Making our own pizza at home is quite an event. Pizza is a dish that we usually eat on special days, weekends, meals with friends or on those days that 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 that special day you decide not only to eat pizza but also to make it yourself, success is assured. Preparing pizza at home is much easier than it seems (even more so if you have a Thermomix or a bread maker at home to prepare the dough). The results are incredible and you can prepare the pizza to your liking, I assure you that you will repeat!
The pizza recipe that I bring you today has been prepared by Emile Henry for his ceramic base for baking pizzas , which I really recommend if you want to achieve exceptional results. The ceramic base achieves a crispy and perfectly cooked dough and is also ideal for serving and keeping pizza warm at the table.
To enjoy!
Ingredients
For the pizza dough:
- 200g of pizza flour
- 4g of fine salt (1 teaspoon)
- 5g dry yeast (1 teaspoon)
- 2 tablespoons of olive oil
- 100ml of lukewarm water
For the filling:
- 200 ml of tomato sauce
- 5 slices prosciutto ham (thinly sliced Italian ham)
- 100g of mozzarella
- 1 eggplant
- 10 black olives
- Fine salt and ground pepper
For the pesto sauce:
- A pinch of coarse salt
- 12 fresh basil leaves
- 1 clove garlic
- 20gr of pine nuts (1 ½ tablespoons)
- 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
- 100 ml of oil
Preparation
Preparation of homemade pizza dough:
- Heat the water in a saucepan until it reaches about 40 °C.
- Mix the flour, salt, durum wheat flour and dry yeast in a large bowl. A bread scraper will help us.
- Pour in the hot water and olive oil and work the dough, first with the scraper and later with your hands. We must achieve an elastic consistency.
- When the dough is ready, we form 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 we are going to work, and spread the dough on top with the help of a rolling pin, from the center outwards, trying not to work the ends. We leave the pizza base ready to season to taste.
Preparation of the pizza filling:
- Pour the tomato sauce over the dough and spread it over the entire surface, leaving the ends free.
- Add a little salt and pepper.
- Cut the aubergines into thin slices with the help of a knife or a mandolin (in cases like this, with the Oxo Good Grips or the Kobra they work great to quickly get perfect cuts of the same size). We pass them for a moment on the grill , very hot and with a point of oil, to mark them on each side (You can also do it on a barbecue , summer lends itself to it!).
- We place the slices of roasted eggplant on the pizza, followed also by the sliced mozzarella (a mozzarella cutter can be very useful) and the prosciutto ham in strips or pieces.
- To finish, we place the olives also distributed on top of the pizza.
To make the pesto:
- We put the pine nuts in the chop-chop grinder or in a tall glass in which to use a blender , and we also add the Parmesan cheese, the garlic, the basil leaves, the olive oil and the coarse salt.
- Blend until you get a smooth mixture.
- We pour it in the form of rain on top of the pizza.
It's time to bake the pizza! If you use the Emile Henry ceramic base , it is convenient to pre-heat it for 10 minutes in the oven at 200ºC to get a crispy dough. After 10 minutes we can put the pizza on top of the base. Be careful not to move the dough as much as possible, a pizza shovel or a cake shovel will be useful.
The base with the pizza must be in the central/lower part of the oven, at 200ºC. The pizza is ready when you notice the crispy crust and melted mozzarella.
GRADES:
- You can also make the pizza on the barbecue if you have a barbecue with a lid, be it a charcoal one like the one Kettle like gas type Weber 1200 . To do this, introduce the pizza base to heat it on the barbecue while you prepare the pizza; and when it's time to bake it, put the base with the pizza in the barbecue and close the lid. In about 10 minutes you will have a delicious pizza ready to eat!
- A good tip: you can replace the prosciutto ham with prawns, the combination with the rest of the ingredients is equally delicious!
- If you prefer it and you like spicy, you can not prepare the pesto and choose to use a flavored oil after baking, such as Chinata or Tourangelle pizza.
