Vegan Dinner Recipe: Fat pizza!

Monday today. It's been pretty poor weather, and today is my one full day off in the week (because I don't have work or interning or uni) so I have time at home to cook, should I so desire.

And who doesn't desire pizza, like, all the time?



I started an essay, finished my readings, answered my emails, drove my friend to pick up her car, and did some stuff around the house. I also went down to the local Italian grocery store and picked up all my veggies for the week so I have lots of delicious new greenery.

For me, the joy of pizza is making my own dough. I love it, but it means pizza is time consuming. Not the time I'm actually spending making it, but the time I have to be home to make the dough, leave it, come back to it, leave it again, and then actually make pizza out of it. So I started at three thirty.

Ingredients:

Dough:
One cup of warm water
1.5 tablespoons of sugar
A 7gram packet of yeast (The dried stuff, but the real stuff)
3 cups of flour
1 teaspoon of salt
2 tablespoons of olive oil plus a bit extra.

Pesto:
1 cup fresh corriander
2 cups fresh basil
a third of a cup of almonds (slivered preferably)
a bit of lemon juice
a big pinch or two of salt
two cloves of garlic
a couple of tablespoons of olive oil

Pizza 1:
about six cherry tomatoes
a quarter of a capsicum, I used an eighth green and an eighth yellow
three sliced mushrooms
a shallot sliced
a garlic clove
a bit of tinned pineapple
some baby spinach leaves
some ripped basil leaves
as much vegan cheese (I use Notzerella) as you can handle

Pizza 2:
two potatoes and a nub of sweet potato, chopped real small and baked with rosemary, salt and olive oil in the oven.
three sliced mushrooms
a shallot sliced
a garlic clove
some chopped up facon
some baby spinach leaves
as much vegan cheese (I use Notzerella and for this pizza, a "blue style" danish vegan cheese) as you can handle

1) Bake the chopped potato and sweet potato in a 180 degree oven for about thirty minutes, until crunchy on the outside and cooked through.

DOUGH:

Proof the yeast. Stir the water, sugar and yeast together, and then leave them to sit for ten minutes until the yeast froths a bit. This means your yeast is good... yay yeast!

Yeast, water and sugar before proofing

Combine the flour, salt and oil, then add the yeast mix and gather it all together. Once you've got it tip it onto a floured coutertop.

The picture isn't great, but notice how the yeast mix is pretty fluffy on top?

Knead that sucker for five to ten minutes. I'm pretty good at kneading, but don't stop until you have a lovely, not to sticky but still soft and stretchy ball of dough.

Oil up the bowl (making sure it's quite cleanish) and drop your dough in, turning it so it's all oiled.

Oiled dough ball

Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and put it somewhere warm for an hour. In winter, I like to put a couple of inches of hot water in the sink and stand the bowl on a cup or a little stand of some kind, so the dough is sitting somewhere definitely warm and not drafty.

Prep your toppings while you wait.

I like to get all the non-refrigerated pizza ingredients and combine them in separate bowls so they can just be tipped on later.

Toppings, ready to go

Now is also the time to make pesto.

Pesto, pre processing

Stick everything except the oil in the food processor and mix, scraping down the sides. Once it's all satisfactorially mixed, keep it processing low and SLOWLY drizzle the oil in the hole in top so it turns into pesto. Keep stopping and scraping if you have to.

and, there you have it.

Go and study, or read, or facebook for an hour while the dough rises. It should AT LEAST double in size.

Look at it. Is it big and fluffy?

Now THAT is a good rise.

Yeah.

Punch it with your fist. It's very theraputic.

Take that, dough ball.

Give it a quick knead again, just for a minute, to take away the spongey quality. Gather it back up, re oil it, replace the hot water in the sink with fresh hot water, cover it back up and leave it again.

Where did all the puff go?

I like to take this opportunity to go to the gym, so it sits for an hour and a half.

If you leave the house at this time, ask somebody else in the house who will be there to crank the oven to 230 degrees fifteen minutes before you get home.

Get home, possibly incredibly short of breath and red faced. Up to you.

Okay. Get the dough out of the bowl (it should have doubled in size again) and cut it in half.

There it is!

Now, roll each half into approximate circles, and then pick those suckers up and give them a stretch around the edges.

Don't worry if they aren't perfectly symmetrical, they're rustic damnit. Pinch up those edges.

Stretched and rustic.

Now slather on the pesto. In a house of pesto fiends, I used ALL the pesto. But feel free to reserve some, because that is A LOT of pesto.

Tip each bowl of topping onto the respective pizzas and spread the toppings to each edge.

Add the refrigerated stuff - pineapple and facon.

Top lightly with baby spinach and torn basil, then SLATHER in Notzarrella.

Okay. Put them in the oven. Because the fan in my oven is broken, I have to rotate things so they cook evenly. If you have a better oven than me, cook at 230 degrees for 15 minutes. The edges of the pizza should be browning and the Notzarrella should be melty.

Take from the oven.

HUNGRY.

Eat.

If you have a household comprising of two people of the male persuasion who enjoy eating, this will serve them and someone who eats less than them, like me.

What I mean is, there's no pizza left.