Why Pizza you ask? Cause they are the easiest to make.
There is a newly opened bakery shop in my area selling ingredient and bakery supply. Since we got an oven couple of months ago, it hasn’t really been used to the fullest, resulting in my decision to make myself a nice big slab of pizza for lunch (and likely dinner as well).
I quickly went through some online recipes and noted a common ingredient being high protein flour, yeast, mozzarella cheese for the dough and Prego spaghetti sauce for the base. Due to inexperience, I’ve made the decision to use only sausages for the topping, so in case anything were to happen, I can still pick them off and eat it solo.
Total cost:
| 500g flour |
RM 5.50 |
| 5g yeast |
RM 0.50 |
| 1x Ramly sausages |
RM 5.80 |
| 300g mozzarella |
RM 8.90 |
| 1/3 bottle of Large Prego spaghetti sauce |
RM 3.00 |
| Total |
RM 23.70 |
Basically this is expensive. If this fails, I’m going Domino’s forever.
So I first started by sifting 500g of flour in the mixing bowl, pour in another 250ml of tap water, add in the yeast and mix the whole blob for 2 minutes on slow, then 8 minutes on high. At the end of it the blob should be just wet enough to stick together but still dry enough not to stick to your fingers.
PS: Keep the yeast to a minimum, you’re making pizza crust, not bread.
So once the blob is ready. I placed it on a pan so that the yeast can work their magic. Recipe says to leave it for 40 minutes but I went Facebooking so an hour went past before I remembered.
I took the blob out and placed in flat on the pizza pan. Due to the lack of a rolling pin I just did a roti canai on the dough and spread it evenly (not in picture). I went the lazy way and used spaghetti sauce instead of home made tomato paste (which is the same thing anyway, less work). Applying it evenly across the dough, I grated some mozzarella cheese on the tomato sauce before layering chopped sausages on it.
The recipe actually calls to pre bake the dough before layering the topping but again, due to hunger and laziness. I decided to cook both dough and topping together by turning the heat to 220’C rather than 150’C and cook the same amount of time. I just have to keep an eye on the sausages and cheese so that they don’t burn out.
Total cooking time is quite fast, about 20 minutes or so. But probably due to the yeast still fluffing the pizza, I realize that the longer we bake the thing, the larger it became. By the time it’s done, the whole pan is overflowing with juicy goodness.
Wanting the crust and topping to have a more ‘grilled’ look, I popped the above back in for another 10 minutes of high heat grilling. If I have a heat gun, that might work too.
The end result is a nicely baked, golden brown topping and succulent soft pizza dough for dinner. It was so good that I forgot to take pictures until only 4 is left.
Yummy!
