Pizzas and tomatoes

Watching MasterChef tonight (a recorded episode: I think it was last Sunday), I saw many happy cooks. These people loved what they did, and enjoyed time with their families. One of the contestants was a financial planner from Cairns. The video showed him baking a pizza in a stone over in his backyard (there was a pool in the background). His bread made Matt Preston and Georgey very happy.

While I have not experienced the luxury of owning a stone oven in my backyard, I do hope to one day learn the art of making beautiful bread and pastries. I've had some successes with making my own pizza dough, using high-protein bread flour. The instructions are on the back and are really simple to follow. It's always fun watching the dough rise. It comes to life, really. And when you knead and fold the stuff, you can almost feel the yeast breathing.

So today's photo is of one such food adventure we had back on the 15th March 2012. Life was very busy back then. That's why we used dough balls that I had pre-made and put in the freezer. It's very handy to have and I should always have a few balls in the freezer to make a quick pizza. The dough needs to be moved down to the fridge to defrost slowly overnight, so it does require some planning. But the result is always better than any pizza delivery service you can get.

Apart from rolling out the pastry, it takes only 10–15 mins to cook, at around 220°C. Pizza delivery usually takes an hour or so, costs triple if not more, and gives you little control over the exact ingredients that go into the pizza, including the base of course.

A main ingredient was our very own semi-dried tomatoes (1 hour, at around 100°C). My wife used beefsteak tomatoes and included minced garlic, olive oil, and salt. We dried tomatoes in this way to preserve the plentiful harvest from our 10+ plants at the patch. In future posts, I'll describe the drying process in a bit more detail, as well as the variety of tomatoes that we grew this year (and in previous years).

home-baked pizza made with semi-dried beefsteak tomatoes (harvested from our patch)