Operation: Homemade Black Pizza
I have no idea why I wanted to try this, but I figured there’s lots of different black dyes out there and i’ve enjoyed doing coloured recipes in the past and learnt about new ingredients such as when we made black hummus. Today though, i’m attempting a homemade black pizza, everything is made from scratch including attempting black pepperoni and bacon!
48 Hour Pizza Dough
For the pizza dough, in a jug dissolve the sugar into the water with the yeast, stir for a moment and leave for 10-15 minutes, for it to start gently bubbling / activating. Combine the flour and salt together in a bowl, when the yeast mix is ready pour it in with the flour and mix well until combined, adding only more flour / water if absolutely essential. Give it a really good knead, so you have a big dough ball.
Use the oil to lightly grease a bowl, add the kneaded dough, cover and place in the fridge for 48 hours for those flavours to develop and the yeast to work away slowly. Remember to use a big enough bowl as it will double in size. You can also leave this for 72 hours or 24 hours, the longer you leave it the more the flavours will develop.
Remove from the fridge on the day of cooking, divide the balls into 4 pieces, shaping them with flour into dough balls. Cover and allow to come up to room temperature for 90minutes, it’ll be much easier to shape it that way. You can now build the pizza with this dough, rolling it / shaping it to your liking adding the toppings below and more!
Homemade Mozarella
You’ll need a few bits, but other than patience, it’s quite easy. First up dissolve the rennet tablet in the water, stirring if needed to let it break down, leave to one side. In another bowl combine the citric acide with the 250ml water, stir to dissolve in completely.
Get a large saucepan (big enough for 4L at least!) and add the milk, pour in the dissolved citric acid water, and heat until 32C. Remove from the heat source at that temperature (it won’t take long), add the dissolved rennet tablet and mix in. Cover and leave to stand for 10 minutes.
Cut through the top with a knife into a grid shape, it’ll have started to separate a little. Put back on the heat and warm to 41C, again removing from the heat. Scoop out the curds on the top and place into a cheesecloth over a sieve / colander to drain away excess fluid into a bowl. Keep scooping it out to build up the curds.
Heat up the whey once all the curds are removed in the pan but this time warmer to 76C, which is quite hot to put your hands in so be careful. We can now shape the mozzarella, kneading them out of the warm water in batches, the warm temperature helps to shape the cheese well. Fold and stretch the cheese into pieces of the size you wish. Fold in a little salt if you want as you do it. Roll into balls and either use immediately, or put in a water bath with a little salt until ready to use! If you need to re-shape the mozzarella, put it back in the warm water for a few minutes, and stretch / knead and shape again.
Fill up a large bowl with hot water or heat up the whey liquid** (until about 76ºC/170ºF) and place the curds inside. It may be easier to divide the curds in half and do this in two go’s.
Keep the curds in the hot liquid for a few minutes. This is when the mozzarella is taking shape – the curds should become stretchy, a bit smooshy, and look a little like melted cheese***.
Finally, remove from the hot whey/ water, add some salt and then stretch and fold the curds onto themselves (using gloves), like how you would with taffy.
Repeat until they become shiny and firm (usually just a few folds will do like between 3-7- don’t overwork it). Then roll into balls and quickly cool them. (See in the video).
If it’s hard to shape into a ball or comes apart while stretching, place back in the hot liquid and allow to heat up a little more to shape into the final, smooth ball. You can also make small mozzarella balls (Bocconcini).
Tomato Sauce
Blend up the tinned tomatoes in a food processor, dye if you wish at this point, add salt to taste, stir well and keep covered / chilled until needed. Delicious.
Black Bacon
This was made by brushing the bacon strips (thin ones) in treacle, then soaking them in a can of stout for 48 hours. Cook the bacon after soaking for 2 days in a frying pan, never put raw bacon on a pizza. I think I would have liked to have used Bovril looking back too, a good suggestion from some of my Patreon supporters.
Cooking the pizza
My pizza was cooked in a very hot oven at 420c, if using an oven, get it as hot as you can, it may need slightly longer, using a pizza stone pre-heated in the oven as it warms will helps. But it’ll take around 4/5 minutes vs the 90 seconds in a pizza oven.