The Rustic Pizza

We made a great pizza for the high school open house the other night. It was a bit rustic, a bit sparse in toppings, but looked and tasted just great. Aiden rolled the dough and dressed most of the pizzas, I helped him out when he needed it and Harrison ‘burned’ the crème brulee. Here’s how we did the pizza:

We started with a 3 oz piece of my usual pizza dough (recipe follows) but rolled it out oblong, so we had a long thin pizza. Each crust was about 3 inches by 6 inches. We had a very smooth tomato sauce that we could squeeze out of a bottle and we used that to squeeze lines of sauce onto the dough, not covering the pizza at all, but just giving it enough sauce to give it some taste and moistness. We then gave it a drizzle of olive oil, maybe a teaspoon or a bit more on each little pie. I had some left over prosciutto so we cut that into strips and put that on, and then a few pieces of oven roasted asparagus. Next came little globs of goat cheese, a sprinkle of mozzarella, some fresh dill leaves and a bit of cracked pepper. That may seem like a lot of toppings, but we just put a little of each on, so that you could still see the dough through them. We sent these little pies through the pizza oven and they came out the other end perfectly browned, cheese melty, a few bubbles poking up, and very rustic looking. The crust was thin and crisp and the pizza was quite light because of the small amount of toppings. Perfect for snacking! 

You could make these pizzas very easily on the BBQ as well. Switch the toppings around to create your own taste sensation!

Pizza Dough

4 ½  cups warm water

4 tablespoons yeast

1/2 cup oil

2 tablespoon basil

2 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 cup tomato sauce

1 teaspoon salt

10 ½  cups flour

Place the yeast in the warm water and mix in.

Add the oil, basil, pepper, tomato sauce and salt and mix together.

Add 2 cups flour and mix until it forms a paste.

Add the remaining flour until a soft dough is formed.

Knead for 10 minutes. Let rise for about 1 hour

Form into 3 oz balls and refrigerate.

Makes about 32  3 oz pizza shells.