Vegetarian Food FTW: Mushroom and Olive Pizza

Ordinarily, I make pizza dough in my bread maker, but for the purposes of this blog and my dear readers out there who don't have a bread maker, I made the dough by hand and include instructions for this. Obviously, if you have a bread maker, just use that, as it is slightly easier. I borrowed the dough recipe from Delia Smith, but I didn't like her method so I made it the way I used to make pizza dough back in the days when I didn't have a bread maker to do it for me.

One of the (many) great things about pizza is that with one recipe (pizza dough) you can get a lot of variation in your meals out of it, just by changing the toppings. I went for a relatively straightforward pizza topping here but there are so many you could choose from - the only limit is your imagination and budget. I am a big fan of quite saucy pizzas so this has rather a lot of tomato sauce on it and you might want to adjust it to your tastes.

A final tip: when using mushrooms on pizza you must precook them or when they cook in the oven, they will lose water which will make the pizza soggy, or at best will mean when you serve it up you have liquid all over the place - not ideal. What I did in this recipe was to fry the mushrooms in garlic, and then use the mushroom juice in the tomato sauce, so nothing goes to waste (and you get great tasting sauce).

ALSO: If you want to use this recipe (or any on this site) but don't want the photos - click 'print friendly' at the bottom of the post and 'remove images'. There are a LOT of photos on this post, so you might want to do that...

Makes 1 medium-sized Pizza, thin crust

Ingredients:

For the dough:

175g (6oz) plain white soft flour

120ml warm (not boiling!) water

1 tsp salt

1 tsp easy-blend dried yeast

1/2 tsp sugar

1 tbsp olive oil

75g cheddar cheese (optional)

For the pizza sauce:

1 small tin tomato paste (about 27 g, or two tablespoons)

Hot water (if cooking veg such as mushrooms, retain juices from cooking and use this as well)

Dried herbs e.g. basil, oregano

salt and pepper to taste

For the topping:

Black/Green olives, as many as you like!

4 large flat mushrooms (you can easily substitute for smaller ones if you want)

1 mozzarella ball, sliced

1 tsp garlic granules (optional)

Herbs (optional) - whatever takes your fancy. I used parsley, and a 'thyme and smoked paprika' mix.

salt and pepper to taste

For the pizza base:

1. Add flour and salt to a bowl, make a well in the centre of the mixture and add the sugar and yeast.

2. Add the warm water and olive oil, and leave for TEN MINUTES. It will smell yeasty - this is good and shows the yeast is working.

3. Stir mixture together with a spoon into a dough, using your hands to mix together towards the end. Add either flour or water as required until the dough just holds together. If you are using cheese, add in at this step and make sure stirred in thoroughly.

4. Transfer to a clean surface (no need to have this floured) and knead the dough for 3 -5 minutes. If you're not sure how to knead dough, there are plenty of online tutorials on youtube.

5. Once that's done, either transfer to a clean bowl and place oiled clingfilm over the top, or just do what I did and place the already used mixing bowl over the top. This will look a bit silly:

Leave it to rise until about twice the size; about an hour - an hour and a half at room temperature. Whilst this is rising, work on the toppings (see separate instructions below).

6. Once this is done, remove the dough and knock it back, shaping it until it's smooth. Transfer to a slightly floured surface, and using a rolling pin, roll out into desired shape. You are now ready to cook!