May 2022 Food Champions Challenge: What is your favourite Pizza Topping?

You can avoid the problems of too wet and too tired by making a very quick sauce out of tomato paste, EVOO, oregano, salt, pepper and garlic. You apply it raw and it cooks on the dough. The freshness isn’t as good as fresh tomatoes but it isn’t as wet either and supermarket tomatoes are often lacking taste anyway. If you can get some flavoursome tomatoes (grow your own) put them on top so they dry out a bit and don’t wet the dough.

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Fresh tomato, red onion & butterflied sardines drizzled with balsamic vinegarette. Thin, crispy & char-roasted. Love it!

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Either seafood or vegetarian for me - I am not a vego, but I love vegetarian food, and the options nowadays are so varied. Even a cashew-based mayonnaise, delish. I dont like an overload of cheese, but fetta is a favourite.

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Ham Pineapple Bacon and Banana topped with Garam Masala

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I think we have a FCC badge winner here. :rofl:

Not without added anchovies! :partying_face:

Of course it’s difficult to judge just how great the combination and garam masala preferred may turn out to be. It will all depend on the personal hot spice combination used. Are the bananas used green?

P.S.
I might suggest skipping the anchovies on this one unless ….? Hopefully @syncretic has the answer. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Garam masala (like “curry powder”) has no set recipe. In the books on spices and spice cookery that I read it is a mixture of ‘sweet’ spices without chilli. So if the name mentions ‘hot’ it isn’t always so. As the active ingredients are volatile it is often added to food at the last minute so the aroma is not driven off in cooking. I wonder if the garam masala @debera uses contains chilli and if it is added before or after cooking?

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Hi Mark, I use the Masterfoods one in our spice cupboard. It made an amazing combination for the pizza topping ever yummier

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Ground spices lose their kick even in a closed jar. If you like the Masterfoods version then making your own fresh as you need it will knock your socks off.

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Hi Mark,
yes fresh is best. I used to make my own curry pastes but now I have limited use of my arms and hands so it’s out of a bottle for me,

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I get out the mortar and pestle and make my own garam masala as required . I grind Cumin ,coriander , nutmeg, cardamom , black pepper , cinnamon and cloves to make my masala topping .

I do add the GM mix to pizza toppings . It is quite flavoursome . Works well on pizza with sliced tomato . I store any GM left over in an air tight masala dabba .

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We’re not fans of pizza, but will occasionally share a bought pizza with friends. We’re a bit odd we know,

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The International Regulations are a set of codified rules transmitted orally by Neapolitan generations of pizza makers:
put simply they say that a pizza should be:
“Baked in a wood-fired domed oven.
Dough hand-kneaded and untouched by a rolling pin or anything mechanical.
Round, not bigger than 35cm diameter, not thicker than 1/3 cm in the centre.”

A wood-fired oven is usually 430-480 C and the pizza is cooked in 60-90 seconds.
The traditional topping is just 3-4 ingredients, something like a Margherita or Marinara because pizza is really a snack finger-food.
But we are an affluent society and we add meaty toppings according to our taste and have thus encountered problems with the length of time and with the many and various ingredients which might get soggy, or dry out, or burn, and require different attention. A pizza now resembles a main course dish…not traditional, not authentic…but then we should eat to please ourselves as my grandmother always used to say.

PS a sad note: our own Neapolitan pizza house ‘Toto’s Restaurant’ in Lygon street Carlton, hasn’t survived last year’s lockdowns, closing down after nearly 60 years.

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This is an amusing true story:
Some years ago a friend told me that his little boy had been invited to a school mate’s house and had been offered a snack food unfamiliar to him. He politely declined and when asked what did he eat: ‘I’m Australian’ he replied, ‘I eat Pizza’.

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Love homemade pizza. I use whatever flatbread I have. Of late I’ve been using Costco’s spring onion pancakes. Then tomato paste and whatever I have growing in my veggie patch. Always tomatoes and capsicum. Sometimes broccoli and cauliflower florets (steamed) which is nice when you top with cheese. Egg and pineapple. Yes, I love pineapple on my pizzas. :grin:

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I’ve been eating open toasted cheese tomato and ham sandwiches or rolls since …… Square pizza easily done under the grill in two simple steps. Also a great way to use crusts or square buns/rolls getting a little old. Some crudely call them melts, but I’d call it a convenient square Aussie pizza. Certainly inspired by the Australian upgrades/reimagining of the classic round Italian version. I’m also considering some use a bench top grill oven for pizza. :joy:

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