Home-made Pizza
This is the classic dish that we only ate outside for ages. I mean, there are great Italian restaurants in almost every city and among them you always find great pizza.
But as the restaurants started to close beginning of march, we decided to include pizza as one of the dishes that we wanted to master at home.
Pizza is great for kids to help out, offers a fair amount of freedom to choose the toppings, and it is also fun to eat.
The only tricky part is the dough. We tried several versions and found out that using dry yeast we could get a thin and crispy pizza pie, while using the fresh one we got a more generous, thick and flavoured pie… so it really depends on what you and your family want to make.
Here we go with one pizza for 2 adults and 2 kids:
1- The pizza dough
ingredients
450 gr flour (we usually try to mix Weizen and Dinkel)
250 ml warm water
2 tea spoons salt and oregano
2 table spoons olive oil
1 bag of dry yeast ( or 1/2 cube fresh yeast)
Start by measuring 250ml warm water and adding the yeast and the sugar. If you are using fresh yeast, use a fork to break the cube in small pieces. Mix softly with a fork to kickstart the fermentation. Then let it rest for a couple of minutes.
Meanwhile, put in a bowl the flour, olive oil, the salt and a bit of oregano. Once the yeast mixture has rested for a while and you start to see a bit of foam on the surface, add it to the bowl and the start to mix it. If you are using a KitchenAid, you should not go beyond speed 2.
Once you the dough is uniform and still a bit sticky on the surface, stop mixing and form a ball with it. Leave the dough in the bowl, covered by a hand towel and let it rest in a slightly warm dark place for about 1 hour. We generally use our oven.
The dough will rise slowly and after 1 hour it would have doubled in size.
One this is ready, move the dough to the flour covered table, and roll it to give it a flat shape. Proceed slowly and without much pressure using a normal baking roll. To keep things simple, we give shape the dough to a flat rectangular shape that fits our oven rack and place it over a sheet of baking paper. Then we can proceed with the topping.
2- topping & cooking
Once you have the base well rolled, you add 2-3 table spoons of tomato sauce or passata, some oregano & salt and I recommend a tea spoon of crème fraîche (not really originally Italian, but we tried this in Barcelona and we love it since 🤩)
Then spread the sauce to cover the entire surface of the pizza. You can then add any ingredients that you might like for the topping and finally you add approx 400gr grated mozzarella, again covering the entire surface.
Finally you put it in the oven @ 200ºC for about 25-30 min…. and there you are done!
top left: paprika, salami and goat cheese
bottom left: only salami
right half: fresh tomato, mozzarella di buffala & basilic
Topping suggestions for the entire family
1 - paprika & salami
2- goat cheese
3- fresh tomato & mozzarella di buffala
4- spicy chorizo
5- champignons & salami
