Wholewheat 'Pizza Bread' (bakery-style pan pizza)

Wholewheat 'Pizza Bread' (bakery-style pan pizza)


Another installment in my series of pizze casalinghe posts...

Pizze

• Pizza e pasta casalinga: Home-made pizza and pasta
http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=28099#28099

• IHDP: Internationales Haus der Pizza: Pizze casalinghe encore une fois
http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=29441#29441

• IHDP: Internationales Haus der Pizza II: Pizze casalinghe otra vez con nuestras verduras del huerto
http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=42251#42251

• IHDP: Internationales Haus der Pizza III: Pitsákia me Elliniká Systatiká
(Little Pizzas with Greek Ingredients)
- Pitsáki «Ewing» me féta, manoúri, ntomáta, skórdho, maïntanós, kai ladhi.
- Pitsáki «æ oraía Souædhéza» me graviera Krítis, omó kremmúdhi, ánithos, kai ládhi.
http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=68818#68818



One day last week, I really didn't know what I felt like making for dinner. As I thought over the options, it occurred to me that we still had a good part of a loaf of bread made earlier in the week and so, the fresh, homemade wholewheat bread dough (just water, salt, cake yeast, and a mixture of ca. 40% wholewheat flour and the rest unbleached all purpose white flour) that I was going to turn into a loaf that evening was available for some other purpose. Good bread dough is what one needs to make pizza and so that became the plan. A quick rummage around the fridge produced a reasonable set of secondary ingredients.

Since it was getting late and I was feeling lazy, I decided that rather than making two Neapolitan style small pizzas to be baked directly on the stone, I'd just make one bakery-style pan pizza or, as it was called in the old days by folks in Chicago's Italian neighbourhoods, 'pizza bread'.

Some eggplant sliced thin and fried in olive oil, some fior di latte, some pecorino, some left over tomato sauce (oil, garlic, salt pepper, peeled tomatoes, stretched with some passata di pomodoro), and some fresh mint from the garden: that's what was going on this pizza bread:


All one does is grease the pan very lightly with olive oil, then gently stretch the dough out to fit the size of the pan roughly. Then one shapes the dough in the pan further, so that there is a nice border showing and the base of the pie is not too thick. Once the dough is fitted in properly, it sometimes is good to let it rest a bit but in this case that was neither necessary nor practical. I dressed the pie straight away with the slices of eggplant, the tomato mixture (left-over sauce and passata), slices of fior di latte, some grated pecorino, some chopped fresh mint and a drizzle of high quality oil. The pie then went into a pre-heated oven at about 450º.

Here it is cooked:


I'm not sure how long this pie took to cook but it wasn't all that long.


The wholewheat crust had a very nice flavour and I especially enjoyed the nice thick and slightly chewy edge.


Cooking pizzas on a pan and using wholewheat dough are not things that I intend to do on a regular basis but variety is the spice of life and sometimes lazyness the mother of invention. This 'pizza bread' made for a very delicious dinner.

Saluti al mio maestro, Frank Masi!

Antonius


Links to other recipes and cooking notes by this writer: http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=55649#55649