As I mentioned in my previous blog post, due to being safe at home for the two weeks, Stephen and I I have been experimenting with new recipes. We are both regular viewers of the Bon Appétit Youtube Channel and last weekend, we learnt a new way to make pizza using one of their videos. A way to make a tray-baked sized pizza. We made every inch of it from scratch and it was so much fun to make, not to mention absolutely delicious.
To make the dough:
We combined 400g of plain flour with 200ml of lukewarm water, and a sachet of dry action yeast. I was the lucky one in charge of the dough and kneading is the most enjoyable part of the entire process. We also added a handful of dried basil and a pinch of salt. We then left our dough to rise for 30 minutes. During this time, we moved on to making our pizza sauce.
To make our sauce:
We started by cooking half an onion on a gentle heat until it was slightly transparent, along with garlic, spring onion, and chopped celery for flavour. We then added a tin of chopped tomatoes and left it to simmer and reduce. As cooked chicken was one of our chosen pizza toppings, we also added some of the juices from the chicken into the sauce at the end.
To make our chicken (and by extension, our chicken sauce!)
We fried our chicken in butter, and seasoned with cumin, coriander, a dash of cayenne pepper, turmeric, dried basil and dried parsley.
Back to our dough:
After the 30 minutes, our dough had risen beautifully and we began to follow the 'Grandma-Style' technique features on this Bon Appétit video. To do this, we liberally oiled our rectangular baking tray and stretched our pizza dough out to the corners of the tray until it wouldn't stretch anymore. At this point, we let our pizza dough rest for another 30 minutes, and used this time to start preparing our pizza toppings. It was also at this point that I took the cooked celery sticks out of our gorgeous tomato-ey sauce and had them as a snack.
Toppings:
We then went back to our dough which was now more supple and flexible, so we continued to stretch the pizza dough all the way to the edges of the baking tray. After this, we spread our sauce and enjoyed topping our pizza with mozzarella, mushrooms, our cooked chicken, bell peppers, spinach, and a lovely helping of cheddar cheese. This then went into the oven for 25 minutes at 180 degrees or gas mark 4 or 350 degrees fahrenheit, because we like to be inclusive around here.
By the time it was ready to eat, it was Earth Hour in the UK, so we turned off all of our lights and enjoyed our (large) pizza by candlelight. Who says you can't have date night while in self-isolation?
Have you learnt any new recipes during this time? Let me know! xo
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