Wild garlic and potato pizza

 

Oh how I love this wild garlic season! I haven’t been out harvesting it myself this year, but I’ve bought a few bunches from the vegetable market. I’m so inspired by all the spring produce right now, so there will be further recipes to come.

This was a wild garlic and potato pizza with slow-cooked cherry tomatoes, smoked burrata, garlic, mozzarella and wild garlic pesto. I made quite a thin crust pizza and it was very nice.

Have you been eating a lot of nice spring vegetables?

Have a nice weekend!

Your VegHog

 

Pizza night

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful weekend. Mine has been great so far. On Friday we went out to a street food market and had a couple of beers there, and yesterday we visited our friends in their lovely home with garden and had a very nice evening. I’m not sure yet what we’ll do today, probably just some pottering around and going for a walk.

We had a pizza night a while back and made these three different types of mini pizza: a mushroom and emmental pizza, a Mexican style pizza with spicy sauce, sweetcorn and jalapenos and a green olive and mozzarella pizza. They were all delicious and it was nice to have a mix of different flavours. It would be hard to pick a favourite.

 

Have a nice Sunday everyone!

Your VegHog

 

Spicy polenta pizza

I made this dish at our old place before moving, so it has been waiting for a while to be published. Even though it was made a couple of months ago, I think it’s still worth sharing. The dish is a polenta based pizza with vegan chicken style bits marinated in soy sauce, smoked paprika and tomato purée. The other toppings were roasted tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. It was a tasty combo with different textures. You could easily also skip or substitute the mozzarella and make a vegan version.

I pre-cooked all toppings and the base before combining. That way you can be sure that everything is nicely cooked. I marinated the vegan chicken and then fried it and I roasted the tomatoes in the oven.

It’s easy to make the polenta pizza base. Just cook the polenta in vegetable stock with a few added herbs like for example thyme, basil or wild garlic. Spread the cooked polenta on baking paper. If you use two baking papers on each side, you can roll it with a rolling pin as thin as you would like. Let the base cool in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. First pre-bake the base without any toppings for a little while, then add the toppings and bake until done. It’s a nice different style of pizza.

Your VegHog

Pizza is life

I'm always in the mood for pizza, especially homemade variants, and I quite often bake pizzas at home. I would describe my homemade pizzas as “rustic”, as they are not perfect, just comforting and tasty, but not the best looking perhaps. If I eat pizza in restaurants, I often find myself ordering a Pizza Margherita, as I think that the true skill is in the basics.

Over the years I have tried to perfect my pizza dough recipe, but I think that there is still work to be done. I don't measure the ingredients when I mix them for the dough, but just make it by feeling and experience. Good dry yeast is essential for me when making the dough, and I have luckily found my favourite product. I prefer a thin crust, and a spelt and wheat mix for the dough, but lately I have sometimes been making a thicker crust. I mainly make a full baking tray rectangular pizzas, because I think that it's a more practical shape for home baking. I would only very rarely make a round pizza.

I collected pizza photos from a few months, and I'm sure you'll get the drift of my favourite toppings by looking at them. For me it's crystal clear that pineapple belongs on a pizza, and it is on most of my pizzas, sometimes tinned, sometimes fresh pineapple. Another favourites of mine as pizza toppings are olives, mushrooms, bell pepper, onions, and often instead of Mozzarella I prefer hearty Cheddar. That's why many of my pizza photos are rather orange. Cheese of course is essential for a pizza, and I like a double cheese pizza. I use different cheeses on my own pizzas: emmental, cheddar, mozzarella and sometimes a mix or even yet another cheese style. I think it's nice to use different kind of cheeses on pizzas.

I normally make the tomato sauce myself, just a basic garlicky sauce, preferably puréed smooth before spreading on the pizza dough. Sometimes I put a veggie ragout made with vegetarian mince on the pizza, or occasionally just fresh tomatoes instead of a sauce altogether.

Here are now quite a few pizza photos. I would love to hear what's your favourite pizza like, and do you make pizza often at home?

Your VegHog

Pizza Danimarca

Pizza Danimarca was spontaneously created when I was putting toppings on a pizza and suddenly placed the grated cheese as the white cross of the Danish flag. As other toppings of the pizza I had a vegetarian mince, bell pepper and tomato sauce. It was kind of a vegetarian pizza bolognese. In the end I decided to cover the whole pizza with cheese after all. Otherwise there might have been a protest from my partner. Not that he doesn't appreciate our new home country, but he just really loves his cheese. 

There have been a lot of new plant based “mince meat” type of products in the shops here, and I have been sampling a fair share of them. I think that they've all been rather good, firm but tasty, and they've also had nice very affordable pricing. It's a good development to see that more and more people are embracing vegan and vegetarian diets, even in the Nordic countries, where a lot of meat and fish is normally eaten. This of course means that new products are created all the time.

Here are also some photos of a pasta bolognese that I made with one of these products. Maybe I'll need to get more inventive to get beyond pizza and pasta when cooking with these products. Do you have any nice ideas? Are stuffed bell peppers in or out?

Have a nice week!

Your VegHog

Homemade pizza for a cosy night in

Are you familiar with the concept of Hygge, a word that went viral a few years ago?

Hygge (/ˈhjuːɡə/ HEW-gə or /ˈhuːɡə/ HOO-gə) is the Scandinavian word for a mood of coziness and comfortable conviviality with feelings of wellness and contentment. Over recent years, hygge became a defining characteristic of Danish culture. (source: Wikipedia) 

Well I like hyggeing at home very much. Having a good book to read or a film to watch, curling up on a sofa with a hot beverage or nice comfort food. That's hygge at its best for me. Our recent pizza night was just one of those cosy nights in. I made a cheesy spelt crust pizza with various tomatoes (no tomato sauce at all this time), green olives, garlic and some seasoning. It was just perfect, and I hope that I would do such nights much more often. This pizza was also part of my cheap eats regime.

How is your weekend going? Are you relaxing more or out and about? I hope that you'll have a good one whatever you are doing!

Your VegHog

Large homemade pizza

Saving money is the theme of the week. We're on The VegHog's CheapEats Week 2017 and I'm keen to cook for little money. There is still time also for you to share your economical recipe until midnight on Saturday. Click on the link to find more info.

By occasionally making your own pizza, instead of ordering a pizza or eating out, you can save a lot of money. I am a sucker for a good pizza and am too often tempted to eat pizza out, but actually a homemade pizza is so much a tastier that I should make one more often. A pizza doesn't even take that long to make. When the dough is rising, there's time to prepare the filling.

The beauty of a vegetarian pizza is also that you can put any vegetables that you fancy as a filling. This time I just thought that a plain tomato pizza would be nice. I made it with a semi spelt-wheat crust, which was also slightly thicker than usually. I very much enjoyed it as a dinner and the rest of the slices as a work lunch.

I used a variation of tomatoes in this pizza and slow-baked some of the halved cherry tomatoes in order to make them a little bit like sundried tomatoes (kind of like in this Oven Tomatoes recipe, but I didn't quite bake them as long as in that recipe).

Tomato pizza

Dough:

200 g spelt flour

200 g wheat flour

1 tbsp dry yeast

1 tsp salt

300 ml lukewarm water

2 tbsp olive oil

Mix the dry ingredients. Then add the water and knead. Then also add the olive oil and knead a little more. Let rise under a teatowel for about an hour.

Filling:

200 g selected tomatoes

½ cup tomato sauce

200 g mozzarella

Slice the tomatoes thinly. Make the tomato sauce or use a ready made sauce. Grate the mozzarella.

Roll out the pizza dough and put the fillings on the top. Bake at 220 C for about 10 minutes.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog