Belinda Olins: Okay so I love pizzas. So instead of buying the frozen pizza in the supermarket, I’m going to show you a way today on how you can make them easily at home, using up a lot of what you’ve got in the fridge.
So for any piece, you need a tomato sauce base and you can use this for any flavor that you make. So I’ll start with showing you how to make the tomato base. You want to have your heat quite low to start with and this is a basic tomato sauce base for pizzas. So you want a tablespoon of olive oil and you want a tablespoon of tomato puree that’s squeezed. And then you’re going mix two tablespoons of passato which is a saved version of tomato sauce.
Justin Sharpe: It’s pressure to make your own tomato puree. Just by boiling up some fresh tomatoes, they will actually, if you’re simmering them down will just puree to nothing. And that will reduce the amount of sugar and salt. Ketchup and puree’s tend to be higher in salt than the natural ingredients.
Belinda Olins: And then you just want to add a pinch, about a half a teaspoon of mix herbs. Or it depends on what you prefer or what you’ve got in the fridge, just a sprinkle of herbs. You can just let it reduce them and thickens your tomato sauce for your pizza base. So you’re going to leave your tomato sauce to simmer. Keep it on a low heat because you’re going to leave it simmering for about five minutes. During much time, it’s going to get richer and richer. Just make sure it doesn’t burn. And then take your pizza paste and prepare the ingredients for the top.
Okay we’re going to put the pizza base to one side and then I’m going to show you a version which is with bacon, courgette parmesan, and mozzarella. The great thing about making pizza at home is that you can choose your own toppings. I mean you can do tuna and or sweet corn, you can use salami, you can use peppers, I’m just going to show you one of my versions today. I like it because it uses courgettes so it’s another way to give you Trojan vegetable. At the time, is having fun eating a pizza.
So we’re going to use about a half of courgette. I’ll just take the end of that because all the slices you’re just going to so sprinkle over the pizza. And we’ve got a quite large base to cover so we’ll make sure we put enough slices. This pizza is going to be enough for about three or four children.
So what I tend to do is to prepare them in advance and then cut the pizza into portion sizes and freeze it, and then cook it from frozen. So you don’t need to eat it straight away. It’s another recipe you can prepare in advance. And by cutting into portion sizes, you don’t waste the whole pizza because you just gave your child whatever he needs or she needs for that meal.
So we’ve got some slices of courgettes, we’ve got some spring onions. Probably about two or three spring onions just to sprinkle over the top. Just take the outer layer off. You can use two or four, you can omit the spring onion. I tend to find whenever I make a pizza even if I vary the topping that I always use spring onion to tomato base and the mozzarella, and then I change the other ingredients that go on because it comes with a nice base.
And then you just chop the spring onions into little slices. You’re going to sprinkle these on the top. And actually, spring onions are a lot less strong than any other onions. So don’t worry whether child’s to try eating a pizza. The spring onion is very nice.
Okay, we’re going to have some slices of mozzarella. You want to make sure you get about eight slices so it goes evenly all the way around—minimum. And I’ve used just one pack of mozzarella here. You can add, you can use more, you can less but that is just one of your regular bag, 125 grams of mozzarella. So I’ll just set that to the side. And then we’re going to take some bacon. And I’ve used here, I’m going to suggest to use about four slices, five slices. And you’re going to cut your bacon into strips because again, you’re going to sprinkle it just roughly whatever the top. So that’s—I’m going to use five, about 100 grams of bacon.
But again with this recipe, there’s no real measures I mean you’re making at piece so you can sprinkle as much or less anything on the top as you like. The great thing about this is really just to show you how easy it is to do this at home and that it’s much more fun than buying the standard frozen version which may have additives. And you can’t control what you’re putting on the top. So this way, you can make which whatever when you like.
So you’re just cutting out thin strips of bacon. And then the last, we’re going to grate some parmesan just to give a little bit of the taste which is fine on the fine side. Not too fine. You just want to use the next size up. You basically want about a tablespoon. It’s quite strong parmesan so you don’t need too much but it just gives a bit of a different flavor with the courgettes. I prefer freshly grated, it has a little bit more flavor than the package type. You can just buy when it’s already been grated. So a little bit more than a tablespoon.
So by now, our tomato sauce sort of thickened nicely into a paste so we can spread it over the pizza so we’ll just go and check that. So you can see, it thickened up nicely here so we’re ready. We’re going to take that back over and then we’re going to put that onto our pizza base.
One thing I like about this recipe is well, is that you can—if you really want to make spend the time, you can actually make your own pizza dough, but it’s much easy just to buy. It’s much quicker as well. So I’ve bought one today to show you and we’re going to put our tomato sauce into the middle. And you want to just spread that around evenly. You don’t want it too thick because it’s just to give a bit of flavor everywhere. And then you are going to sprinkle your spring onions all the way over. If I was going to be freezing this in portions, I would do exactly the same and then I will just cut it into portions before I freeze it and before I cook it so then it would be frozen uncooked. And then I’m going to sprinkle over some bacon. Yeah, we would freeze it uncooked. And then I would cook it from frozen for about anything between 12 and 15 minutes but it really depends on the pizza base you buy. You need to check the package instructions. It normally tells you how long you actually need to cook it for. So I may have just cut a little bit too much bacon here but that’s fine. Leave that to one side and then you just put the courgettes on the top. Just roll over. And then you sprinkle on your parmesan, serve about a tablespoon of parmesan. And then at the very hand, you just lay in your mozzarella and I think that looks like it was bought in the supermarket.
So there you have your homemade pizza. And you pop that in the oven on 180 for between 12 and 15 minutes.
Justin Sharpe: The five minute pizza is brilliant because by making it yourself, you’ve already reduced the salt, reduced the sugar, and reduced the fattiness because you’re in control of the ingredients. Also, I like the fact that it’s got a vegetable added on the top and that vegetable is a good source of folate. Alternatively for other evenings, if you make up your pizza bases and put them in the freezer, you can add other vegetables and this is an excellent way to get children who don’t like vegetables to eat it because neither your children nor I know love pizza. And if you cut the vegetables at small enough, they will eat whatever is on top. So things like broccoli or red peppers, spinach, sweet corn, any of the vegetables also would make a fantastic topping.
Belinda Olins: Here we go, one courgette and bacon pizza.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services