bournville chocolate: Pizza

Mushroom Pizza

Pizza is fun to make! I love making yeasty doughs, and you also get to choose any flavour combo you like. It's hard to get them just as crispy as the professionals do, but if you've got an oven that can get really really hot you'll still have something delicious on your hands.

We had one of my friends over for dinner on New Years Eve, and we made it a pizza night! The dough recipe is from Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Italy, a huge tome that I've had for years, but never actually used - it's almost too big and intimidating to be picked up and read regularly.

His recipe for pizza is actually for small pizette, but it's not too hard to just use the dough to make grown-up sized pizza.

The dough is a pretty standard yeast dough, with a good lot of olive oil in it. However, what is interesting is the way in which you knead the dough. It is referred to as la colomba, (dove), because you fold the dough over like a dove's wings!

To start, you press it out with your fingers, both stretching the dough and leaving lots of indentations in it.

Then, much like the turns in puff pastry, you fold the dough into thirds...

... and stretch it out again. You do that a couple of times (no need to rest in between), and then let it rest for 20 minutes. According to the recipe, the indenting and folding creates pockets of air that get trapped in the dough.

You can already see the trapped air bubble when you roll out the dough...

I divided the dough into 3 pieces, and we all choose our own toppings for them.

Onions, salami, red peppers, provolone cheese, mushrooms and tomato sauce (homemade!!!) - all of my favourites.

They took about 20 minutes in a super-hot oven (240C).

The pizza you see at the top of this post was pure mushroom - mushrooms and cheese, with a little porcini powder for extra mushroomy oomph.

This one had mushrooms, tomato, cheese and salami!