Pizza Toasties! – VeganMoFo Day 27

Today’s recipe, if you can call it that, is simple and straightforward, for a simple straightforward prompt – the TV Dinner! I mean, we don’t have a dining space so we eat on the sofa every day anyway, but sometimes you want something comforting, easy to eat, and tasty for watching your favourite show.

Enter the Pizza Toastie!

I’m not going to post an actual “recipe” for this, as it’ll depend a lot on what you use yourself – but I’ll describe how I made it.

I made a batch of my gooey cheese sauce – which is really delicious and works great as a melty cheese for sandwiches – and used that as the cheese filling. I used Asda’s free from red pesto as a sauce, and added chopped up sundried tomatoes as well. You could add different flavours if you like – grilled mushrooms, sausages, basil, fresh tomatoes. I pressed these in my panini grill for about five minutes, until nicely golden.

Rainbow Pizza – VeganMoFo Day 7

You may notice that I skipped a day! Oops! Actually no, I won’t be posting every single day this month – just most days. Thirty days of non stop posts is a lot to get through! Though I know there are many fellow MoFo-ers who are doing it, and much respect to them.

Today’s prompt is about “colour” – be inspired by colour in your food. We’ve had colour themes before – red food (twice) and I’ve even done a beige day! But today I’ve gone multicoloured. And put it on pizza, because why not?

Pizza is such a versatile food, and most certainly not one you have to give up when you go vegan! I have several pizza recipes on here, and so I thought I’d add another one. This uses a variety of vegetables in rainbow colours (but if you’re not going for the rainbow look, just use what you like the taste of best) and Tesco’s Free From cream cheese – but again, any cream cheese you like the taste of would work great!

If you wanted to use premade pizza dough you could – check the ingredients to make sure it’s vegan – but I’m including the recipe for my own pizza dough too. You have to knead it, which can be a little tedious, but put on a nice playlist and take it all ought on the dough as you knead!

Rainbow Pizza

• Servings: 1 pizza
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Ingredients

For the Dough
• 250g strong white bread flour
• 1 tsp white sugar
• 1 tsp instant yeast
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 200ml hand-hot water (water should be hot enough to hold your little finger in without wincing)
For the toppings
• 1 pack vegan cream cheese
• Veggies of your choice, cut into bitesize pieces. I used black olives, purple radishes, red onions, red, yellow, and orange tomatoes, red, green and yellow peppers, and green courgettes.

Directions

1. Begin making your dough. In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, yeast, salt, and olive oil together.
2. Slowly pour in the warm water, mixing until a dough is formed.
3. Knead the dough for approximately 8 minutes, until it is smooth and bouncy.
4. Cover with a tea towel, and put in a warm place to rise until doubled in size – at least an hour.
5. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F
6. Roll your dough into a large circle ready for topping.
7. Spread the cream cheese evenly over the pizza base.
8. Get creative and place the vegetables on top of the cream cheese in a rainbow pattern!
9. Bake in the preheated oven for 15-20 minutes, until the dough is golden and firm.
10. Slice and enjoy!

Pizza Sticks – Vegan MoFo Day 1!

It’s that time of year again! Time for 2016’s Vegan Month of Food (“VeganMoFo”). This year comes with a whole new set of weekly themes and prompts and promises to be a great month for vegan food. Check out the website to find out more! 

The first weekly theme is “Treat Yourself (and others)” so this week will be all about treats. Today’s daily prompt is “What is your favourite food?“. I had to think long and hard about this because I don’t know if I have a favourite food. I like lots of foods but my “favourite” tends to change depending on what mood I am in. One food that pops up a lot though is pizza. Pizza is pretty versatile – especially if, like me, you treat it as dough with whatever topping you like, from a cheesy feast to a healthy hummus/vegetable topped meal. I already have not one but two pizza recipes on my blog,  do I really need another one though? Yes, of course. This one is slightly different. It’s a recipe for pizza sticks.

 Pizza sticks are somewhat a cross between a breadstick and a calzone. They are a little messy to make, yes, but they are a great food for parties, picnics, and just snacks! Have a pot of hummus or your dip of choice and eat away.

They’re not too difficult to make either – and you can fill them with a huge variety of toppings.

Roll out your pizza dough into a rough rectangular shape (oblong if you’re more like me). Top half of it it with tomato sauce (recipe to follow), and your toppings of choice – I used Vbites “Bacon” and Mozzarisella cheese – fold the top half over, squish it down a little with a rolling pin, and slice into sticks about 2cm/3/4 inch thick. Place on a baking tray and bake for 15 minutes or until nice and golden!

If you have a good melty cheese then it does ooze out a little but that just adds to the tastiness. Plus, you can totally eat the cheese scraps off the baking tray (not that I did…ahem…).

Pizza Sticks

• Servings: about 50 sticks
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Ingredients

For the Pizza Dough
• 400g bread flour
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp instant yeast
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 250-300ml hand-hot water (water hot enough that you can just stick your little finger in without it being too hot)

For the Tomato Sauce

• 5 tbsp tomato puree
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 1 tsp cider vinegar
• salt + pepper
• Boiling water
• Toppings of choice eg: Vegan Cheese, Vegan bacon/pepperoni

Directions

1. First, make the pizza dough. In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, salt and yeast. Stir through the olive oil.
2. Gradually add the hot water to the flour mix, adding enough to form a dough consistency. Knead the mix for 8 minutes until it forms a stretchy, firm dough.
3. Cover the bowl, and place aside in a warm area (by the heater, in the airing cupboard etc) to rise for at least 1 hour, until doubled in size.
4. Once the dough is risen, preheat the oven to 210C/410F.
5. Next, make the tomato sauce. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl, and slowly add boiling water until the paste becomes a spreadable, sauce-like consistency. Taste and adjust seasoning.
6. Time to assemble the pizza sticks! Split the dough into four pieces. Roll each dough ball into a rectangle about 5mm thick (a fifth of an inch).
7. On the bottom half of the rectangle, spread tomato sauce. Top with your toppings of choice.
8. Fold the top half of the dough rectangle (the bit without any toppings) over the bottom half, and gently roll over it with your rolling pin to seal.
9. Cut the folded dough into strips about 2cm/a quarter inch wide. Place on a baking tray.
10. Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes, until golden brown. Repeat with the remaining dough!

Gooey Cheese Sauce

Mmm, pizza. Who doesn’t love it, with its gooey, stretchy cheese topping? Or lasagne, with the cheesy layer next to the pasta and the tomato sauce?  As vegans, sometimes we think we have to miss out on that. But we don’t!

I found this recipe a while ago on Season Square, a French vegan blog, and adapted it (and translated it!) to make this lovely cheese sauce, which goes great in anything you could use cheese sauce for – on pizza, it hardens up a little and forms a gooey topping, in lasagne, using it instead of the bechamel, in sandwiches…the possibilities are endless!

It’s so simple too – you just blend all the ingredients together, and heat gently, till the sauce thickens and you can then use it however you like.

• Servings: Enough to cover 2 pizzas
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Ingredients

• 350g silken tofu
• 110ml vegetable stock
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil
• 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 3 cloves garlic, finely minced
• 40g cornstarch
• 1 tsp salt

Directions

1. In a large saucepan, fry the minced garlic in the oil for about a minute – don’t let it burn!
2. Remove from the heat, and add the tofu, vegetable stock, salt, cornstarch and nutritional yeast.
3. Using a stick blender (or transfer to a stand blender) blend the mixture until smooth.
4. Return the saucepan to a low heat, and whisk continually until the mixture has thickened.
5. Once thickened, continue to whisk for a further minute, before removing from the heat.
6. Use however you like!

Thank you to Season Square for the recipe inspo!

Hummus Pizza – Vegan MoFo Day 16

“Late Summer” is today’s prompt. Well, it’s the middle of September and I’m pretty sure summer is gone now. It’s all rain rain rain here!

But back to food, and away from rain. What could be more summery than a nice pizza? Made with hummus, and topped with all those lovely vegetables left over from the summer.

I dry fried all the vegetables (apart from the tomatoes) to start off with, as this lets them cook through and release all their water before going on the pizza. This is important so the base doesn’t go soggy! I used peppers, courgettes, and mushrooms, but you could use whatever you have.

I made the hummus myself as it’s a pretty simple recipe, but use a tub if you like – it really doesn’t matter. You can add flavourings to the hummus as well if you want.

I used the same pizza dough from my post last year as that’s my go to pizza dough recipe, and it works perfectly! One batch of that dough makes two large pizzas.

Hummus Pizza

• Servings: 2 pizzas
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Ingredients

• 1 batch pizza dough, rolled out

for the hummus:

• 1 can chickpeas, drained
• 2 tsp tahini
• 3 tsp lemon juice
• 2 tsp olive oil
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 3 tsp water

for the vegetables:

A mixture of whatever vegetables you have to hand, chopped, I used:

• Mushrooms
• Courgettes
• Red Peppers
• Tomatoes

Directions

Preheat the oven to 220C/430F
1. First, make the hummus. In a food processor or blender, mix together all the hummus ingredients and blend until smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste.
2. Heat up a non-stick frying pan and add the vegetables (except the tomatoes). Fry for about 10 minutes, stirring regularly, until slightly crisp and dry.
3. Spread the rolled out pizza bases with hummus, and top with the fried vegetables. Add the tomatoes, and some salt and pepper.
4. Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes until the base is golden brown.

How to make a vegan pizza

“But what about pizza? How can you live without pizza?!” I’m sure you’ve all heard something of that ilk before. Pizza has become more than just a food, it’s a social event. But what do you do when the main ingredient of pizza – the cheese – is something you don’t eat?

Well there’s several things you can do. You can just forgo cheese altogether and use something else tasty – I particularly like hummus on pizza, like this one from Budget Bytes, or this curried hummus pizza from Vegan Richa – both of these pizzas are wonderful! But if you like you can go down the route of vegan cheese. Oh what a touchy subject. If you give it to non-vegans, most of them will probably go ick and refuse it – it’s an unfortunate truth that most vegan cheese doesn’t taste like dairy cheese – although I’ve heard good things about Daiya in the US and Violife here in the UK, both are pretty expensive! Vegan cheese can be good though, despite it not being a perfect copy. Today I decided to use Tesco’s Soya Cheese – apparently this is repackaged Sheese, but I’m not sure I’ve ever had Sheese so I can’t compare. I like the taste and it melts well, so it’s good with me!

The Crust

As you may have noticed from the photo, my crust is perhaps not the most elegant. Why is this? It’s because I made it from scratch! Now there isn’t anything wrong with using a store bought crust and it’s really handy if you want a quick pizza, but I find there something very satisfying in making and baking your own bread dough. Mine is nothing simple and based off my mum’s recipe, which she got from an American friend of hers when she was younger.

First, you mix flour, salt, sugar, dried yeast, and olive oil in a bow, and then slowly add “hand hot” water. Hand hot water is water that you can just bear. I make it by boiling water, putting some in a jug, and then putting cold water into that. Test it by putting your little finger in the water. If you can hold your finger in for ten seconds without going ouch, but you still find it pretty hot, it’s good to go. You don’t want it to be too hot, otherwise it’ll kill the yeast, but you don’t want it too cold otherwise the yeast will never activate. Gradually stir this water into the flour mixture until it forms a rough dough. You don’t want it to be too sloppy, and you can always add more water later if needed.

The next step is the kneading. This part can get kinda tedious. If you have a stand mixer with a dough attachment, well just use that, it’s easy, but if not, you have to punch the life outta this thing. Pretend it is somebody you really don’t like, and knock it again and again. Keep doing this for about 8 minutes until the dough comes together and looks like, well, dough.

Put this dough back in the mixing bowl, cover the bowl with cling film, and a towel or some other cover. Now, if you’ve been watching the Great British Bake Off, you’ll have seen them putting their dough in a “proving drawer”. If you have a proving drawer then I am jealous of your kitchen, but go ahead and use it, but if you don’t (like most of us), you need to find a warm place to put it. In the winter that may be nearby a radiator, in the summer perhaps in the sunlight from a window. I decided to put mine in the airing cupboard.

Now comes the patience part. Forget about it for at least an hour, up to two hours is a good time to leave it. Once the time is up, take the dough out, flour a surface, and roll it out to your desired shape. The crust will rise again when baking so make it quite thin – no more than 5mm.

Now it’s time to put the dough aside whilst you make…

The Sauce

There are many ways to make pizza sauce. Some people like red sauce, some people like white, some people like pesto, and some like no sauce! But I’ll stick with the classic red, tomato sauce. If you want to be super posh you can cook down fresh tomatoes and make a lovely rich pizza sauce, but mine is nice and simple and easy to make.

Simply combine tomato puree, salt, pepper, sugar, dried basil, a chopped garlic clove, a splash of vinegar, and enough boiling water to make it into a spreadable sauce. That’s it, that’s all there is to it, and you have a tasty pizza sauce!

Spread this on the bases you’ve already rolled out. Next it’s time for….

The Toppings

The important thing with pizza toppings is that they don’t make the crust all soggy. A lot of pizza toppings are vegetables, which contain lots of water, which, when cooked, seeps out into the crust and stops it crisping properly.

Today I decided to put mushrooms and tomatoes on my pizza. After washing my mushrooms, I sliced them and put them in a preheated saucepan – with nothing else in it – and let them cook for a bit.

The mushrooms will leech a surprising amount of water – what you want is this water to evaporate, leaving the mushrooms much dryer, so that it doesn’t all leech out onto your pizza!

Tomatoes are harder because you can’t really pre-cook them, so I slice them first, then remove the wet seedy areas, and I place them on top of the cheese, so the cheese acts as a barrier between the tomato water and the crust.

So once your mushrooms are done, add these on the pizza, grate cheese on top, add your tomatoes…and there you have it! A pizza ready to go in the oven!

Put the pizza in a preheated oven, and bake for 10-12 minutes until the crust is brown and crispy, and the cheese is lovely and melted.

And there you have it, one vegan pizza!

Pizza Dough

• Servings: 2 large pizzas
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Ingredients

• 400g white flour
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 large pinch salt
• 1 tsp instant dried yeast
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 250-300 ml hand hot water

Directions

1. In a large bowl, mix flour, sugar, salt, yeast and olive oil together.
2. Gradually pour in the water, stirring constantly, until you reach a dough like consistency.
3. Turn the dough out onto a work surface and knead for 8 minutes until it forms a stretchy ball of dough.
4. Put the dough in a bowl, cover, and leave in a warm place for at least an hour to rise.
5. Remove the dough and roll into pizza base shapes.

Pizza Sauce

• Servings: enough for 2 pizzas
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Ingredients

• 4 tbsp tomato puree
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 1 tsp vinegar (I used cider vinegar)
• 1 clove garlic, very finely chopped
• Salt & Pepper to season
• Boiling water

Directions

1. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl. Slowly add in the boiling water until the paste becomes a spreadable consistency.

Vegan Pizza

• Servings: 2 pizzas
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Ingredients

• Pizza dough (above)
• Pizza sauce (above)
• Pizza toppings – eg tomatoes, mushrooms, whatever you like
• Vegan cheese of your choice

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 200C (400F)
2. Spread the sauce evenly on your pizzas, leaving a gap of approximately 1 cm around the edge.
3. Add on all your toppings except fresh tomatoes.
4. Grate the cheese over the pizza. Be generous!
5. If using fresh tomatoes, add on top of the cheese.
6. Bake in the preheated oven for 10-12 minutes until the crust is golden brown and firm to the touch.
7. Eat and enjoy your pizza!