French trip – la sixième et dernière partie – Fancy a quick pizza?

There really is very little to it. Just make the dough, prepare the tomato sauce, get the toppings together, get the oven up to temperature, assemble the pizza, cook and serve, right?

Wrong. Oh so very, very, very, very wrong. If you want a quick pizza ring Domino’s. If you want the best pizza you have ever tasted, read on my friends, read on. The down-side is that preparing pizza for two is a lot of work for one. Particularly when I am the one doing the working.You will need a raft of stuff for the various elements. The first thing you will need is a Great Tomato Sauce. For that you need:

• 1.2 kilos of great tomatoes
• 3 shallots
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 teaspoon of smoked paprika
• 1 glass of good red wine
• Olive oil for frying

For the Pizza Dough, you will need:

• 600 gms of 00 flour
• 1 sachet (or teaspoon) of instant yeast
• half a teaspoon of salt
• 300 ml of tepid water
• a tablespoon of olive oil

For The Toppings, you are on your own. I got a bit carried away in the excitement of my first from scratch pizza making and despite the fact that there were only two of us going to eat, I decided to make:

• Mozzarella, Portobello Mushroom and Smoked Ham
• Roquefort and Tomato
• Chanterelle and Goat’s Cheese
• Mozzarella, Mushroom, Smoked Ham and Herb de Provence
• Sweet Onion and Black Pepper

We were eating in the evening, so the previous day (Yes, the previous day.), I went to Les Halles market in Narbonne and bought the tomatoes.

The tomatoes were the best I have tasted in ages. Fresh, really fresh. If you want them all the same size with perfect skin, go to the supermarket and sacrifice the taste.

My selected tomatoes, garlic from Lautrec and shallots. Quality Ingredients lead to an excellent tomato sauce.

First thing to do is to chop and sweat the garlic and shallots, over a low heat, in a big pan.

While these are cooking, cut a cross in the bottom of the tomatoes. Drop them into boiling water for a minute or two. This will make them really easy to peel.

Core them, chop them and put them in the pan with the shallots and garlic. Add a glass of red wine and simmer them for half an hour or so. Drink a glass of red wine yourself. At this stage, you will need some fortification. Add a teaspoon of paprika and simmer for another few minutes.

Let the mixture cool for a few minutes and then pass it through a sieve into another saucepan. Be sure to squeeze every last tasty drop of tomato through.Reduce the sauce by about half. This will concentrate all the flavours into an intense, tasty sauce. Let it cool and it will be ready to use.

On the morning of Pizza Day, sieve the dry pizza dough ingredients into a bowl.

I mentioned to one of the lads in the gym that I was off to France and looking forward to my first time ever cooking pizza. It turns out that he is GM in Ireland for Puratos an international food ingredients business. He very generously gave me a bag of O-tentic powder to help guarantee a decent pizza dough. I used it instead of the yeast.

Add the olive oil and gradually add the water.Mix until you have a gooey mess like mine.

Knead this on a lightly floured surface (the table) until your arms hurt. Well, that’s what I did.

It got me along the front of my forearms and behind the ‘guns’.

Pop it back into the bowl and wait.

We were in the south of France so there was no need to ‘put in a warm place’. Everywhere was warm. We left it and went out for lunch and a walk in the Garrigue. When we got home, the magic had happened.

Punch it down and divide it into six.Roll each piece into a ball, lightly oiled, and refrigerate until needed.

Prepare your topping ingredients. For me this meant, chopping the white onions and sautéing them over a low heat for 40 minutes or so.

Difficult to get in Ireland. Beautiful sweet white onions.

Frying the Portobello mushrooms…

…and the Chanterelles.Then cut, slice and dice the rest of the ingredients. Turn on the oven. We were lucky enough to be using a wood fired outdoor pizza oven. It took a while to get up to temperature. 

I have no photos of my pathetic attempts to make a round pizza. I managed to successfully form the outer crust but I failed to get anything approaching a circular pizza. Here’s my ingredients on a picnic table ready for assembly. Note the tomato sauce…

The oven almost hot enough (550 degrees centigrade in this case).I started to assemble the pizzas, one at a time. First the Mozzarella, Portobello Mushroom and Smoked Ham.

We were so hungry, I forgot to photograph the first one out. It was delicious.

The whole process had taken most of the afternoon and evening. We were ravenous by the time I produced the first of the pizzas. Note the unique shape of each of the pizzas. I could pretend to be proud of them but I was trying for circular.

The Roquefort and Tomato pizza in the oven. It took about 2 minutes to cook in the intense heat.

The Roquefort and Tomato Pizza. This was the high point of proceedings for me.

This one lasted just long enough to get a couple of pictures.

I thought I should at least show one shot of the pizza plated. Just to prove that I actually got time to eat some of it.

Then back to stretching, cursing the shape, assembling, cooking and serving. Why am I doing this? It’s meant to be a holiday.

The Chanterelle and Goat’s Cheese Pizza on the way to the table. It just about did us in. Still I had two more to cook.

I had plenty of time to photograph this one. We had it cold the next day.

Mozzarella, Mushroom, Smoked Ham and Herb de Provence was followed by the Sweet Onion and Black Pepper.

The last one. It looks more like Australia than a pizza.

These were delicious the next day with a salad. I had cooked enough pizza for at least five people. We had eaten enough for four between the two of us. The flavours were ‘formidable’ to use the French. However, It took more than a working day to produce five pizzas. The tomato sauce was incredible. It was the star of the show and made it all worthwhile. The Wife enjoyed it. But, if you really fancy a quick pizza, hand me the phone…