The best pizza base in town - Recipe

What makes for a great pizza base?

The right ingredients and process

I believe it’s about getting the right balance between chew, crisp and a nice thin crust plus I’m sure most of you will agree with me.

Well, fear not my fellow Steemians. We managed to discover the Crème de la crème of pizza bases and once you’ve tried this bad boy out, you won’t have to fly off to Italy again!

So, after this semi-dramatic intro… which it deserves, I present to you the ultimate pizza base recipe which includes a simple tomato base and some toppings we enjoy.

The recipe below makes 6, YESSS, 6 large pizza’s.

Base Ingredients:

7.5ml Active dry yeast
625ml Italian ‘OO’ flour
625ml Stone ground white flour
30ml salt
560ml water
30ml Olive Oil

Base Process:

Add the flour, salt and yeast to a mixing bowl and incorporate the ingredients together using a beater. This should only take a minute.

Next, change over to dough hooks and slowly add the water to the flour mixture. You will need to mix it for about 10 minutes or so and be sure to keep a little extra flour and water on the side. This will be needed to adjust your mix if necessary. You’ll know you have the consistency right when the dough doesn’t stick to the side walls of the bowl but sticks slightly to the base of the bowl.

Once done you can roll it out into a thick sausage on a lightly flour dusted surface and cut it into 6 equal parts.

Then roll it into balls, rub a little Olive oil over and loosely cover them with cling wrap. Put the dough balls in the warmest part of your home if it’s cold to help speed up the rising process.

We have an extra 'ball' for the kiddies :)

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Now you have time available to prepare your tomato base and toppings. A really simple tomato base that works great and is enough to cover your 6 large bases is the following:

1 can chopped tomatoes (500ml)
1 tin tomato paste (50gm)
A few pinches of salt to taste

Blend the above ingredients with a blender if you have. If not, you can just drain of some of the excess liquid if it appears too runny. You can jazz the tomato sauce up a little by doing all or some of the following. Replace the salt with two to three anchovies, add two cloves of garlic, add a small handful of fresh oregano leaves and/or add some fresh basil leaves. All those mentioned need to be chopped (or blended) of course...

Once they’ve doubled in size they’re ready to roll out into pizza bases. Flour dust the surface and use a rolling pin (or long narrow glass bottle if you don’t have one) to roll them out into thin pizza bases.

Next, you can either flour dust your pizza peel or sprinkle with semolina and carefully move the base onto the peel.

Reason? It makes it easier than getting the pizza with toppings onto the peel... that's for the daily practitioners.

Then sprinkle with a little grated mozzarella before brushing your tomato base. This helps the toppings to stick so it doesn’t slide off when cutting the pizza.

After you’ve done the tomato base it’s time to add you favorite toppings and finish off with some mozzarella.

One of our favorites is a four cheese combination with some smoked mussels. Scatter some smoked mussels (oysters will work), add a few slices of brie or camembert, cheddar (or a full flavored yellow cheese), blue cheese and mozzarella. Just take it easy with the mozzarella since you have other cheese on there already :)

Still need some work on foodie photo's, lol

What else do you need?

You need to cook it...

The minimum requirements are:

A closed cooking system that's as hot as possible i.e. Pizza Oven.

If you don't have access to that, like most of us don't, an oven or closed grill system will work, provided you bang that bad boy up to max temperature and use a pizza stone. They're cheap and do the trick :)

Team South Africa banner designed by @bearone

This awesome doodle was created by @atopy :)

For any comments or queries, please feel free to ask.

I'd also love some feedback :)

Cheers!!