Paulie’s Scamorza and Pesto Pizza

Okay, I’m officially a genius. I’ve just made the greatest pizza in the world and now it doesn’t exist anymore. Because I ate it. I barely had enough time to take a picture, such was my pizza-lust.

Since I’m such a kind and generous person, I’m going to share the recipe with you.
This is dead easy and should feed two people...or one really greedy person.

Dough
First you want pizza dough. You'll need...
225g flour
1 ½ tsp dried yeast
1 tsp salt

-Put about 150ml of lukewarm water into a jug and add a teaspoon of sugar. Then sprinkle the yeast over the water and stir it up to buggery.
-Leave that somewhere warm and watch a bit of telly for about 15 minutes while the yeast activates.
-Sift the flour and salt onto a clean worktop. Make a well in the middle and pour in your yeast juice.
-Start stirring the flour into the liquid with a fork, gradually working your way towards the edges. Don’t bother with a mixing bowl - this is much easier.
-You should end up with a nice ball of dough. Put your ball into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with a damp tea-towel and leave it somewhere warm, then go and watch some more telly. Make sure you memorise what size it is because you’ll need to know when it’s twice as big. That should take an hour, hour and a half.

Pesto
At some stage, you’ll want to make some pesto. This isn’t an exact science, and it’s mainly trial and error. You’ll need...
A couple of handfuls of basil leaves.
A lump of parmesan.
Olive oil.
Some toasted pine nuts. (this’ll take about 5 minutes in a dry frying pan.)

You can probably mess about with graters and a mortar and pestle, but who has time for that?

-Obliterate the parmesan in the food processor.
-Take the ground up parmesan out and keep it aside.
-Fill the food processor with the basil, pine nuts, a slosh of olive oil and some of the cheese.
-Wazz it up.
-If it’s too dry, add more olive oil.
-If it’s not cheesy enough…add more cheese.

As long as you get the texture right, you’re laughing. It has to be…like pesto. If you don’t know what pesto looks like, you probably shouldn’t attempt this.

You might as well start preheating your oven to 200°C now.

Back to the dough.
-Once it’s twice the size, slap it onto your worktop and beat the crap out of it. You need to get rid of the larger bubbles otherwise the pizza won’t cook evenly.
-Knead the dough and roll it until it’s roughly circular and about ¼ inch thick.
-Dump the pesto in the middle and spread it evenly with a spoon.
-Now cut your scamorza into thin slices and cover the pizza as evenly as you can. Scamorza is similar to mozzarella, but smoked and a little bit cheesier. If you can’t find it, just use mozzarella.
-You can add other toppings if you wish. I only had a frankfurter in the fridge so I sliced that up and spread it over the cheese.
-Bung it in the oven.
-Watch some more telly.
-After about 10-12 minutes. take it out, slosh a little olive oil over the top, slice it up, and then don’t let anyone else have any.

Bon appetit!