Monday, October 01, 2012

Experimental Cookery 2012: Pizza

It wasn't the best of weekends, for a variety of reasons. Probably the best thing was that I spent some 30 hours asleep (out of the 66 between work ending on Friday and starting again on Monday). And so, on Sunday evening I came to make pizzas, a long-awaited experimental cookery.

The method came out of Hugh's "River Cottage Every Day", although both Lorraine ("Home Cooking Made Easy") and Jamie ("Jamie Oliver's Italy") have extremely similar methods. Basically, you mix flours, salt, warm water, and yeast to make a dough, knead for 10 minutes, and let it rise for an hour. Then divide into 5, squish out until flat, and add toppings. Not the hardest thing in the world!

My original plan had been to make up five complete pizzas, with toppings, freeze three, and cook up the other two for dinner. However, it quickly emerged that we didn't really have enough toppings for this, and so we ended up freezing 2 'complete' pizzas and 1 base, and stretching the toppings for the other two. This was probably a mistake - the pizzas we ate needed considerably more mozzerella than we had available.

The pizzas went into the oven, and were cooked only too quickly. And at this point I knew despair - they really didn't seem right. Oh no!

Still, we cut them up and had dinner, and it turned out that they were okay - the base was nice and light, the toppings weren't over-powering. They were good! (Still, need more cheese next time.)

The biggest downside of this is that creating them made a lot of mess. There was flour everywhere! Still, they were both cheaper and nicer than the Tesco equivalent, and the time taken to make five was hardly excessive. So, I foresee making up batches of these periodically. Will definitely make these again.

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