mutteringhousewife

If you’re going to be watching Rush Hour 7 with the family on a Sunday night, what you need for dinner is pizza. One problem with making the bases yourself is that once you’ve done it once, your family won’t accept shop bought again and they’ll even get a bit fussy about which pizza restaurants they’ll eat in. Fortunately our suburb abounds in excellent pizza joints, but I’m certainly not dragging myself out to pick some up, not wearing this ankle brace, even if it is now adorned with a fur cuff. Easier to make your own.

This is a forgiving recipe and will turn into pizza bases even if you start the whole thing with an hour to go. It’s better to start it earlier in the day for the yeast to do its thing, so whenever you get a moment. In a bowl place eight grams of fresh yeast, three hundred grams of water, ten grams of sugar and five hundred grams of flour, half of which should be farina per pizza if you’ve been to the deli recently, which I haven’t, so it isn’t. Mix it all up. My yeast looks like it’s on it’s last legs, I’m going to have to get up to the IGA this afternoon and fork out another sixty cents for some fresh stuff, but it doesn’t matter for this recipe.

Grind some salt over it and slosh a bit of olive oil on it, then knead it in. Every ten minutes or so, repeat with the oil maybe three times. Then leave it alone with its thoughts for a few hours. If you’re looking for international pizza certification you use less yeast and hard flour and it should rise over at least twenty four hours. That’s nice to know, isn’t it? Moving on, once it has risen a bit start pinching off bits and rolling them into circles. I go with a chunk that’s a little smaller than a tennis ball, that works for a thin crust on the pizza trays I have. You can use baking trays if you haven’t got pizza trays. Let these rise for a bit, and if you haven’t got the bench space, stack them separated by baking paper. I rarely manage this step, but it’s nicer if you get it in.

Spray your pizza trays or what have you with olive oil spray and sprinkle with cornmeal. Heat your oven to about two hundred degrees Celsius, and if you’ll be using a pizza stone, you should have done this half an hour ago, come on, the natives are getting restless. I do have a pizza stone, they’re only about fifteen bucks and they make a nicer pizza, but you can only do one at a time and I like to circumvent that who’s pizza is coming out first argument by putting three in at a time.

Then there’s toppings. Salami or bacon and cheese for the Horror, tomato paste and cheese for the Muffet and for the Moose, salt. I do seem like the type to grate my own cheese, but have you ever tried to grate mozzarella? It’s very squishy indeed, so I buy a pregrated pizza cheese mix. These bases also make a very nice flatbread, which is how the Moose eats it, so I often roll out a baking tray full and he’ll take it for lunch the next day. The grown ups get tomato paste, pepperoni, mushroom, celery and capsicum, anything that’s not wet. Fresh tomato on pizza is a bad idea, it makes it soggy and burns your mouth, leave it off. My favourite pizza is goats cheese, baby spinach, mushrooms, cauliflower, pepper and celery topped with cheese, but that’s a bit girly for my husband, so sometimes we get a different one each if we’re very hungry.

This recipe makes between six and eight 25cm pizza bases. It turned out that the DVD was covered in someone’s sticky fingerprints, so we never did find out if Chris Rock managed to keep his eyeballs in for the entire movie.