Can We Call it a Salad? Pizza with Whole-Wheat Flour
Keeping the whole #bettertogether thing in mind, one of the most important things we’ve learned from making pizza (pizzas actually) is to have snacks for while we are working on it. Seriously though, it can take up to two hours when making the dough from scratch, so starting hungry is not a good idea. Cooking together can become much less fun when one of you gets hangry.
Here’s a definition of what being hangry means if you’ve never heard the term:
Hangry: adj. being bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger.
I wish we were making it up, but it is a real term and a real condition (trust us). Jonas used to fall into that trap quite regularly…
But enough about hangriness.
On to the pizza crafting!
We started with a dough recipe Kate found long ago in some Italian pizza recipe book that we both liked, but we didn’t follow it exactly and added extra ingredients. I guess we used it more for inspiration and to get the proportions of flour and yeast right. The recipe at the bottom of this post is our improved version. You’re very welcome!
Making the dough
One of the first steps in making a pizza dough is to mix the yeast with the water and let it react (also known as “proofing”). After 5-10 min, “bubbles” should start to form. For this reaction to happen you should mix yeast with warm water. However, one of us put it in cold water without thinking and therefore got no bubbles. Since we didn’t want to wait too long, all we could do was hope that the yeast will work eventually and move forward.
One of the ways we changed the recipe was to add whole wheat flour. We didn’t know how much to add, so we picked a random ratio of 1:3. Half a cup of whole wheat flour and one and a half cups of regular flour. It turned out great, it gave pizza that nice, slightly uneven, crunchy texture.
We also add olive oil and our special secret ingredients – oregano and some grated cheese. So much for them being a secret…
After we mixed it all together, we let it rise for about an hour in a pre-warmed oven. By the way, it did end up rising 😉
The saucing of the pizza sauce
As the dough was rising, Kate worked her very own sauce concoction: garlic fried in olive oil, tomato paste, oregano, basil, salt, and pepper. Give it time to simmer while the dough rises so all the flavours mix better. Some people add some sugar to tomato sauce… We’ll need to compare tastes sometime…
A note on frying garlic in olive oil: keep in mind that both garlic and olive oil, burn really fast, so fry it on a lower heat, watch it well and get it off the burner as soon as it gets a little golden….Garlic is sensitive and gives off especially offensive odors when it is burned.
Topping the toppings
As Kate was working on the sauce, Jonas cut up the toppings, grated the cheese and washed some of the dishes. By the way, if you have a kitchen as small as ours, washing dishes as you cook is a good idea. Just don’t do it while frying garlic…
Cheese is great especially when it is gr(e)ated.
Jonas practicing his Punny dad jokes.
Maybe it is a Northern European thing, a Lithuanian thing or just a Jonas thing, but Jonas used to be convinced that cheese goes on top of all the other toppings, but now he has converted to the original way of the pizza.
So the order goes like this:
- Spread the sauce on the dough.
- Cover the sauce with the cheese.
- Put the rest of the toppings on top of the cheese.*
*The order you put the rest of your toppings also adds to the overall presentation of the pizza. The general rule is bigger toppings under the smaller ones. We didn’t think about presentation much for our first pizza… It tasted great but looked unappealing.
Cooking the pizza
The only thing left is baking.
The oven should be heated to around 200C (~400F). We didn’t have a thermometer for our oven, so we had to guess the temperature!
Apparently, we are pretty good with that, because our pizza turned out just right after cooking it for around 20 minutes.
I say “around 20 minutes” because we forgot to set a timer and started watching YouTube videos. Luckily we stayed in the kitchen and decided to check how it is doing when the whole kitchen started smelling of pizza. At that moment it was perfectly done: the crust was holding the toppings and was slightly crunchy, but not hard.
Since more than half of our toppings were vegetables, we were joking that maybe we could call our pizza a salad and consider it healthy food.
Maybe not.
We were very happy that our pizza turned out really well even though we didn’t know what temperature we cooked it in and it looked kinda ugly…. Actually, we made enough dough for 3 pizzas, so we had pizza more or less the whole week.
Almost Italian Pizza with whole wheat flour from scratch
Equipment
- Oven
- Rolling pin
- Baking tray
Ingredients
Crust
- ½ ounce fresh yeast (You could substitute it with 1½ teaspoon of active dry yeast)
- 1 cup warm water
- ½ cup Whole wheat flour
- 1½ cup Regular wheat flour (Have extra to flour hands and table later)
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 tsp oregano
- 1 tbsp olive oil (extra-virgin)
- ¼ cup grated cheese (This is optional, we just like cheese. Tastes best with hard cheese)
Sauce
- 1 cup tomato paste
- 1½ tsp salt
- ½ tsp basil
- 1 pinch pepper
- 2 cloves garlic (Tastes best if crushed and fried in olive oil)
Toppings
- 3 cups grated cheese (You can actually add as much cheese as you want)
- anything you would like on your pizza
Instructions
Dough preparation
- Mix warm water, olive oil and yeast and let it sit in a warm place until you see little bubbles.
- Mix salt with flour, then add oregano, and grated cheese.
- Combine everything well until it becomes one lump hard enough to knead it in your hands.
- Cover it, put it in a warm place and let it rise for 1 hour.
- After it has risen, sprinkle some flour on the table, on your hands and on your rolling pin, then take out the dough. Press/punch it so the extra air comes out of the dough and knead it a few times. Don't knead it too many times as it will make the dough rise less
- Using a rolling pin, roll it into the desired shape, thickness and size. If it is sticky - add more flour.
- Flour the baking tray or put baking paper and place the flattened dough on top.
Sauce
- Crush or cut garlic in small pieces and fry it in olive oil.
- Mix in tomato paste, oregano, basil, pepper, and salt.
- Let simmer.
- As it cools off some, spread a thin layer of sauce on the dough.
Bake
- Spread cheese and all the toppings on your sauced pizza dough.
- Heat oven to 200°C (about 400 °F) and cook for about 20 minutes (or until the whole kitchen smells like hot and freshly baked pizza)
Notes
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