bread & pizza recipes - a rough guide

I thought I'd give you our bread and pizza dough recipes again, for
any new readers to see ....

Our standard bread loaf recipe

1lb 2oz (about 500g) strong bread flour
… usually a mix of good quality strong wholemeal flour and strong
white flour (4oz / 120g)… the white flour added for better
texture & rise.

1 tsp / 5ml fast-acting dried yeast (half a sachet)
1 tsp / 5ml salt
1 tbsp / 15ml granulated sugar

360ml water
One generous glug of sunflower / olive oil

This is our Panasonic bread machine recipe, which produces a loaf in one
4 hour cycle. It's ages since we used the greased bread tins and the oven
to cook bread in, though we do use our Remoska for baking bread rolls from
time to time. The resulting bread, when sliced up, freezes well … so you
can easily defrost a few slices at a time.

For bread rolls, we’d use less water, say around 300ml, and divide the
dough into 8 (to make 8 bread rolls). Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 deg C
for 17–22 mins, until looking golden brown on top. The rolls freeze well,
and when defrosted in the microwave, are remarkably fresh.

For pizza dough, we use …

The above flour mix, same weight
1 sachet fast-acting dried yeast
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar

about 230ml water
2-3 generous glugs of sunflower / olive oil

We use the pizza dough setting on our breadmaker (45 mins mixing and rise),
& leave the dough to rise a little longer inside.

We use a bit less that half of the dough, to make one thin-crust pizza, and
make bread rolls out of the rest. We use only 1 tsp of sugar, so the bread
doesn’t rise as much, to make a thin crust.

Pizza toppings …

Sliced mushroom, red / green pepper (not chilli), thinly sliced small onion
& one or two cloves of garlic, sometimes some slices of courgette, sweet
corn (we pre-cook a small amount of frozen sweet corn), grated mozzarella
cheese (which keeps in the freezer well), dry black olives with stones inside
them, and a small tin of anchovy fillets. We spread some tomato puree (out
of a tube) on the pizza base.

One problem with putting a lot of stuff on top of the pizza is that you
can end up with a very soggy, undercooked bread base. So we tend to
pre-cook (partially cook) most of the veg, except the sweet corn and
olives, in the microwave, & then drain off the resulting water, before
spreading the hot veg on top of the pizza.

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 deg C for 17-22 mins, until everything
looks well done. Enjoy!