Pizza or what happened... when yeast meets the beast

Now that I am not so scared of yeast anymore, I've been on a rampant baking spree in my kitchen hence no blogs left unseen and no one spared from my experiments. This whole bread making experience has been quite uplifting... and its actually fun to watch dough rise up only to get punched down. I am not known to be such a sadist, but you know like I said before, these days things are different.

fungal cruelty

Ok this thing about pizzas (this is a veggie rant so you may skip it altogether and hit the next para) why do vegetarians only have two pizza choices? the promising Veggie Delight and the oh-so-promising Garden Veggie Delight... when actually everything about the two are far from delightful. While browsing today I came across a link at a blog called Veggie Terrain. The link takes you to a very humorous article by Taylor Clark called Meatless Like Me and the following line from there succinctly sums up my present line of thinking "vegetarians are normal people with normal food cravings".

The pizza recipe is a 'from scratch one' I scavenged out of a pile of archives at Deeba's blog. Needless to say, practically every post of hers is on my must make list. For the recipe do check out Passionate About Baking: Pizza from scratch.


Here's how I made the pizza sauce:
Paste of Tomatoes - about 4
Tomato sauce - 1 cup
Bay leaf - 1
Minced Garlic - 2 cloves
Oregano - 1 tsp
Chilly pdr/paprika - 1 tsp or less
Olive oil - a little
Salt & sugar to taste.

Method:
1. Heat oil in a wide pan, sauté the bay leaf followed by garlic, tomato paste & the tomato sauce.

2. Sprinkle the oregano and chilly powder, followed by some salt and about a tsp of sugar.

3. Let cook on low flame till most of the water evaporates and the mixture has a sauce like consistency. Check for seasoning, take off flame and allow to cool.

Once you roll out the pizza spread the sauce liberally, add your toppings and a dash of olive oil and bake gas mark 4 for about 15, 20 min.or until the cheese looks melted and the crust begins to brown.

I made two kinds of pizzas, one was the 'Vengeful Veggie' (i threw in some thinly sliced eggplants, onions, spring onions, zuchini, peppers and spinach along with mozzarella). The other I call 'Popeye Delight' this one had mozarella, spinach, mozarella, cottage cheese - in that order.

Popeye Delight

Vengeful Veggie

I had some dough leftover so I tried out two things: Curried Calzone and Micro mini pizzas - perfect for kids (and adults) to nibble on. The beast has been unleashed, watch this space for more on my tryst with the pizza dough.

Thanks to Deeba's tipoff I found the Wild Yeast blog by Susan, there's some mean actions going on there, I am tame by comparison. So right now I am off now for some YeastSpotting!