The Daring Bakers do Pizza!

Yes, it is that time again! Another Daring Baker challenge to post. This month’s challenge was chosen by Rosa from Rosa’s Yummy Yums and is Pizza! This obviously left quite a wide scope for imagination.

I have made pizza dough from scratch quite often, so the challenge wasn’t something new for me. I do love home made pizza though, so my challenge was to make something simple but tasty. Some of the best pizza I have ever tasted was at a small pizzeria (if that is actually an Italian word!) in Rome called La Renella. They sell pizza by weight in Italy and my husband and I kept going back there for more. Some of the stand out flavours were eggplant and mozzarella and potato and parmesan. I loved the simplicity of the Roman pizza.



I found the dough for this recipe quite sticky, but past experience has shown me that a sticky dough often gives a crisper base. I also only made ¼ of the recipe – enough just to make one large pizza. We were meant to try tossing the dough as part of the challenge, but my dough just a bit sticky for that. I had visions of dough sticking to the ceiling! The pizza stone (or tray in my case) was liberally sprinkled with semolina which gave the pizza a great crust.

We had to top our pizza with both a sauce and a topping. I made a sauce using chopped onion, garlic, olive oil and canned Italian tomatoes. I simply reduced this down, adding a small spoonful of brown sugar, salt and pepper to make a delicious well flavoured sauce. On top of the sauce I used prosciutto, blue cheese and pinenuts. My husband and I both really enjoyed this pizza! It was the first meal that I cooked in the kitchen of the place that we are renting while our house is being built. The oven passed the pizza test (and more importantly passed the shortbread test as well!).



See what variations of pizza the other Daring Bakers (I think there are well over 1000 of us now!) made here.