in our refrigerator. He uses our electric kettle to boil water, and uses cold tap water in a measuring cup to bring the water up to 'temperate', warm not hot.
The yeast when activating is visible to the eye.

Zok makes pizza sauce whenever tomatoes are ripe in the garden, or on sale.
We keep those in the freezer.
Our secret is that we twice bake our crust- the first time we lightly brush oil on the pizza base, and sprinkle the top with garlic salt and herbs.
After they fluff up and toast up in the oven we add the tomato sauce and whatever toppings we want.
Zok used his pizza to test out four salamis from our new favorite Italian Deli.
I pretty much stick to pineapple with mozzarella and provolone cheeses.

I suggest buying pizza tins at a catering store. I have always found bargains and hard to find items (remember when muddler was a foreign word?) at catering stores, and there always seems to be one, large city or small.
The tins have to be treated with oil, and it is a good habit to always put a small amount of oil on them before storing them away.

I suppose pizza is a simple dish, and often overlooked in favor of ordering this item delivered. But this is a good meal to make with kids, or for easy entertaining.

2 thick crust pizzas- 10 inch pizza tins (because everyone like cold pizza the day after)

3.5 cups of plain flour (not self rising)
Tsp. salt
Tbl. caster sugar
8 grams of dry yeast to one cup of warm water
Mix all in your mixer or by hand until light and fluffy
(Zok says to do this until you think you are done then mix another 3 minutes)
Add more warm water or flour as required
Put the ball of dough in a lightly oiled large bowl, roll the dough around to lightly coat the dough this ensures that the dough doesn't dry out while rising
cover with a towel - about 90 minutes.

Sauce (for about 8 pizzas)
Render down about 2 kilos (4.5 lb) of tomatoes
Zok flash boils the tomatoes, then removes the skins
Then cook all of them up until well rendered, then he uses a sieve to remove the seeds
Then re-cooks the tomatoes almost to a paste
Add herbs (to taste) We use what we have in hand from garden, rosemary, parsley, oregano, basil, garlic all finely chopped, cook these all up a bit more.
The sauce keeps for ages (2-3 months). We label each batch to keep them straight.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like Zok's expressive hand gestures.

Anonymous said...

ummmm makes me feel hungry