pizza

Two Ingredient Pizza Dough

- Alex Prichard 4 Comments

2 ingredient pizza dough

The idea of a two ingredient pizza dough recipe has been floating around the internet for a while. This hit my inbox at some stage and while I noted it, I never really thought there was anything wrong with my existing pizza dough recipe.

We had pizza a week or so ago and had some mozzarella hanging around in the fridge, so I was determined to use it up before it needed binning.  Unfortunately, inspiration was a bit thin on the ground at the end of last week so … pizza it was. However, given that we always have yoghurt in the fridge I thought maybe it would be worth a bit of an experiment.

I don’t know where the two ingredient dough originated but kidspot seems to stake an early claim. However, by both my standards and those of many of the commenters, the recipe given is really rather deficient.

  • Serving size? 1 pizza base. Because there’s some kind of universal standard for pizza bases …
  • Greek or natural yoghurt is given in the list of ingredients … but the recipe creator says in the comments she hasn’t tried with natural yoghurt …
  • There are a ton of complaints about the ratios
  • There’s no cooking temperature
  • There’s no cooking time

And that’s before I complain about the fact that the flour quantity is given in cups, rather than grams.

I’m all for playing fast and loose with recipes but I suspect that had you never made pizza dough before you’d be facing an uphill battle with this one!

The following recipe makes a thin crust for a 30cm diameter pizza tray. We find that this is perfect for dinner for the two of us (the small child won’t touch pizza on account of the bread component).

Of course, the really important part of all of this is … how did it taste? While it was OK it was … just OK. While it was a thin and crispy base it had a slight but discernible taste of raw flour and the texture was slightly too crumbly (for want of a better word). The dough is also very soft which makes it difficult to work with.

I can see the appeal in this dough – no yeast and no rising time. But with dried yeast so readily available and the rising time for pizza dough less crucial (and, indeed, for ease of dinner prep I made this dough in the afternoon so there was no advantage to me at all there) I’m not sure that the compromise in taste, texture and easily workable dough is worth it.

We’ll be returning to our standard recipe.  Yes, it’s 4 ingredients but so worth it!

 

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Two Ingredient Pizza Dough

Ingredients

  • 200g self raising flour + extra for kneading
  • ¾ cup plain yoghurt (I used Paris Creek B-D Yoghurt)

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 250°C fan (or as hot as it will go).
  2. Mix the flour and yoghurt until they come together in a soft dough.
  3. Knead well on well floured board and roll out to fit 30cm pizza pan (greased with olive oil).
  4. Top with your favourite toppings - we use a base of tomato paste, oregano and chilli flakes, topped with mozzarella, bacon, red onion, hot salami and capsicum (for example).
  5. Bake for 10 minutes and serve immediately.
https://eatingadelaide.com/two-ingredient-pizza-dough/

Perfect Pizza Dough Recipe

- Alex 1 Comment

IMG_3103

So back in November last year, I attended the Food SA awards and promised to put some focus on South Australian producers.

I’ve not done the world’s best job of that, have I? Still, the other week at the Cellar Door Festival Pangkarra, based in Clare, had a stand so punters were able to try their pasta and purchase a wide range of their foods.

Pangkarra started life as a legume and cereal producer but these days, this fifth generation family owned business produces fine foods, such as flours and pastas, too. And while I have no doubt that this kind of value adding takes a lot of effort that many primary producers can’t afford, it is a brilliant way of ensuring that more money flows back to the people who produce the food, rather than middle men.

I’ve seen Pangkarra pasta in my parents’ local Foodland (unfortunately not in my own) but never had the presence of mind to purchase it. And the Cellar Door Festival wasn’t really the place to buy pasta – it being fragile and all. But I was easily tempted by a 1kg bag of the stone ground, wholegrain durum flour. It was offered at the special price of $3 (I think it’s normally around $7, so this is quite a discount) and I could have bought 6kg at an even greater knock down price. I also knew I had no hope of carting 6kg of flour around for an afternoon!

Now, Pangkarra does actually have a pizza dough recipe on the website, but I’ve been using an Antonio Carluccio “recipe” (you can find it in Complete Italian Food) for years and there are some things I find need no fiddling at all.

For one pizza, mix 1 generous tsp of dried yeast, with a generous ½ tsp of sugar and 125 mL of warm water (think tepid). Leave to allow the yeast to activate (the mixture will start to froth a little) and add in 200 g of flour. I was warned that the Pangkarra flour would be more thirsty than run of the mill (ahem!) flour – and it certainly was, so have some additional water to hand to bring the dough together.

This is usually quite a stiff dough and was especially so in this case because I didn’t want to end up with dough that was too wet. I always let my KitchenAid do the first lot of kneading for me, then I just form the dough into a ball, cover it with a slick of oil and leave it to rise.

Making the pizza is easy! Preheat your oven to as hot as it will go (250°C fan in our case), lightly oil a pizza pan, and roll out the dough. Put the dough in the pizza pan, add a generous slick of tomato paste, some dried oregano and chilli flakes and then lots of slices of mozzarella cheese. Finish off with toppings of your choice (in our case, onion, ham, spicy salami, some green capsicum, artichokes, and black olives) and bake until done. In our oven, this is just 10 minutes.

Slice and eat immediately!

The Pangkarra flour made a good dough and good base. I usually add salt to my pizza dough but in this instance I forgot (thanks to my pint sized kitchen ‘helper’) and while I did notice (don’t you always, if you know!) Andy said he didn’t think it needed it – a sign that the flour itself has plenty of taste.

It’s obviously very strong flour so I really am going to have to have a go making my own pasta with it …

NOTE:  This post has not been sponsored in any way.  I paid for the flour and, had it been awful, I would have told you so!

Crust Gourmet Pizza – Brighton

- Alex 2 Comments

Crust Pizza

Crust Pepperoni Pizza

Disclaimer:  Crust sent me an Ultimate Night In voucher so I could check out their pizzas for myself.

When Crust’s PR people got in touch and asked me if I’d like to try a pizza from one of their three new South Australian pizza bars, I didn’t really have to be asked twice. While I make a lot of pizza from scratch (we’re blessed with a brilliant oven) we actually also order in on a semi regular basis. It really doesn’t feel good to see that written down!

Crust markets itself as gourmet pizza and the first thing I noticed when checking out the menu was the huge variety of pizzas on offer. There are six vegetarian pizzas, there are “healthier choice” pizzas, there are four each of chicken and seafood pizzas and then there are the five Upper Crust pizzas (wagyu and prawn pizza anyone?). So it was quite a good thing I’d downloaded the menu in advance and changed my mind umpteen times before going through the options with Andy.

While I was tempted by the Moroccan Lamb and Sausage Duo options we ended up going for Pepperoni, which makes us sound really boring but it was the closest to what we’d normally order (Mexican), which we thought made for a fairer taste test. Crust’s Pepperoni pizza is not just pepperoni and cheese – it’s pepperoni, Spanish onions, green capsicum, ground beef, olive tapenade and garlic with chilli optional (yes please! in our case), all on a tomato base.

Our voucher also included a salad – not something I’d normally even consider ordering from a pizza bar. I’ve got absolutely no benchmarks here (do other pizza bars even offer salads?) but we chose the Greek salad.

Decision making over and done with, we placed the order and were told it would be ready for collection in 20 minutes (Crust does deliver, but we live outside the delivery zone). The Brighton restaurant gets a massive thumbs up for our food being ready when they said it would be. I arrived, picked up the food and left in one swift manoeuvre.

At home, I was most interested in checking out the salad. It was really good! It came in a cardboard box (which was a plus – salads in plastic boxes are all horrible and sweaty) and the salad dressing came in a sachet for us to add to taste. As someone who (generally) loathes salad dressing, this made me happy. The olives in the salad were good quality but best of all was the feta cheese which was really creamy.

On to the pizza – the first thing I noticed was that the crust was considerably better than on most pizzas (including our regular). It was thin and crispy and not at all soggy or heavy. The pizza wasn’t laden with topping, which I liked – I suspect this helps with the crust and also meant that everything was well cooked and the cheese was starting to bubble and caramelise. I was also impressed that the tomato base was evenly spread out and was not sweet. There was also some good heat to the pizza – it wasn’t overwhelming and there was a bit of debate whether it came from the extra chilli or from the pepperoni itself.

Overall, it was the crust that made the pizza for me. That was absolutely a cut above your standard pizza bar pizza.

The downside to all of this pizza goodness is that the pizzas aren’t cheap – the large pizzas are $21 (seafood $22 and the Upper Crust 15″ rectangular pizzas are $24). The large pizza and salad was definitely enough for the two of us for dinner – this would have set us back $30 which is not bad for two people but if you were particularly hungry (or wanted leftovers) you could easily be spending a lot more. But with all things, you do get what you pay for. So if you fancy a decent pizza, you should give Crust a try.

Crust currently has branches in Brighton, Norwood and Unley. You can check out a review of the Norwood Crust over at d bites. There are better photos too … I’m always too hungry for good photography!

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