Pizza Night

Italian Vegetarian Cooking

Tonight was a night I’d been promising myself for a little while as I don’t often get the time to make pizza from scratch anymore.

The base is from a book we’ve been using for almost 40 years now, Italian Vegetarian Cooking by Jo Marcangelo. We’ve mainly used it for the focaccia and pizza-base recipe and not much else and I’ve still to figure out why?

But I think we will start exploring it more in a little bit to see what else we could possibly make from it, or at least remind ourselves of why we don’t cook much from it.

The pizza base dough is standard and I really don’t need the book to remember it though I like to use it:

225g OO flour
7g instant dried yeast
1tsp sugar
small palm of rock salt crushed
150ml warm water
2 tablespoons oil

This doesn’t change at all, mix it all together and knead until smooth, let rise for 1.5 to 2 hours.

I usually make my own tomato sauce base from:

half an onion finely diced
2 cloves garlic finely diced
fresh rosemary, chopped
handful of black olives finely minced
salt
pepper
tin of chopped tomatoes
good squeeze tomato paste

Sauté the onions until soft, then add the garlic and rosemary and cook for a few minutes before adding the olives, salt, and pepper.

Let this cook for a while and then add the tin of tomatoes and squeeze of tomato paste, cook for 20-30 minutes over a low heat to cook tomatoes down and get a strength of flavour in the sauce.

Preheat the oven to 230°

After the dough has risen spread it out onto an oiled baking tray and make sure it fits, then spread the sauce on thinly. From here it’s completely up to what you fancy to have on the top, usually we have anchovies, black olives, and feta. Tonight though we opted for roast artichoke, black olives, and feta.

We do like feta on a pizza due to the sharp taste and it complements the tomato base so well.

Cook in the preheated oven for about 15 to 20 minutes until the base is well cooked, then enjoy.