Tuesday, April 13, 2010

PIZZA




I am making a middle of the year resolution, in order to curb my cook book buying addiction, I hereby promise to make at least one dish from each new book I buy within a fortnight - starting next week!!!

While gearing myself up to this, I decided I'd better use some of my more recent purchases - "The Australian Women's Weekly - The Complete Book of Modern Entertaining", it is a lovely looking book, fantastic photography and very doable recipes.

I have made pizza before, without much success (could be the yeast phobia issue!!) my pizza bases were too thick and spongy - I like my pizza thin and crispy!  But I knew from all my favourite Australian blogs that the AWW are ultra reliable, so I decided to take the bull by the horns (so to speak) and give it a go.  My favourite pizza restaurant is "The Steps of Rome" off Grafton Street in Dublin, and they make a fantastic potato and rosemary pizza - and when I saw one in this book - I knew it was for me.

The pizza base recipe makes enough for two large pizzas, so I made one potato and one asparagus and tomato.

The base was really easy to make - I used the kitchen aid mixer.  I found it easy to roll out to the desired thickness (or actually thinness!)  The recipe called for raw potato, but I have a "thing" about undercooked potato so I decided to use up the previous nights left over roasted baby potatoes, and that was a good decision the pizza was delicious - I just spread the sliced potato over the uncooked base (which I spread with some goats cheese) then sprinkled with chopped rosemary and maldon salt, drizzled a little extra virgin olive oil over and popped into the oven.



As I was on a "use up the leftovers" roll, I chose to use the roasted asparagus and tomatoes which I had stored in the fridge.  I spread some "Bunalun" (an excellent product) concentrated tomato puree over the base and then placed the veg on top.  I then cut up a ball of mozzarella and distributed the pieces over the top.  The result was a deeply flavoured topping over a light and crispy base.  Good stuff!

I am having a problem with the alignment of this post  - the only thing I can  think to do is post the recipe for the  pizza base separately, and then publish this post. I'm really sorry about this!!



5 comments:

Jutta said...

AWW are such an aussie cooking institution, to be found in just about everyone's house back home in Australia. I have COOK and KITCHEN as well as some paperback baking ones and my favourite kids cakes one.

I usually use Jamie Oliver's pizza dough recipe from The Naked Chef. And I use passata for sauce sprinkled with dried italian herbs. I like to make a big batch of bases and par-bake them and then freeze individually wrapped as then whenever we want pizza you can grab one out of the freezer, put the toppings on and straight into the oven just takes a bit longer to cook of course, but still quicker than deciding on a pizza and having it delivered and tastes fab. My first attempts at rolling out pizzas was hilarious; I even made one look like a boomerang!

Pam said...

It looks and sounds great! And that's a great resolution also, I should do the same!

Anonymous said...

BG, love your toppings. This is one area where our pizza chef (hubby) says he will experiment more. Interested in Jutta's idea above to make bases for the freezer

Lucie said...

Do you deliver? :) These look FAB! I have cut back on recipe books too, I don't read the ones I own, but as soon as someone mentions a book I haven't got I feel I am missing out :) The web is just loaded with recipes - the Sainsbury monthly mag is great too (and cheap!) Lucie x

Brownieville Girl said...

Jutta, as Lily says that's a great idea to freeze the bases, then you always have a quick fresh meal moments away (well half and hour!!)

Pam, I am great at making resolutions - not so good at keeping them!!! Just ordered Venezia by Tessa Kiros, so the clock is ticking!!!

Lily, these toppings worked really well, I love aubergine as well - ideas to pass on the your personal pizza chef (feeling a bit jealous here!!)

Lucie, I am just like you, I "need" every book I read about!!! Unfortunately we don't have Sainsbury here, I have read the magazine and thought it was great.