My favourite Italian Pizza Recipe

fullsizeoutput_ec3

This is THE proper Italian pizza recipe – it really tastes awesome and is one of my favourite recipes. By following the below you will be able to prep 4 large sized pizza, so if you would like to have one per week, you are all good for an entire month 🙂

Prep time	Cook time	Total Time
20 min	10 min	30 min (plus resting time 2 hours)

When I became vegan, Pizza was something that I thought would be missing out on, because it doesn’t taste right without cheese. Well, wrong! This is due to the fast growing market of vegan cheeses. I admit, in the beginning, most of them were not really tasty. But now, all sorts of cheeses are available on the internet, in small shops or even in big grocery stores. If you are trying to cut out processed foods, you might want to try make some your own. I have made a few already and will definitely put all my recipes in here as well.

So please enjoy and do not feel guilty – as it is said in Italian:

Uno non può pensare bene, amare bene, dormire bene, se non ha mangiato bene.
(One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one hasn’t eaten well.)

Ingredients:

500g spelt flour (I always try to substitute the super processed wheat flour most shops sell nowadays)
10g of fresh yeast (= 1 package of dried active yeast)
250ml water
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp salt

Note: This recipe is designed to make 4 large sized pizza. You can freeze the remaining ones, separated by baking paper, perfectly.

Instructions:

Dough preparation:

Dissolve the fresh yeast in 50ml of lukewarm water
Pour all remaining ingredients into a big bowl
Add the dissolved yeast to the big bowl

Now its kneading time, this is the most important step with this recipe.

I do this by hand for around 10-15 minutes or until you have a very smooth dough
(You can also use the kneading hooks of your mixer, but I prefer to do it with my hands as it allows me to feel the consistency of the dough)

Now it is time for a little Siesta.

Allow the dough to rest for around 1.5 hours and keep it covered with a kitchen towel or kling film in a warm place without draft. In Italy the dough usually rests overnight. In order not having to plan that far ahead, I added significantly more yeast. The dough should at least have half an hour to raise but it’d be better if you give it around 1.5h.
While the dough is resting you could either take a break yourself 🙂 or you already start preparing your toppings and possibly even make the tomato sauce from scratch as well as some vegan mozzarella (recipe will follow soon!)

Toppings:

This is where you can get creative. Everyone has their own favourite list of pizza toppings and this is the beauty of pizza, am I right?

Remember, this is just a list of MY favourite toppings and not all of that usually fits on one pizza. Hence, it’s great that we made dough for four 😉

Rocket
Mushrooms
Roasted butternut squash
Garlic
Slices of aubergine & zucchini
Olives
Small cubes of different coloured peppers
Spinach
Chilli
Artichokes
Sun-dried tomato
Onions
Pine nuts
Vegan cheese
Tofu
Vegan spiced sausages
Beetroot
Kale
Dill
Capers

Back to the dough:

When you come back after ca. 1.5 hours to check on your dough, you will see that it has almost doubled in size.

Now it is time to pre-heat the oven to 220 degrees Celsius. Usually, I rarely preheat the oven when cooking but if you are making pizza this is really the key to get a perfect base.
Cut the dough into 4 pieces to make 4 pizzas roll into balls cover and let rest for another half an hour.
Then use your hands to stretch it out to the size you want, proper Italian bases are usually quite thin, I like it a bit thicker (you can also try and spin the dough into the air to make it thinner, I admit this takes a bit of practice but works a treat)
Perfect now it’s time to spread out tomato sauce and put all your toppings on. I always spread small chunks of garlic over it, pine nuts, a bit of olive oil and because for me there is no such thing as Pizza without cheese, I definitely add some sort of vegan cheese (if you’d like to make a pizza cheese yourself in under 5mins – please check out this recipe)
The pizza will only need around 10mins if the oven if it has been properly pre-heated.
One more tipp: I recently started making my own antipasti while the pizza is resting. For this depending on what I have in my fridge, I chop up butternut squash into small pieces, take whole garlic cloves, slices of aubergine, zucchini, pepper and marinate it with more minced garlic, salt, herbs and olive oil, put all on a tray covered and bake while the oven pre-heats and leave it in until the pizza comes out the oven.