Jottage from Lancaster - making my own pizza

Heather mentioned to me that she made her own pizzas so that was enough to throw down the challenge to me to have a shot at it. I decided to make the Magic Bread as the basis but because I was in too much of a hurry, I chucked the ingredients into the bread maker to let it mix it all up rather than go to the effort of kneading it myself. Lazy, I know, but I ended up with some nice stretchy stuff that I suddenly realised would have to rise for an hour or so before it could be made into pizza. So I postponed the idea of having pizza and put the covered dough into the fridge in the hope that it would be OK to use tomorrow. 


Now tomorrow has turned into today and that bowl brimming over with risen dough seems to be filling the fridge so this morning I took it out and next I had to work out how to make a thin circle. In River Cottage Veg Hugh seems to make out that you can just roll it out very thinly but the dough seemed to refuse to roll and stubbornly stuck to the rolling pin or just shrank back to its original size. Suddenly I remembered a silicone roller I had bought from Lakeland in a sale and I threw the ball of dough on to the baking sheet and eagerly rolled it into shape. It seemed to obey and obligingly stayed in shape.

Nice rolling thing

I then slathered it with a layer of passata, cut up a red pepper very thinly and layered on peperoni, mozzarella and a little grated cheese. I was very spare with everything making one little ball of mozzarella do 2 large pizzas and barely used an ounce of cheese on each. I had put the oven on to very hot, threw in the 2 pizzas (I had enough dough left over to make a plain flat bread-y thing which I'm not sure what to do with yet) and this is what came out:

Now this may not look that appealing or professional - but it tasted wonderful - much tastier than anything shop bought and I would say barely a quarter of the price. Success, I think!