Simple Pizza

The thing I’ve been craving most since becoming a vegan is pizza, particularly a margherita pizza on a romana base at Pizza Express. The dough they make at Pizza Express is vegan, but I’ve yet to build up a selection of toppings that I enjoy as much as my old favourite. Because of this, and because I’m back at Uni now and so back to cooking for myself 24/7, I thought I would try making my own pizza completely from scratch, and luckily The Baking Bible has a ‘Family favourite pizza and easy pizza sauce’ recipe in the book!

I’d recommend starting to make the sauce for the base when you leave the dough to rise for an hour in step 3.

THE DOUGH
You will need…
225g strong plain (bread) flour
1/2tsp sea salt
1tsp fast-action dried yeast
1tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1.Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and stir in the dried yeast. Make a well in the centre and gradually work in 150ml warm water and the olive oil to form a soft dough
2.Turn the pizza dough out on to a lightly floured surface and knead well for 8-10 minutes until smooth and elastic
3.Put into an oiled bowl, turn the dough once to coat the surface with oil and cover the bowl with clingfilm. Leave to rise in a warm place for about 1 hour until doubled in size
4.Knock back the dough and shape as required

THE SAUCE
You will need…
1 onion
2tbsp olive oil
3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
2tbsp tomato puree
2x400g tins plum tomatoes
1 bay leaf
2tsp dried oregano
1tsp sugar

1.Fry the onion over a low heat in the oil until softened. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add the tomato puree and cook for 1 minute. Add the tomatoes, bay leaf, oregano and sugar and cook gently for 1 hour, crushing the tomatoes with the back of a wooden spoon, until the sauce is thick and pulpy
2.Remove the bay leaf and check the seasoning. Use straight away or cool, freeze in batches and use within three months

THE PIZZA
1.Preheat the oven to 230oC and lightly oil two baking sheets. Knock the air out of the pizza dough and divide in half. Roll each half into 25.5cm circles. Transfer to baking sheets.
2.Spread the bases with the pizza sauce, then top with your chosen toppings. Bake for 10-15 minutes until crisp and golden.

The main downside that some may find is that all in all the recipe takes a looooong time, with the dough needing one hour of rising time, then about another half an hour after it’s been knocked back, and once all the ingredients are assembled for the sauce you need to leave it for about an hour to cook. But it’s not as if you are cooking constantly for all that time, and if you co ordinate the two by making the sauce whilst the dough is rising then it works very well and gives you time to chop the ingredients you want to put on top, for mine I added sundried tomatoes, mushrooms and then chopped pepper and basil at the last minute (I like the pepper crunchy!). I also experimented with Cheezly super melting mozzarella. Like most vegan cheeses, it tasted yucky by itself, but it melted well on the pizza and was actually pretty nice with all the other ingredients!

My favourite meal for my mum to cook is home made pizza, so I was super excited to try my hand at it, although nervous knowing I had a lot to live up to. But overall I think that this recipe was very very very succesful, I absolutely adored the pizza, the dough was delicious, and the sauce was fantastic, and all of my lashings of mushrooms, sundried tomatoes and basil came together really well. I’m desperate to make it again, and I’ve kept the extra servings of sauce in the freezer, which I may use with pasta at some point this week. When I next have a free day I’m going to make a bulk load of pizza dough and sauce and freeze it all so that I can whip it up much faster!

My non-vegan review this week was from one of my awesome housemates and friends Becki, she seemed pretty impressed and said ‘That’s really good, not sure on the texture of the cheese (not very stringy like normal mozzarella), but the sauce and dough are both really good.’ So all in all I’m very very proud!