Fig and prosciutto pizzas

I love pizza. Love it. Homemade stuff never lives up to the ordered-in or restaurant variety (well, in my kitchen at least). That doesn’t stop me from trying out lots of recipes at home.

This week I made this one from the September 2012 edition of the Good Food magazine. It’s the best textured base I’ve tried, easiest to make and the taste was good too. Now all I have to do it find that sauce and figure out the best cooking method…

Fig and prosciutto pizzas

400g strong white bread flour

7g of dried yeast

1 teaspoon of salt

4 tablespoon of olive oil

250ml of warm water

Mix the flour, yeast and salt in a bowl. Add the oil to the water and then pour the whole lot into the flour. Mix with a spoon or your hands. In ever other yeast recipe I’ve read and tried you would always tip the dough onto your countertop and knead it for 10 minutes to stretch out the gluten in the flour. This recipe doesn’t say this, so in the name of research I followed its advice and covered the bowl with cling film and left in on a sunny windowsill for an hour. An hour later, the dough was happily gurgling away.  

Heat your oven to 220°c. Tip the dough onto a floured board and knead it for a moment. Divide into six portions and roll out and put one or two onto a floured baking tray.

Topping

The recipe says to mix 250g of crème fraiche with 50g of Parmesan, some cooked shallots and salt and pepper. Spread a little of this over the pizzas and bake for 10-15 minutes.

The crème fraiche I thought I’d bought and put in the fridge wasn’t to be found, so I cooked some finely chopped onion with some garlic for about five minutes and added a tin of tomato puree and two tins of water and used this instead. Or you could put the mozzarella on the pizzas now and cook them.

When all your pizzas are cooked, scatter the tops with some figs and prosciutto and some fresh, torn balls of mozzarella. 

The pizzas were good, but were better without the figs, so these were picked off and eaten as a post-pizza-pre-jellies-for-dessert snack.

ps: in the magazines intro to this recipe, it says “these are ideal for an impromptu lunch…”. Seeing as the dough takes an hour to rise, they are not as impromptu as GF thinks they are. 

For those hot, summer nights

I have a post written from about 10 days ago, about my plans for a mysterious 3 kilos that seem to have crept onto the bathroom scales over the past few months. The post is currently unpublished as thankfully summer finally arrived, my appetite has vamoosed and with it, about 1.5 of the mysterious 3 kilos.

Today, it is (checks phone) 34 degrees. 34 degrees! Crikey! That’s hot. The in-laws are due any moment for a bbq, and I spent the critical heat hours (ie: midday to 2pm) in the relative coolness of the kitchen rustling up some focaccia, roasting some courgette, aubergine, red onion and tomatoes for a roast veg and bulgur salad and making a Gordon Ramsay lemon tart. I have photos, but first looks and smells are positive!

Roasted vegetable and bulgur salad

For starters, I have a mozzarella, fig, melon and cured meat platter. Open a packet of prosciutto or mixed cured meat and arrange on your dish and add slices of melon, torn balls of mozz and some figs.

Mixed meat, melon, mozzerella and fig platter