Homemade Pizza with Nectarines, Ricotta and Basil

This dinner was eaten standing up.

After all that effort to put together a nice meal, we never even made it to the table.

I’ll take it as a compliment.

I’m most excited to finally find a great pizza dough recipe. Once you’ve got that down, the toppings are the easy part. This recipe was awesome. It created a nice crispy, chewy, thin crust and was quite easy.

I’ll never stray.

I lifted this recipe (once again) from Alexandra’s Kitchen.

• 

Pizza Dough

3 1/3 cups all-purpose flour, plus additional for rolling
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 3/4 cups lukewarm water
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons active-dry yeast (I used quick-rising)
2 teaspoons olive oil

1) In one bowl, combine flour and salt. In another small bowl, combine yeast, sugar and warm water. Let sit for 5 minutes or so until bubbly. Add olive oil.
2) Gradually add liquids to flour mixture and knead until firm and smooth, about 5 minutes.
3) Divide dough into four balls and coat with small amount of olive oil. Let sit in a warm place on greased pan with plastic wrap loosely covering for about 1 – 1.5 hours until dough has risen (almost doubled) in size.
4) Roll out with floured rolling pin until dough is flat (Note: this recipe makes “personal sized” pizzas)
5) Pre-heat oven to 500. Place on greased pan or dry pizza stone and cover with whatever yummy toppings you desire! (Note: I used a pizza stone with great success). I baked the pizza with ricotta and nectarines and added the other toppings after. Bake 10-15 minutes until crust is golden and crispy (although not too crispy like Pizza #1!)

I reduced about 1/2 a cup of balsamic vinegar while the pizza was baking over medium-high heat until syrupy (be careful not to burn!)

Toppings

2 ripe nectarines, sliced
1 cup fresh ricotta cheese
1/2 cup fresh basil (after)
2 tablespoons balsamic reduction (after)
Slices fresh Parmesan (after)
Olive oil (after)
Arugula (after)

I still have dough left over. Apparently it freezes  very well (we shall see). Making dough in advance makes for very quick meals later on! I can’t wait to have more homemade pizza in a pinch. Having the dough pre-prepped will help me feel extra domestic goddess-y later on.  

What are your favourite pizza toppings?

Let me know if you try this out!

xo

M

 

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White Pizza with Pear, Walnuts and Parmesan

This was made for a dinner party for six, along with two other pizzas. Although the others were great- rosemary and chicken, spicy sausage and red onion, the white pizza was  le grand experiment. I had made some whipped cream for a dessert and decided to set some aside and add some truffle oil to it (just a drizzle) for the white pizza base (luckily I don’t like my whipped cream overly sweet and had added minimal sugar!) This whipped truffle oil creme was probably the biggest discovery of the night. Although I didn’t serve them (this time!), I tried some truffle cream on  fresh crostini with spicy sausage. Oh.my.

White Pizza with Pear and Walnuts

The pizza was good. I found the crust overwhelmed the toppings a bit (when I find the perfect pizza dough recipe I will post it), as it was a bit bread-y. This pizza would be best served on a thinner crust (a la Terroni, the inspiration).

• 1 thinly sliced pear
• finely grated Parmesan for the base, topped with larger curls
• loosely broken walnuts
• fresh sage
• black pepper
• whipped cream
• truffle oil

Cook at 450 for 15 minutes.

I also could use a pizza stone.