Night number 3 of pulled pork and I had to come up with something to cook for the flatties. I actually had those burritos on the second night but they are nothing to write home (or on a blog) about. I like the way you can toast the shit out of them until the cheese and meat and rice and anything else becomes amalgamated into a hot delicious mess.
In my opinion, pizzas and burgers are a staple of any flat repertoire. I’ve made and eaten so many burgers and pizzas over the years; I’d like to think I know a thing or 2 about making burgers. It’s gotten to the point where you just initiate
“the burger protocol” and you can whip up a meal that everyone loves in like half an hour. Since learning how to make bread, I’ve got to a point where I’m baking my own buns and making my own pizza bases. It feels good. It feels really good.
For the bases I just used a standard overnight pre-ferment that might be a little wetter than usual. Two batches of the bread made about 6 decent sized 12 inchers. Which was more than enough to use up the rest of the pulled pork and have extra for lunch the next day. I’ll chuck up a recipe but honestly, this post is mainly to show off the pizza I made essentially from scratch. Everyone has they own way of topping their pizza so I’m not going to tell you how to do it. I’m just proud of the way mine turned out.
So this turned out to be a much shorter post than I originally imagined. These were the 2 photos that was actually happy about.
Pizza Bases (makes ~6 x 12′ bases)
Ingredients for the pre-ferment (make this the day before)
- 500g of plain or hi grade flour
- 500g of water
- 5g of yeast
Method
- Mix ingredients together. You may want to let the yeast soak in water before you make the mix but honestly I don’t think it makes much of a difference.
- Leave to ferment overnight.
Ingredients for the final mix
- 500g of plain or hi grade flour
- 250g of water
- 20g of salt
- 10-15g of yeast
Method
- Measure out the water and pour around the sides of the pre-ferment starter. Run a spatula around the edge of the bowl so that the water separates the starter from the sides of the bowl.
- In another large bowl, measure out the flour salt and yeast. Pour the starter and the water into the main bowl.
- Mix, making sure that the ingredients are largely combined and there is no loose flour at the bottom. Also make sure that there aren’t any clumps of dry flour in the dough. It should be quite a wet dough.
- Let the dough rest for about 10 minutes, it should start relaxing into a blob at the bottom of the bowl.
- At this point, you’re going to want to grab one side of the dough, stretch it to the point before it breaks and fold it over the top of the blob. Repeat this for the other 3 sides of the dough.
- You want to repeat this folding process about 2-3 times before leaving it alone to rise for reals
- Once you’ve let the bread rise for about 5 hours, sooner or later depending on your schedule.
- Divide the dough into roughly 6 equal bits or 5 or 4. Up to you. Dividing this into 6 will give you 12 inch pizzas.
- They are pretty much ready to use at this point if not you can refrigerate to retard the rising process.
- I’m guessing you’re not a pizza chef that can toss it into the pizza shape so in order to stretch them out I just use my fists to slowly stretch the dough into a round-ish shape.
Like I said, I’m not going to tell you how to top your pizzas. But I had pulled pork, red onion, mushrooms with sprinkles of bacon here and there. Topped with grated smoked mozzarella. And prawns because prawns on pizza go with anything and are delicious.
It’s nice to eat something that you’ve pretty much made everything from scratch. The dream is to get tender pizza dough that can withstand wet toppings. The pre-ferment just lifts the status of the crust from obligatory carbs to something worth munching on. This was pretty close to the dream
The Shitty Food Blog 