Pizza
I was taught how to make pizza when I was 8 years old by an old Italian man. This recipe is hundreds of years old, the original Italian thin crusted pizza. The pizza base is exactly the same recipe used to make pita bread and pasta. The catch with it is that if you overcook your pizza the crust will go hard and crunchy, still, some of us don’t mind that.
I wrote this out for the mother of a 13 year old autistic boy a few years back.
I make my tomato paste first so that the flavour of the herbs gets longer to permeate through. I use those tiny little tins of condensed tomato paste because they work out the cheapest. You only use 1/3 of a tin and mix it with water to thin it down, I add some garlic paste and some oregano too. Make it about as runny as the bought tomato sauce you put on sausages. Put the rest of that little tin in the fridge, it keeps for ages.
Now for the base, easiest recipe in the world, you can’t get it wrong because there’s only 2 ingredients – Flour and Water. If it’s too dry add more water, if it’s too wet add more flour. Impossible to forget and impossible to screw up too badly.
by volume:
3 parts Flour
1 part Water
To cover a large ceramic dinner plate:
1 cup Flour
1/3 cup of Water
To cover the medium sized biscuit tray I’m using tonight:
1 ½ cups Flour
½ cup Water
The weather affects this mix a little too, on really hot dry days you’ll need a little more water than you do on cool humid days. Use a nice stainless steel saucepan as a mixing bowl, one with a lid. Firstly because they’re so easy to clean, secondly because, unlike an old fashioned mixing bowl, it has a handle on the side, it’s easier to hold it still when you first start mixing.
Measure your flour and then chuck it in the saucepan, don’t bother sieving it, waste of time. I like to add a little black pepper to my pizza dough, or sometimes a little curry powder, if you want to do something like this use a kitchen fork to stir it in to the flour before adding the water.
Splot the water in and start stirring it with a kitchen fork, when it gets too thick and you’re in danger of bending the fork then it’s time to start getting in there with the fingers. Messy.
Wash the fork and put it away before you start with the kneading of the dough, it’s finished with now. Little things like this ultimately save you so much time. If you tidy as you go then you’re not making any mess. Then you don’t have much of a mess to clean up when you’re finished.
When you first start mixing with your fingers it feels horrible but then the dough starts thickening up as it picks up all those dry bits of flour, eventually all the bits stuck to your fingers disappear again.
To Knead the dough means to grab sides of the dough and stretch them up and then push them into the middle, you can do this one handed with small amounts like a pizza, lift on side up, fold it over the top, then push it down in the middle with your thumb. Keep doing this, for two reasons. First, because as you do this you catch little pockets of air and force them in to the pastry which helps it rise.
Second and more important though, it makes all the flour molecules stretch in to long Strands, this means you get proper chewy pastry instead of something like baked mud. Keep kneading until every time you lift the side up and push it into the middle it looks like it’s tearing and it’s starting to get thicker and stiffer. Now we need to let it rest and settle for about 15 minutes but we need that 15 minutes to chop up all the stuff we’ll put on our pizza.
Put the lid on the saucepan with your pizza dough in it, that’ll stop it drying out on the outside while it rests.
What you chop up and put on your pizza is up to you. I like the old fashioned Capricciosa, Ham, Pepperoni, Mushroom and Olives. Sometimes I add a bit of Sliced Onion into the mix. I use real mushrooms instead of champignons. Tonight I might add a splash of Port to the tomato sauce. Rummage around in the fridge and get inventive maybe.
Cheese:- to some people it’s very important that they have the Mozzarella cheese on a pizza, the stretchy stringy cheese, personally I don’t care about that so I just use Shredded Tasty from the supermarket, the homebrand one. Much cheaper and tastier. I also add a little sprinkle of Parmesan Cheese, if it’s a real Italian Pizza then it has to have smelly cheese.
I use Bacon instead of Ham, much tastier and cheaper too. I buy the “Short Cut” rashers of bacon from Woolworths, much leaner and better quality than the commercial brands. That’s not to say that Woolworths is the better supermarket because it’s not, but it does have some good things that others don’t, and vice versa. I separate the bacon in to lots of 4 rashers and freeze them, perfect pizza fodder.
So now you’ve got all your bits and pieces chopped up and sitting in their little groups on your chopping board. Now it’s time to make that pizza.
Sprinkle a little flour over the bench top then plop your pizza dough in the middle of it. Now would be a really good time to clean that saucepan. The lid never got dirty and can go straight back in the cupboard, the pan only had flour and water in it. A quick rinse with running water and a dish cloth, dry it with a tea towel, put it away.
I use an empty Port bottle as a rolling pin, best rolling pin you can get. Many older women in the bush do this, they mostly fill the bottle with water and keep it in the freezer. The idea is that pastry kept cold until you want to actually cook it rises better so they use an icy cold rolling pin.
Only show-offs twirl their pizza pastry in the air, and they can only make round pizzas. Sprinkle a little more flour over the top of your dough and use a rolling pin to start rolling it out. Every now and then sprinkle a little more flour over your pastry and use your fingers to rub it all over, then peel your pastry up off the bench and turn it over. Dust this side with flour and rub it in too, then roll it out some more.
Roll that pastry out until it is much bigger than the plate you are using, because you need to rub flour in to it again then flip it and rub more flour in before you put it on the plate. When you do this your pastry shrinks a little. It’s because of those long elasticky strands you created when you were kneading it.
The plate you put your pastry on must be very clean. No Oil. Not even a dirty fingerprint. Anywhere that there is oil on the plate your pizza will stick to the plate.
Put your pastry over the plate and shift it to sit right. You can use a butter knife to trim the excess pastry from overhanging the plate. You can put this excess pastry in a freezer bag and save it to mix with the next batch, but I used to have a dog and I left those bits hanging off the sides of the plate as extra crusts for her. She loved them.
Spread your tomato paste all over the top of the pastry, I use the back of a spoon to do this. I use the back of the teaspoon that I used to mix the paste. As soon as I’m done the teaspoon and the glass get washed and put away.
Now is the time to turn your oven on and let it heat up. Shift the oven trays around so that your pizza can sit roughly in the middle of an electric oven, or nearer the top of the oven if you have gas. Pre-heat the oven to 210 degrees.
Now start putting all the toppings on your pizza in whatever order you think best. By the time you’ve done that, including shredded cheese and smelly cheese, the oven is hot enough. Put the pizza in for about 25 minutes, until golden brown on top.
While you’re waiting, clean the chopping board and knife and put them away. Use the dishcloth to clean all the flour off the bench top and dry it with a tea towel. Rinse all the flour out of the dish cloth. Now the only dirty plate you have is the one the pizza’s cooking on. No mess anywhere.
