pizza

Some years ago, we built an adobe oven so that we could make good bread, pizza and other things that cook in wood-fired ovens. It's pretty hard to get a decent pizza in Tasmania and even in Australia. Most of the doughs have all sorts of weird conditioners, the bases too thick and the cheese cheddary. Then to top it all off there are too many toppings.
It's sad because it is not hard to make a good, simple, traditional pizza.
The dough should only have flour, water, salt and yeast. To have pizzas ready for dinner, make a batter of flour, water and yeast as early in the morning as possible. Cover and leave to ferment until just before you light your oven. For us, this is 3 hours before we cook the first pizza. By this time, the batter should be bubbly and yeasty smelling. This is where all the flavour comes from.
Add quite a bit of salt and enough flour to turn it into a pliable dough.


Knead for 15 minutes and then oil the ball of dough and place it back in the bowl, covered, until the fire is ready.
We make a simple sauce with our bottled, pureed tomatoes. Just reduce the sauce with a little salt and some oregano added. The cheese is a bit of an issue. It's almost impossible to get real bufalo mozzarella in Australia and if I could get it, I would just gobble it up. We use a cheese variously called cappriciosa or fior de latte. It's really good on pizza and similar to a mozzarella.
Briony is our champion dough puller. She pulls a beautiful thin base which we top with some tomato, a bit of cheese grated (even though it should really just be ripped apart) and then one or two toppings.


It takes about 2 minutes to cook in a hot oven ..............


................and it's difficult to wait for long enough so that the roof of your mouth doesn't burn.