Making our own pizza at home is a real event. Pizza is a dish we usually eat on special days, weekends, meals with friends or on those days when we feel like eating in front of the TV to watch a couple of episodes of Sex and the City for the seventh time.
If on that special day you decide not only to eat pizza but also to make it yourself, success is guaranteed. Making pizza at home is much easier than it seems (even more so if you have a Thermomix at home or a bread maker to prepare the dough). The results are amazing and you can make the pizza to your liking — I assure you you'll make it again!
The pizza recipe I bring you today was created by Emile Henry for its ceramic pizza baking stone, which I really recommend if you want to achieve exceptional results. The ceramic stone produces a crispy, perfectly cooked crust and is also ideal for serving and keeping the pizza warm at the table.
Enjoy!
Ingredients
For the pizza dough:
- 200gr pizza flour
- 4gr fine salt (1 teaspoon)
- 5gr dry yeast (1 teaspoon)
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 100ml warm water
For the topping:
- 200ml tomato sauce
- 5 slices prosciutto (Italian ham in thin slices)
- 100gr mozzarella
- 1 eggplant
- 10 black olives
- Fine salt and ground pepper
For the pesto:
- A pinch of coarse salt
- 12 fresh basil leaves
- 1 garlic clove
- 20gr pine nuts (1 ½ tablespoons)
- 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
- 100 ml oil
Preparation
Making the homemade pizza dough:
- Heat the water in a small saucepan until it reaches about 40 °C.
- Mix the flour, salt, durum wheat flour and dry yeast in a large bowl. A dough scraper will be helpful.
- Pour in the hot water and olive oil and work the dough, first with the scraper and later with your hands. You should achieve an elastic consistency.
- When the dough is ready, form it into a ball and let it rest for 30 minutes in the same bowl, covered with a clean cotton cloth.
- Sprinkle flour on the surface where you will work, and roll out the dough on it with a rolling pin, from the center outward, trying not to work the edges. Leave the pizza base ready to season to taste.
Preparing the pizza topping:
- Pour the tomato sauce over the dough and spread it across the surface, leaving the edges free.
- Add a little salt and pepper.
- Cut the eggplants into thin slices using a knife or a mandoline (in cases like this, the Oxo Good Grips or the Kobra are great for quickly getting perfect, equally sized slices). Quickly pass them on a grillvery hot griddle with a touch of oil, to mark them on each side (you can also do this on a barbecue, summer is perfect for that!).
- Place the grilled eggplant slices on the pizza, followed by the mozzarella cut into slices (a mozzarella slicer can be very useful) and the prosciutto torn into strips or pieces.
- To finish, place the olives distributed over the top of the pizza.
To make the pesto:
- Put the pine nuts in the chop-chop chopper or in a tall jug to use a blender, and also add the Parmesan cheese, garlic, basil leaves, olive oil and coarse salt.
- Blend until you get a smooth mixture.
- Drizzle it over the pizza.
It's time to bake the pizza! If you use the Emile Henry ceramic stone, it's advisable to preheat it for 10 minutes in the oven at 200ºC to achieve a crispy crust. After 10 minutes you can place the pizza on the stone. Be careful to move the dough as little as possible; a pizza peel or a cake server will be useful.
The stone with the pizza should be in the middle/lower part of the oven at 200ºC. The pizza will be ready when you see the crust crisp and the mozzarella melted.
NOTES:
- You can also make the pizza on the barbecue if you have a barbecue with a lid, whether a charcoal one like the Kettle or a gas-type Weber 1200. To do this, put the pizza stone on the barbecue to heat it while you prepare the pizza; and when it's time to bake it, place the stone with the pizza on the barbecue and close the lid. In about 10 minutes you'll have a delicious pizza ready to eat!
- A good tip: you can replace the prosciutto with prawns, the combination with the other ingredients is just as delicious!
- If you prefer and like it spicy, you can skip the pesto and opt to use a flavored oil after baking, such as the Chinata or the La Tourangelle pizza oil.
