So, this afternoon I opened the oven to retrieve the left overs from yesterday’s roast chicken dinner and to my absolute horror, out flew two giant flies! I was planning on making a lovely chicken and mushroom pie, but my plans were scuppered and the lot went in the bin.
So what to do? There wasn’t much else in the fridge bar a few leftover ends of cheese, a packet of bacon and the bag of mushrooms.
We’ve also recently harvested a bumper crop of home grown potatoes, so I wracked my brains for a recipe that would combine these ingredients (and avoid a trip to the shops!), but nothing came to mind.
I quickly searched on BBC food website for goats cheese and found no inspiration, when I stumbled upon a recipe for a goats cheese pizza!
Another quick google search for “pizza dough” led me to this recipe which I realised I had all the ingredients for.
So following the instructions (but using a combination of 1/2 plain white and 1/2 strong white bread flour) I made the dough, although I cheated and used a mixer instead of kneading it by hand. I did knead for the final 5 minutes to get the right consistency, I also found I used a considerable amount of extra flour to stop the dough feeling too sticky.
After allowing the dough to rise for about an hour and a half and taking great pleasure in punching all of the air out of it I spread the dough over two cookie sheets, about 1cm thick on each and topped the dough with pasata, then goats cheese, fresh vine tomatoes and mushrooms and finally a rasher of bacon cut into 1cm strips on each base.
I covered the whole lot in about 100g of mild Cheddar (50g on each pizza) and put in a preheated oven on Gas Mark 6 for 20-25 mins.
I swapped the two pizzas over about half way through the cooking time and this is what I ended up with (x2):
On reflection I would add a few herbs to the pasata next time. To serve I just ground a little bit of black pepper over the pizza and accompanied it with some home made coleslaw (Mum’s secret recipe) and a beetroot and tomato salad. It was nommy!
Lally.