pitta pizza party - 5/6/2014

Sometimes in order to get people to read the stuff I write about dough with tomatoes on, I post the link to new blog entries on my Facebook. Last time I did this - for the pizza bagels post a few weeks ago - I was LITERALLY INUNDATED (four people commented) with suggestions for the next bread I should turn into a pizza. The victor was pitta bread, and as I was a pitta pizza novice until last night, my pals Hector and Lu came over to give me a hand in undertaking this complex transformation of mere bread to delicious meal. Essentially this was the pizza equivalent to the bit in She's All That when Evan Rachel Wood takes her glasses off, shedding her plain Jane exterior, and wears a tight dress in order 2 fulfil her destiny as a complete betty. Pitta pizza is also a betty.

So first of all we started by making some pizza sauce. Same ingredients as the ones for the sauce in the bagel post, except we added oregano too. It tasted good.

Then Hector, as the resident pitta pizza expert (his mum makes them for him when he goes home from uni in the holidays), performed the most crucial part of the operation - carefully slicing the pittas down the side so you end up with two flat bits per pitta, rather than two stubby halves like usual, say if you were putting the pitta in the toaster.

Hector was super stoked to be cutting some pitta bread. It is his calling.

Then we chopped some veg (I think we had mushrooms, peppers, red onion, black olives, courgettes, chillies and sundries tomatoes), spread the sauce over the pittas which were lined up on baking trays wrapped in foil, topped them (I just had veg, Hector and Lu also had torn mozzarella which seemed like a cool touch), and put them in the oven to bake for around ten minutes at about 160 degrees (my oven gets very hot very quickly though, so maybe adjust that for your own appliances). But not before I had the chance to take some incredibly obnoxious A Level Art-lookin' photos:

What I liked about pitta pizzas as opposed to the other breads I have experimented with in the past was that they give you room for lots of toppings, which is something that bagels and crumpets just cannot do. Also, their thinness is gr8 if you're about that crispy base life (I am), because as long as you cook them correctly in the oven (i.e. don't let them burn), they'll crisp up really nicely so that you get a p satisfying crunch when you bite into them. They are also surprisingly substantial, in that they're filling (we had these for dinner, but we did use Tesco's large pittas rather than regular sized ones) and also that they're real sturdy - as you can see they have quite a lot of toppings on them and they held up to that pressure well. I think pitta bread would do well on The Cube. When they came out of the oven, they looked like this:

which is, clearly, completely dope. 

So yeah, those are pitta pizzas, and they are probably the best bread I have Queer Eye For The Straight Guy'd so far. They taste great - the base is crispy and the toppings we used were all delicious and didn't make the bread soggy or droopy or anything. Making them was also a really fun thing to do with palz (shout out to Hector and Lucy for coming to help out) so I would recommend that u have a pitta pizza party of yr own sometime soon.

Pizza rating: 9/10

vegan pizza b4g3ls - 18/5/2014

Pizza bagels you were promised, so pizza bagels you shall have. Continuing my odyssey of turning various bread products into PIZZA products (see 'za crumpets from about 2 weeks ago), I focussed my attentions on the bagel. I just want to take a second to give a shout out to bagels because they are seriously fucking great. I am all about that gooey chewy inside bread life. 

So "how did u make pizza bagels???" I hear u cry. Well, my pizza pal(s) (lol who am I kidding), it was very easy. This post will tell u just how to do it *a million pizza fans breathe a collective sigh of relief*. Also in a restinpizza first, I'm about to hit u with an actual recipe 'cause I made my own pizza sauce so hold on to your damn hats.

These are the basic ingredients you will need. You will also need some crushed garlic or a squeezy tube of garlic puree which is not pictured because I forgot. I chose to use New York Bakery bagels mainly because they come pre-cut and I have some sort of delusion about being a luxury bitch who refuses to do menial tasks such as slicing bagels, but you can obvi use any you like according to personal taste/budget.

Now for the pizza sauce recipe - I usually use that Tesco stuff that I've talked about a couple of times before, but because I am part Italian it was drummed into me as a child that one should always have a vast array of tomato products to hand in case of emergency (I am really not joking about this, I have witnessed my dad buy at least a two tins of chopped tomatoes on every supermarket shop I've ever accompanied him on), and also because I'm hella poor right now, I decided to use the tools at my disposal to craft my own delicious pizza sauce.

So. For four pizza bagels, I'd recommend about a tablespoon and a half of tomato puree, as well as a few generous sloshings (v professional food blogger) of passata. Give it all a mix about so that it's a consistency somewhere in between the slightly thin passata and the thicker puree, and then add a squeeze squeeze of garlic (depending on how strong u like it ;-) hehe) and some herby seasoning - the one I use is Sainsbury's Italian Herb Seasoning and it is a rly good all purpose seasoning for pasta sauces and pizzas and so on. Give all of that a stir and as if by magic - you got yourself pizza sauce. Even though I made this sauce for the bagels, it's obviously fine for any other sort of pizza too (it actually tastes really really good so would recommend giving it a go if you're so inclined) and once you've bought all the ingredients it does actually end up working out cheaper, if a bit less convenient, than buying a pre-made one.

We toasted the bagels super lightly, and then added the sauce, and then we also added some grated mozzarella style Cheezly (which u can see in the ingredients photo - rly good vegan cheese replacement that actually melts and bubbles and does all that cool normal cheese stuff; obviously u can use any cheese, dairy or otherwise, of ur choice and u will still wield similar results). We didn't add any more toppings but we definitely could have - sliced black olives would have been cool here and I'm definitely gonna try em out next time. Then we put them under the grill for abooout 5 mins at abooout 150 degrees (this is why you don't need to toast the bagels loads in the first place), but because every oven is different, just keep an eye on them - you can probably take them out when the cheese starts to bubble. 

You should end up with something like this (tbh I don't see how you couldn't unless you are an idiot or baby, this is not a challenging recipe). They taste totally friggin dope and imo they're better than pizza crumpets. But maybe that's just because I like bagels more than I like crumpets. The squishy inside-ness of the bagel went really, sort of unexpectedly, well with the sauce/cheese combination, and this is 100% something I would make again. 

I am not sure what bread I will turn into a pizza next. I will have to think on it and get back to you. 4 now, c u all soon and happy pizza bagel-ing. Mwah xoxoxo

Pizza rating: 8.5/10