Lee's Blog

Makin' The Dough

I was a bit nervous about getting the water temp right, but it seemed to work out ok. It needs to be hot enough to give the yeast the warmth it needs to grow but not too hot or you'll kill the yeast.

The sugar and the yeast in the bowl.

Adding the water.

After the yeast and water has been left for about 10 minutes.

After the salt and oil has been added, working in the flour one cup at a time.

Kneading the mix, and beating it for good measure. Adding flour as I go.

I added a bit over half a cup of extra flour all up.

My dough ball.

My dough ball, flattened out (I didn't realise I was supposed to keep it as a ball, but no matter), rubbed with olive oil and covered in glad wrap.

The dough has risen after being left in the sun for an hour. hurrah.

The dough is broken down into portions and refigerated.

Garlic & Herb Pizzas

Since living in Melbourne we often have garlic pizza instead of garlic bread. Our most local (down the street) pizzaria and restaurant make pizza we're not too fond of.. except for their garlic and herb which we often have on the side of our main dishes there. It is flavoursome and has a lovely texture from the course salt flakes, so I've tried to approximate something similar here.

Here I've diced a really large garlic clove (about three normal ones would replicate), added about 1/2 a teaspoon of dried oregano, and some course salt flakes, and left to infuse for a few hours.

The oil mix, spread accross a small piece of dough I'd rolled out. So hard to make it circular!

After ten minutes at 210 degrees C.

This was really delicious. It could have been cooked for another two minutes I'd say - I was worried about burning the garlic but it just browned nicely. The only problem was the course salt was way too salty, so I'll give that a miss next time and just put a wee bit of regular salt on.

So yum, it was, that we made another, with the leftover oil and garlic mix! I forgot to press on the dough with my fingers before topping this one, and it puffed up. But still very yum!

Hawaiian Salsa Pizza

For our main pizza we wanted to replicate something I ate last weekend, a hawaiian pizza with tomato salsa as the base, topped with ham, pineapple, and mozarella. We used old el paso tomato salsa with a medium heat, on reflection mild is probably more suited to this..

Action shot : M throws ham onto the pizza.

Ready to go into the oven..

After about 12 minutes at 210c we took it out. It was still a little soft in the middle.. not sure whether we need to raise the heat, or the cooking time, or roll it out thinner.. I rolled it out as thin as I could, but it was tough! But the taste... delicious! We made another one later with less salsa, more cheese (cheese below and on top of other ingredients) and added olives.

We will definitely be doing this again! And I still have enough dough leftover for two small pizzas, so I am going to pop the dough in the freezer for another time.