Sunday, October 20, 2013

Vegetable Pizza with homemade dough

Oh we had to eat pizzas yesterday. Something from inside spoke I guess. "The Voice" was loud and clear from within all of us, specially from me and my sister. Originally we were planning for egg mushroom rolls but I guess the rolls are not having the best of their times (If you read previous post you will realize this is not their first rejection ;) ). Pizza is more popular amongst us and we have been planning to have pizza with homemade dough for a while. For me making every component of a dish myself is very important. So I started with the dough, moved on to the sauce, chopped some veggies and finally baked the pizza. It was a delicious thin crust pizza, well balanced with sauce, toppings and cheese. Dough recipe is a simple and fast recipe and is the best that I have seen so far. Why wouldn't it be, after all its a Jamie Oliver recipe :).

Lets bake some Pizza.

Vegetarian Pizza
3 medium and 1 regular size pizza

Ingredients:
For Dough:
1. 266 grams all purpose flour
2. 66 grams very fine semolina
3. 1 1/2 tsp dry yeast
4. 1/3 tbsp caster sugar (I have also used 1 tsp granulated sugar and it works fine)
5. 1 tsp salt
6. 1 tbsp olive oil
7. 216 ml lukewarm water

Jamie Oliver rightly mentions on his site about this dough recipe "Once you have tried this easy pizza dough recipe, you'll never look back (trust me)".  He is absolutely right. I will never look for another pizza dough recipe after this. This is the easiest and fastest dough recipe and made perfect pizzas.

For preparing the dough mix the sugar, oil and yeast in the lukewarm water and let it rest for like 5-7 minutes. Mix the flour, semolina and salt in a big bowl. Now create a well in the flour. Pour the water inside this well. Now using a fork push the flour from the walls inside the well. Dust your hands well with flour (I missed doing this and it got a little messy). Now start kneading the dough. Knead it on a surface well dusted with flour while dusting your hands with flour every now and then. Knead till it becomes soft and smooth. Dust the bowl with flour in which you started kneading the dough and keep the dough in it. Cover it with a damp cloth and let it rest for around an hour or till it gets double in size.

You can roll out the pizzas about 10-15 minutes before you want to bake them. If you have extra dough you can wrap it in a cling film and save it in the fridge or freezer for later use. To make the pizza base, dust the surface with flour and using a rolling pin roll out a ball of dough. If you like thin crust pizza, roll the dough to a thickness of about 1/2 cm or even less.

For Sauce:
1. 5-6 chopped garlic cloves
2. 1 fine chopped red onion
3. tomato seeds and pulp of 4 tomatoes
4. 2-3 tomatoes with seeds removed (use the ones from which you have taken out the seeds)
5. 1/2 tsp dry oregano
6. 1/4 tsp black pepper
7. 1+1 tbsp olive oil
8. red chilli flakes (as per taste)
9. salt to taste

Put the garlic, onion, chopped tomato, salt in a mixer and blend. Now in a pan heat 1 tbsp olive oil and add the blended mixture to it. Cook it for a few minutes till it starts drying and then add the tomato seeds/pulp, oregano, pepper, chilli flakes and 1 tbsp olive oil. Cook for another minute and keep it aside.

For Topping:
1. 1/2 Zucchini
2. 2 medium sized red onion
3. 1 Cubanelle pepper
4. 200 g button mushrooms
5.  1/2 green capsicum ( I had a large one so halved it)
6. 1-2 tomato (use the ones from which you took out the seeds for sauce)
7. 8 -10 french beans
8. Grated and cubed cheese

Cut out thin stripes of zucchini lengthwise while maintaining its width. Slice up the button mushrooms (you can also chop them in chunks). Keep the zucchini and mushrooms on a foil and keep them in the oven on the grilling plate for a while. Spray a little olive oil before keeping them inside. Let them grill for a while till the zucchinis get little brown marks on them and the mushrooms also browns up. Simultaneously cut the french beans, tomato, capsicum, onion and cubanelle pepper. Now take the vegetables out of the oven. You may choose any kind of vegetables chopped up in different shapes and in amounts as per your liking. Grill them, saute them or use them raw. Just make sure that the vegetables are not too dried up and do maintain their crunch. And always half cook them as they are going to get baked with the pizza.

Grate any kind of cheese you like. I used grated Amul Cheese along with grated and cubed Britannia Cheese cubes (chilli pepper flavor).

Assembling the pizza:
Dust a tin foil with flour. Now keep the rolled out pizza base on it. Apply a thin layer of sauce. Sprinkle salt and black pepper. Now arrange some portion of all the vegetables on the sauce. Sprinkle salt, black pepper and oregano. Now top it off with grated and cubed cheese. Let it bake in the oven. I baked the pizza at 250 degree Celsius for about 7 minutes and for around the same time at a lower temperature (160 degree Celsius). I baked at a lower temperature so that the base can cook properly.

Serve hot. You can sprinkle with oregano and chilli flakes on the top.




Pizza was delicious and was cooked well. The sauce turned out to be really good and the sides of the pizza had that crunch. The toppings were really tasty. This was a yummy pizza which finished soon and I didn't get time to take enough pictures. I am sure I will make pizzas soon. Next time I will make the pizza with soft mozeralla and shiny parmesan.

So go ahead and make a delicious pizza for dinner tonight. Enjoy the rest of the sunday guys. :)

2 comments:

  1. Avoid using measurements like 266gms flour and 66gms semolina....its not practical while cooking.

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  2. Thanks for the advice. I will avoid this wherever possible. Though there are recipes sometimes which are using ingredients in much larger amount. And they uses certain complex things like yeast etc. So when I fraction them down I take extra care to be very precise. So that the person who tries does the approximation himself. It would avoid the two times fixation to the ingredient amount. Thanks for visiting.

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