Pizza Making

Fiona, Tayla, Justin and I were inspired by my nephew's blog. Living in Italy for 6 months, Mathew is becoming an expert chef, making pizza's in a genuine pizza oven.. he is also creating other culinary delights which you can check out on his blog My Tuscany OE.

As a result of reading Mathew's Blog, we decided to give pizza making a go. We did not have a pizza oven but decided to make our pizza as authentic as possible. We followed Jamie Oliver's Pizza Dough recipe. A granite kitchen bench definitely helped!

We sieved the flour onto the bench.
We mixed the other ingredients in a jug - water, oil, sugar and yeast. We then made a well in our flour and slowly poured in the water mixture. Justin and Tayla then began to mix the liquid into the flour - determined not to let the flour wall cave in - they had to work hard. Little by little the mixture became thicker and tackier - then we would add more of the water and mix mix mix. Eventually the wall had to cave and mix in with the rest of the mixture.
When the fork was not longer useful, Tayla and Justin rolled up their sleeves and began to knead. They practiced, added flour, kneaded, rolled and turned the dough. There was flour all over the bench and we decided to enjoy the mess and just stay at it until the dough was ready to roll into bowls.
The bowls were placed next to the fire to rise.


Unfortunately the whole process took longer than we had imagined so decided to eat it for brunch the next day instead of dinner that night.

The next morning the dough was twice its size and ready to knock back and roll into balls.
Another enjoyable time with flour and dough then rolling the dough into flat pizza shapes.
Most of the morning was spent chopping ingredients for the top of our pizza.
Keira joined in as well - an expert at chopping with a very sharp knife (only a little nick in her finger which she recovered from and continued to chop).


What awesome pizza's we had for dinner. Next time we felt we might need more cheese on our pizza's and more tomato base. Any advice welcome to make a pizza more moist. The base was great, the topping tasty, the experience - priceless!