Pizza Party - Nectarine, Prosciutto and Radish Pizza

The pizza obsession I spoke of in my last post has created one of my favourite pizza flavour combinations so far - nectarine, prosciutto and radish. Sweet, salty and with a bite. Could there be a more perfect flavour combination? The nectarines go a little jammy on the bottom forming a lovely 'sauce'. For those of us who are in Perth, where nectarines (and stone fruit in general) aren't in season, this is also delicious with thinly sliced Beurre Bosc Pears, or Pink Lady or Fuji Apples. For those of you currently enjoying a Northern Summer - stone fruit away! As the prosciutto and capers are salty side, make sure your cheese is a less salty variety.

As with my last pizza post, this uses my chick-pea pizza dough, but use a pre-made base if you can't be bothered. The nuttiness of the chick-pea dough really does add a little something here.

Nectarine, Prosciutto and Radish Pizza

1 nectarine, sliced

6 thin slices Prosciutto, roughly torn

1 tsp capers
4-5 radishes, thinly sliced
50g brie, sliced as best you can

half of this pizza dough (or your own bases)
1 tsp cornmeal
Basil leaves to serve

Preheat your oven to 170C and prepare your dough, leave to rest while you slice all the ingredients.

Sprinkle the cornmeal onto a baking tray to stop your pizza sticking.

Roll out the dough into a rough rectangle, to fit your baking tray. Spread the nectarine slices across the bottom of the dough, then layer the prosciutto, capers, radishes and brie over the top in a vaguely even kinda way.

Pop in the oven for 20 minutes, or until the edges of the base are golden and the cheese melted.

Scatter basil leaves to serve.

Pizza Party - Beetroot, Eggplant and Salami Pizza

I have been crazy for pizza lately. For the last few months, we’ve had homemade pizza at least once a week. It’s often on a Sunday, sitting out in the now cooling sunshine with a beer, or a glass of wine. Or, in this case, a glass or bubbles. I love building different flavour profiles in pizza and coming up with something a little fun and novel. The bases have all been the lentil/chickpea flour bases I made in this post here. I love the extra oomph of flavour that the chickpeas give the dough. Feel free to use whatever bases you want, but there really is only a little extra effort in making your own. Mix the dough, leave it to rise for half an hour while you prep the ingredients, then roll and assemble the pizzas.

This pizza was created after a trip to Kakulas without Lance. We have a rule in our house that Lance is not to be in charge of portion control. He instigated that rule himself after he assured me that he could eat a whole mess of herring that we caught on honeymoon. I was sceptical, but cooked it all and nothing else. Just the herring. Luckily. It was a crazy amount of fish. He understood this, and now it’s up to me to decide on portion control. So I think I might have to instigate a rule that I shouldn’t go to Kakulas without Lance. He talks me down and makes me be more sensible with my cheese and cured meats purchases. Without him asking me, repeatedly, if we *really* need that AS WELL, and when will we get to eat all of this cheese, especially when we’re out for meals all weekend and the first few days of the week, well…I get a little bit ridiculous. And my basket gets piled high with various gourmet cheeses and salamis and serrano and…well, you get the idea. And I only went in to get one or two things.

But, I knew I was going to make pizza. And I knew I was going to use roast eggplant and beetroot on the pizza. So I knew that I wanted a gorgeous fennel salami. And some fetta. Do try and get a fennel salami for this, the aniseedy fennel brings out the absolute best of the earthy sweet roast beetroot. And the saltiness of the fetta makes the silky roast eggplant “sauce” come to life, so try make that a good quality one, too. I like sheep/goat’s fetta, as it has a nice creamy texture, rather than a drier, crumblier one.

This was all topped off with some of the orange hollandaise sauce I made for the enoki tacos. It’s seriously next level stuff to drizzle over this pizza. A decadent flavour boost. If you don’t have the time or inclination to make it, serving this with a lemon wedge is a nice idea.

Beetroot, Eggplant and Salami Pizza

2 roasted baby beetroot

1 small roasted eggplant

5-6 slices fennel salami, cut into pieces

50g Greek fetta, sliced and ready to crumble

tablespoon fresh oregano leaves
sprig thyme, leaves removed

1 portion pizza dough (my go-to is this one - halve for this pizza, or double the toppings)

to serve
orange hollandaise
lemon wedge

If you don't have any roasted eggplant and beetroot, start by doing that. Heat your oven to 175 and baked whole, scrubbed beetroot wrapped tightly in foil for 45-50 minutes until tender. Roast the eggplant for 30-40 minutes, turning over halfway, until soft. Allow to cool enough to handle, then peel the beetroot and slice.

Make your dough, if you are. Or gather your pizza bases.

Preheat your oven to 175C. Sprinkle a teaspoon of coarse cornmeal on a baking tray to stop it sticking.

Roll your pizza dough out to your desired shape. I tend to go for a rustic rectangle to fit on my baking tray. Slice your beetroot, salami and fetta ready.

Cut the roast eggplant in half and use a fork to shred out the flesh. Spread this over the base of the pizza, top with the other ingredients, adding the fetta last.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the dough is golden.

Serve with a drizzle of orange hollandaise, normal hollandaise or a wedge of lemon.

Pizza Party - Pulse flour pizza with Ras el Hanout Mango Ricotta

 

 

Sometimes you need pizza. There’s no way around it. And it has to be real pizza. A real dough base, not just the usual cheat method of using a Lebanese loaf and spreading on your toppings. And then you need a beer and to sit outside in the fresh air and sunshine with your pizza and your husband and reflect on how good life can be. That despite being bone tired from a long and hard crabbing session that was mostly fruitless (although eating the crab hot out of the pot that night with fresh bread and butter still made it feel worthwhile), an afternoon of good food, good weather and good conversation is all it takes to get over the exhaustion.

 

This is a pretty simple dough that was made a bit more exciting (not to mention good-for-you) through the addition of two types of pulse flour. I had a little bit of lentil flour left over from my Secret Cake Club baking, and added some chick pea flour to total half the flour. You could use all chick pea flour seeing as that is pretty easy to get, but making your own lentil flour is pretty easy if you’ve got a coffee grinder. In which case, you could also use all lentil flour. As with my baking experimenting gone awry, the addition of a little arrowroot powder ensures the dough binds properly. The molasses in place of the normal sugar adds a smokey sweetness to the nuttiness that the beans bring. Leave it to proof for half an hour while you make the sauce and chop some veges and it’s a pretty quick way of getting a real pizza base in your life.

 

This makes two just-bigger-than single serve pizzas, by themselves enough for around 3 serves. Or 4 serves if you have a side salad. The toppings are fairly easy to change in and out of the sweet and spicy cream cheese sauce. Mine were what were to hand. Although the sauce and lentil base is flavoursome enough that the toppings play textural counterpoint as much as anything. Fresh greens on top are one of my favourite things to do with pizza, you could probably get away with just that.

 

 

Pulse Flour Pizza Base

½ cup lentil flour

½ cup chick pea flour (or one cup of chickpea flour)

1 tbsp arrowroot powder

1 cup plain flour

2 tsp yeast

1 tsp molasses

½ teaspoon salt

2 tbsp olive oil

2 tsp cornmeal

 

 

 

Ras el Hanout Mango Ricotta Sauce

150g smooth ricotta

1 mango

2 tsp ras el hanout

2 cloves garlic

2 tsp tamarind puree

 

 

 

Toppings

¼ roast chicken, meat shredded

¼ zucchini sliced into thin rings

½ red capsicum, sliced into thin strips

Snow pea shoots

 

Mix the flours together in a large bowl with the salt and yeast. Make a well in the centre and add the olive oil, warm water and molasses. Stir the liquids together first, then slowly bring in the flour until it becomes a shaggy mess. Knead for around 5 minutes until it forms a smooth ball. Pop in an oiled bowl and cover loosely with plastic wrap and set aside to double in size.

 

Meanwhile, mince the garlic, dice the mango and mix all of the sauce ingredients together until well combine. Slice your toppings as desired. Heat your BBQ or oven to 160C

 

Punch down the dough to remove some of the air, then divide the dough into two. Roll the each ball of dough out to around 2cm thickness. Sprinkle 1 teaspoon of cornmeal on two baking trays and lay the pizza bases on top. Cover with toppings and bake in the oven, or on a lidded BBQ for 15 minutes or until base is golden at the edges and the cheese mixture is browning.

 

 

Get Well Soon - Herbed Cream Cheese and Prawn Pizza

Lance and I both got hit by the flu that was going around. It knocked us around quite a bit and in an attempt to kick it, I started amping up the health-promoting ingredients in all of our dishes. This on top of the lemon, honey and ginger teas we were drinking like they were going out of fashion. One Sunday we were both feeling sorry for ourselves, the sun was shining and I was a bit over the soups. So I made these cold-kicking cream cheese pizzas – full of garlic, ginger, chilli, fresh herbs and lemon and honey squeezed over the top. We sat out in the sun to get some vitamin D and shake off some of the germs and cobwebs from being in bed for a week. 

It felt a lot like the sitting at the pub and having a gourmet pizza that we were missing out on, and it perked us up enough to get back to work the next day.

You don’t need to be sick to enjoy these. But they’re easy enough to cook when you are. I think this is going to make a few appearances over Spring and Summer. Possibly with real, homemade pizza bases!

Herbed Cream Cheese and Prawn Pizza

100g peeled raw prawns

4 lebanese loaves
250g Philadelphia cream cheese
2 bunches coriander
1 bunch parsley
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 tsp red chilli, minced
1 tsp grated ginger
¼ tsp salt
Handful bean sprouts
1 tbsp capers
Handful rocket
Lemon wedges for serving

Preheat the oven to 170C

Throw your cream cheese, coriander, parsley, garlic cloves, chilli, salt and ginger in a food processor. Pulse until it’s all chopped up and evenly combined.

Spread over the Lebanese loaves, then distribute the prawns, capers and bean sprouts. Pop in the oven and cook for 20 minutes until the prawns are pink and the cheese is getting golden at the edges.

Serve with a handful of rocket on top, then drizzle over some honey and add lemon wedges.

Even better with a beer or crisp white wine

Fusion Food - Curried Mango and Black bean Pizzarepa.

Ok, let me preface this post by saying I know this whole thing sounds weird. Even when I was putting this dish together in my mind, I wasn’t 100% sure it was going to work. But it does. The original idea was born out of two things; one, what weird random things are left in the fridge (remedied this weekend gone after a hugely successful visit to the farmer’s markets). And two, Lance making an offhand comment that he thought I would’ve made something a bit more interesting with a few of the mangoes from our tree, like a curry. This was after about a week of mango salsa and tacos. So in my mind I’m picking up and rejecting ingredients and flavours and just the general ‘idea’ of what to cook for dinner. And I came up with this. So a Mexican-Cuban-Indian-Italian pizza. Fusion food at it’s most-fused!

I somehow settled on wanting pizzas. But I didn’t have any pizza bases, or Lebanese breads with which to make them. So I immediately went to making my own. But a lot of recipes for pizza dough are yeast driven, and I didn’t want to wait for it to proof. When I thought of arepas. These are flat breads made out of cornflour the same kind as you use for tortillas. I also remembered the half tin of black beans I had in the fridge leftover from tacos a few nights earlier. Add a little mango, a little curry powder (I went the lazy route and used a pre-made curry powder blend – feel free to mix your own). A little cayenne for an extra kick, then grilled chicken, sliced mushrooms and some cheddar cheese. The black beans I used were actually pre-seasoned frijoles, so in the recipe I’ve just put salt to taste for if you use plain cooked black beans which are so much easier to come across in Perth. And the saltiness also depends on what is in your curry powder, if you use a pre-made mix.

This sauce made more than required for the pizzas.

Arepas
(makes 2 individual size pizzas)

1 cup corn flour (masa lista)
1 cup warm water
¼ tsp salt
oil to fry

Curried Mango and Black Bean Sauce

½ tin black beans

1 mango
3 tbs curry powder
¼ tsp ginger
½ tsp cayenne
¼ tsp turmeric
Salt to taste

Toppings

2 mushrooms, thinly sliced

1 chicken thigh, grilled, then sliced
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
Baby kale leaves, olive oil and lemon juice to serve

Mix all of the arepa ingredients together, knead until a smooth dough forms, the set aside for 15 minutes.

Mash the black beans and mango together in a bowl until completely combined, add the curry powder, extra ginger, cayenne and turmeric then check for seasoning. Salt if needed, or add more cayenne or spice if desired.

Preheat the oven to 180C

Heat a tbsp of oil in a frypan to medium-hot. Divide the arepa dough into two, and roll each into a ball. Place between two sheets of baking paper and roll out to form a disc just under 1cm thick.

Carefully place into the hot pan, cook for 2-3 minutes or until golden on that side. Flip over and sprinkle arepa with black pepper. Cook for a further 3 minutes or until golden.

Slide onto a lined baking tray and repeat for the second arepa.

Spoon and spread the curried mango and black bean sauce, then layer the ingredients and sprinkle cheese on top. Pop in the oven for 15 minutes or until cheese is golden and melted.

Serve topped with baby kale leaves, a drizzle of olive oil and a wedge of lemon for squeezing.