Homemade Sweet and Savoury Pizza!

Milo(Chocolate and malt powder), banana and shaved chocolate Dessert Pizza

Our trusty pizza stone has been put to very good use and is now looking worse for wear but it still makes us some great pizzas with a crispy base. I highly recommend getting a pizza stone even for store bought pizza and it distributes heat evenly across the base and extracts moisture keeping the pizza base dry and crispy!! The best way to have a pizza, in my opinion.

Garlic and Parsley Pizza

Since getting the stone, we have been making pizza more often and it's always possible to make a batch of pizza dough, and freeze half of it for another day. The best thing about it all is that we can go crazy with the ingredients! The Chocolate and banana pizza was delectable!

Tomato based artichoke, olives, egg pizza

Here's the pizza dough recipe taken from Jamie's Italy. Once this is done, be as creative as you like with the toppings!



Serves 2 – 4
Makes 6 – 8 small, thin pizza bases


Ingredients:
400g strong white bread flour
100g fine ground semolina flour (or strong white bread flour)
½ tablespoon fine sea salt
1×7g sachet of dried yeast
½ tablespoon golden caster sugar
around 325 ml (just over half a pint) lukewarm water


Pile the flours and the salt on to a clean surface and make a 9 cm well in the centre. Add your yeast and sugar to the tepid water, mix up with a fork and leave for a few minutes, then pour into the well. Using a fork and a circular motion, slowly bring in the flour from the inner edge of the well and mix into the water. It will look like stodgy porridge – continue to mix, bringing in all the flour. When the dough begins to come together and becomes too hard to mix with your fork, flour your hands and begin to pat it into a ball. Knead the dough by rolling it backwards and forwards, using your left hand to stretch the dough towards you and your right hand to push the dough away from you at the same time. Repeat this for 10 minutes until you have a smooth stringy soft dough.

Flour the top of your dough, cover it with cling film and let it rest for at least 15 minutes at room temperature. This will make it easier to roll thinly. Now divide the dough into as many balls as you want to make pizzas, i.e. lots of small ones, or a few larger ones.
Timing-wise it’s nice to roll the pizzas out 15 to 30 minutes before you start to cook them. If you want to work more in advance, it’s better to keep the dough in cling film in the fridge rather than having rolled out pizzas hanging around for a few hours. Take a piece of the dough, dust your surface and the dough with a little flour or semolina, and roll it out into a rough circle about 0.5cm / ¼ inch thick. Tear off an appropriately sized piece of tinfoil, rub it with olive oil, dust it well with flour or semolina and place the pizza base on top. Continue doing the same with the other pieces and then, if you dust them with a little flour, you can pile them up into a stack,
cover them with cling flim and put them in the fridge.

When you’re ready to cook them, preheat your oven to 250°C/500°F/gas 9. At this stage you can apply your toppings. Remember less is more. If you can, cook the pizzas on a piece of granite or a pizza stone in your conventional oven – if not, do them one by one on the bars of the oven shelf towards the bottom of the oven. (If you’re going to cook them on the bars of the oven, make sure they are not too big – otherwise they’ll be difficult to manoeuvre.) Cook for 7 to 10 minutes, until the pizzas are golden and crispy.