Growing up my amma would make yummy pizzas with a sand oven (YES! you are reading that right). And it was DEL--LI--CIOUS! Every week we would look forward to our Saturday night pizza dinners! Even my thatha (my paternal grandfather) who was not a big fan of trying out non South Indian dishes, approved of it! Of course for him the pizza had to be followed by a tayir sadam (yoghurt rice with Indian pickle) to complete his meal. Haha!
We would excitedly get those pizza bases from a small store in the campus called Adarsh Bakery, use Maggi ketchup as our tomato sauce base and Amul cheese as our substitute for mozzarella cheese. I would do anything to go back and relive those moments of my childhood!.
Another big influence for my pizza cravings was the pizzas made by Ranga uncle and Darshan aunty. Who were both Chemists and would practically live in their Organic Chemistry Lab. They had a convection oven (for us a FANCY one) where they would bake their yummy pizza for a LONG time. Too long for me to be salivating! Haha. But the end result was simple AMAZZ..ING!
Of course you can choose to make your own pizza dough. But typically during weekdays, usually there is not much time to knead the dough, let it rise and all that jazz. So I usually buy pizza dough from Whole Foods where I do my regular groceries. It works the same!
Let us get started!
Preheat your oven to 450 °F (I like to bake my pizza in a pizza stone, so I let it preheat in that). Check your pizza stone heat limits and use accordingly. You need not have a stone but you can get a cheap one like I have from Walmart for 10 bucks or so or buy a fancy pizza steel which I plan at some point in my life for better results (HINT HINT Santa ;-)).
A tip to handle a store bought dough. Do not remove the dough from the plastic bag instead remove the plastic bag from the dough. Basically avoid breaking the air bubbles from the fermented dough.
Coat the dough with some flour and set it out for sometime till you get other things ready.
Slice your veggies:
1 shallot
1/4 green pepper
1 mushroom
1/4 cup of frozen corn
1/2 of small can of slices black olives
Kale (4 small leaves)
Basil (3 medium sized leaves)
I like to work on the dough directly on my pizza peel. So that it can be transferred to the pizza stone.
Dust the peel generously with flour.
TIP:
Another tip that I recently learnt. Instead of cornmeal or flour, actually SEMOLINA works quite well to make the dough slide easily out of your pizza peel! I can't thank that lady enough at Whole Foods kitchen for this tip!
Start pressing down the dough slowly with hands to flatten it out, to a desired thickness. Sprinkle it with flax seeds.
Apply pasta/ pizza sauce to the pizza dough base (thin coat, do not make it a thick coat, or else it gets soggy). Add shredded cheese on top of the sauce (I used mozzarella here). Then top it up with veggies as mentioned above.
Add the seasonings:
Salt
Pepper
Red chilli flakes
Oregano
Onion powder
Garlic powder
Transfer the pizza to the oven on the pizza stone. Depending on your stone. Mine took 10 min to bake well.
Slice this yumminess and ENJOY!
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