Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Pizza ai funghi e prosciutto

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | Cooking

Pizza is, without a doubt, one of the most forgiving meals to make. Almost no matter what you put on it, people simply love this piece of dough. Of course, there are a few people who misunderstands the whole pizza concept and put bananas and stuff on them. That is just a plain frightening concept. Now, at its core, the pizza is ‘just’ another yeast dough, much like bread, although it is a somewhat more dense dough than most bread doughs I usually bake. In fact, a single pizza, normally serving four (but in our family 1½), is made of just that little ball of dough. This is what it looks after a good three hours of fermentation.

After beating the dough down and rolling it out, we get the much loved round pizza napolitana shape.

Ok, so perhaps my shaping skills are not the best, but it came out round-ish. This is our able foundation for anything pizza, whether it be napolitana or calzone, and it is ready to receive our chosen filling. For my dinner I had chosen a traditional mushroom pizza, pizza ai funghi, and this mean a nicely cooked tomato sauce with mushrooms, garlic (I went a bit overboard here since I am down with a nasty virus) and onions. This you, of course, smear across the pizza prior to baking it. It is very important to have let the tomato sauce mixture cook for a while so you get a lot of the excess water out of it as you’ll have a wet dough mess once you take your pizza out of the oven otherwise.

And presto, after a good bake you get a lovely pizza. Now, as I was rather short on mushrooms (we had used quite a few more than I had anticipated for our mushroom risotto the day before), I added some lovely prosciutto to the pizza after it had baked. Adding prosciutto after the bake ensures that the ham does not get as hard and rubbery as sole leather.

Those Italians really hit it well on figuring out a good all-purpose dinner subject that works with pretty much anything you’ve got left over in your cupboards. Amazing.

That’s all there is to making a lovely pizza from the contents of your cupboard. I hereby name this Pizza ai funghi e prosciutto. (That does sound quite a lot better than pizza with mushrooms and ham, does it not?) Buon appetito.

Tags: baking, pizza

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