Pizza

Lunch - Vegetarian

You don't need to spend £300+ on an Ooni or Gosney outdoor pizza oven to get decent home-made pizza anymore, you can get them for around £150 from Amazon and indeed sometimes under £100 from your favourite European discount retailer.

The key to doing this is getting all your ingredients chopped and prepared ready for you to just assemble together in a fast and smooth motion before putting in the oven.

Add fresh or dried herbs to the topping or to the base mix for extra fun.

I have this for Saturday lunch during the summer, but you can have it for whatever meal you like.

Cooking method: Bake
Serves: 2

Time: Long - longer than 60 minutes
Difficulty: Tricky - a bit more involved to put together

Equipment

• Dough hooks
• Food mixer
• Pizza cutter
• Pizza oven
• Pizza peel
• Pizza stone
• Rolling pin
• Spatula

Ingredients

• Condiment, cube, or tube
• Salt - 0.5 teaspoon
• Drink or liquid
• Water - 130 ml
• Eggs / cheese / dairy
• Cheese (mozzarella - grated) - some
• Cheese (mozzarella) - some
• Flour / sugar / baking
• Yeast (dried) - 1
• Flour (00 grade) - 200 gm
• Meat
• Pancetta (chopped) - some
• Oil
• Olive (extra virgin) - some
• Tin or jar
• Tomato passata - some
• Vegetable
• Mushrooms - some
• Olives - some
• Onion (chopped) - some

Method

Put the flour, yeast, salt, and lukewarm water into the mixer and set it kneading for about 10 minutes. Leave it to rise for an hour or so.

Time passes, and you'll need to chop your onions, olives, and mushrooms, slice your big ball of mozzarella, and arrange all that artfully on some kind of plate - for no reason other than it looks good. Take all the stuff out to where you keep your outdoor pizza oven and lay it out logically on a table. It's important you lay everything out logically, because making like Graham Kerr when making pizza both looks good, and acting moving and smoothly for all the actions will get you better results at the end of it.

Light your pizza oven, and get it to around 400C.

Cover your hands in flour and take a big blob of pizza dough out of the mixer bowl, and form it into a ball. Slap it onto a floured pizza stone, and roll it out into a thin pizza shape with your floured rolling pin; whilst you're rolling it out, keep rotating it, flipping it, and flouring it as you go.

Once it's as thin and wide as you want it, give the top layer another dusting of flour just to make sure, and flip it onto the pizza peel with the floured side down; you may find a spatula helps with this.

Using a spoon, spread a layer of the tomato passata onto the base, and then build up all your other ingredients - onions, olives, pancetta, mushrooms, sliced mozzarella and grated mozarella - onto the base, and drizzle the top with some olive oil.

Open the door of the pizza oven (ensuring the oven is still at around 400C) and flick the assembly in; again you may find a spatula helps you get it in off the peel in one nice piece. The first few times you do this it'll almost certainly be a disaster, but you'll get the knack eventually.

Shut the door of the oven and let it cook - but check every 10-20 seconds or so; srsly, it cooks this quickly in a small outdoor pizza oven at full temperature! If you're able to without making a mess it's good to use the peel to rotate the pizza every time you check to help with even cooking, but again that's a knack you'll have to develop.

Once you start to see deep browning on either the cheese or the base the pizza is cooked - take it out, put it on your plate and cut however you like your pizza to be cut, and top up the fuel in the oven ready for the next one.