Vegan Gourmet Caravan: MIKE’S MEDITERRANEAN MADNESS PIZZA

There are few things in life I love more than Pizza, so when Emma asked me to write a post to help out with Vegan MoFo I knew exactly what I would write about! Just a warning, if you don’t want to read a lengthy romantic ode to my favourite food, please skip to the recipes!

I’ve loved Pizza for a very long time. As a child growing up in Poland we used to have these things called “zapiekanki” which is basically a baguette style roll cut in half, tomato paste on the bottom, sometimes a light layering of toppings and cheese which is then baked. I was obsessed with these and when we moved to Berlin these followed into mini pizza’s on toast that my parents always made, sometimes proper pizzas with their homemade dough as well as visits to the Italian restaurants in Berlin at the time.

After moving to Australia the relationship with pizza still continued, but as money was tight the quality wasn’t that great and I got accustomed to fairly mediocre pizza and some of my love for it diminished. As I grew older, had my own income and choices to eat outside of home though, I one day discovered Good Life Pizza through a vegetarian friend, the first accredited organic pizza bar in Australia, and soon after met Emma and it became one of our favourite places as young gourmets in love. When we moved into our first place together, we were lucky enough to move to the “little Italy” of Adelaide and the quality of the pizza we could get was incredibly good. Goodlife Pizza was still our favourite and one day we discovered Melt Pizzeria, which I would say is the best gourmet pizza place I’ve ever eaten at, they have flavour combinations I have to this day not seen repeated anywhere else.

So when we decided to become vegan, I guess the thought of pizza without some sort of cheese had me sort of worried. I remembered my vegetarian friend heading towards veganism and ordering pizza’s from Goodlife without cheese, and I mockingly said “Pizza without cheese, why bother?”. He correctly mentioned that pizza for the majority of the years after its inception, was actually without cheese, and I saw this again during an episode of the superb Food Safari on SBS.

The term pizza appeared in medieval Latin in 997, and was for many years a bakers tool, used to verify the temperature of a bakers oven. Flavoured flatbreads which led to the modern pizza have had a diverse history of changes and toppings across the countries in the Mediterranean though, so a detailed history of pizza would probably need several chapters in a book, along with some sort of flowchart diagram. There’s a project I might attempt one day! There’s just so many interesting styles of pizza too, the deep pan, the crispy thin Spanish style pizza, the Turkish pizza... the mind boggles (and the stomach rumbles!).

Interesting facts to note are that the Modern pizza originated in Italy as the Neapolitan pie with tomato. In 1889 cheese was added. Tomato was only added to pizza after America was discovered, prior to that, combinations of oil and spices were used as well as many other toppings. Oh and you can also make desert pizzas, we’ve had ones with caramelised apples, custardy bananas and also thin layering of melted Belgian dark chocolate sauce.

So when we moved to Germany, one of the things I looked for was a decent pizza place where we could eat occasionally. In Australia, all our local places got used to us ordering a custom gourmet pizza with our favourite toppings, and asking for no cheese! This wasn’t that big a deal. Places in Germany though, like always, seem a bit unprepared for the request but finally give in and give you what you’ve asked for. Sadly, the quality and amount of toppings here seems very poor so far. And only one place managed to make a base that was better than the frozen organic vegan pizza’s we could get at our Bio-Supermarket.

This just wasn’t going to do, and I decided that we had to start making our own pizzas. We had made our own Pizzas back in Australia several times too, and it was super easy because we could get really good bases to use as well. So the first challenge we had to overcome was to create our own base. Luckily Emma has been progressively digging far deeper into baking than we ever had before, and we tried out the recipe below which has worked absolute wonders! We’ve made it both “classic thickness” and what you would call “thin and crunchy” and both have been really good. I can’t decide which one I love more actually!

In our photos we made two pizzas.

Herby Pizza Dough

Ingredients:

1 instant yeast (In Germany that’s all we can get at the Bio stores near us)
¾ cup warm water
2 ¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
Pinch of sugar
1 tbsp of olive oil
1 ½ tsp of mixed dried herbs (our favourites are ¼ tsp basil, ¼ tsp marjoram, ½ tsp oregano, ½ tsp sage)

Directions:

1.	In your Mixmaster or KitchenAid bowl (with the dough hooks), combine the flour, yeast, sugar, salt and mixed dry herbs, stir to wooden spoon or spatula to combine. Get the Mixmaster kneading and add the olive oil and then the water. Pour the water in slowly though as you may not need all of it, you just want to get the dough to start holding together, you may need a little bit more too. Once it pulls together as a dough knead in the mix master it for 2-3 minutes, until smooth and elastic. We usually do the last minute of the kneading by hand to ensure the dough is at the consistency we want. You know it is ready when you can lightly indent it and it springs back or if you gently pinch a bit and it springs back. Alternatively you can also make this dough by hand, in which case you put the dry ingredients in the bowl first, then add the wet ingredients and mix it until combined. Lightly flour your work surface and knead your dough out until it looks smooth and elastic, which should take around 10 minutes.
2.	Oil a large bowl, put your dough in it and coat it lightly in the oil and cover with a damp towel. It now needs to sit in a warm place for about an hour, so it’s doubled. We use our oven as it can be cold in a German kitchen. We warm the oven to 25-30°C (using our oven thermometer).
3.	You’re now ready to start the next journey of your pizza! For us, this makes a 13” pizza at classic thickness, or two 11” pizzas at thin and crispy thickness.
4.	Get your oven heating up to 230°C and punch the dough down. Lightly flour your work surface again and roll the dough out into a circle if you can. We always end up with wonky rectangles which are fine as they fit perfectly in our baking trays.
5.	Transfer onto a lightly oiled baking pan and bake the base for 10 minutes on its own (or a tiny bit less if you’ve made it very thin!), take it out and now it’s time for the toppings! (If you end up making two very thin bases, bake them for a few minutes less and swap their top & bottom positions in your oven if one starts looking considerably browner than the other). Sometimes some of our bases puff up a bit too, if you have this happen to you, push the puffy bit down while it’s still cooking, and next time make a few stabs with a fork in the base before baking!

Mike’s Mediterranean Madness Pizza

(I’ll be using this name in my vegan pizza shop so don’t go stealing it!):

Ingredients:

Vegan pesto on the base (you can make your own or use a bought one, the Italian brand La Selva in Germany make a really good Vegano one with basil and garlic, and since we always kill every plant that we get we buy the premade one)
Sliced tomatoes (we like to put a little bit of freshly crushed salt on the tomato)
Sliced red onion
Mixed pitted olives (the ones we get are marinated in a herby oil of yummy-ness)
Faux Feta Cheese (recipe below)
Vegan salami slices or chorizo Spacebars (in Germany the Wheaty brand makes really good ones)
Vegan Cheezly (but only a light covering for texture, not a river like non vegan pizza would have)

Other things you can use on your pizza as well and are only required if you’re a pizza piggy like me or you have them handy and they need to be used up:

Marinated or fresh mushrooms
Salted capers if you have some spare
Pine nuts or roughly chopped walnuts (for an extra nice combo drizzle with a bit of truffle oil when using the nuts once the pizza comes out)

Directions:

1.	Remove the bases from the oven, after they have baked for 7-10 minutes.
2.	Cover your pizza with your favourite toppings.
3.	Now return the pizza back to the oven for another 10 minutes, or monitor it depending on your oven and how well baked you like your toppings! Crush some fresh black pepper to taste when they come out!

Faux Feta Cheese

This recipe comes from La Dolce Vegan! and is really good for pizza. It has a subtle herby flavour without being overpowering.

Ingredients:

200g firm tofu (crumb it roughly by hand)
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp water (I always prefer to use filtered water in cooking)
¼ cup red wine vinegar
1 tsp salt
½ tbsp dried basil
¼ tsp dried oregano
¼ tsp dried dill
¼ tsp ground black pepper

Directions:

1 .	In a medium bowl, mix together all these ingredients. Marinade the tofu for at least an hour before using, or leave it in the fridge for up to 24 hours. We also like to drain it lightly in a sieve for a moment before putting it on the pizza to reduce the amount of liquid that comes with it.
	La Dolce Vegan!: Vegan Livin' Made Easy by Sarah Kramer

This is just one of the many awesome types of pizza’s you can make, but with a strong base you can make a huge variety of creations and we’ll post some other gourmet ones up in the future, we’ve made these weekly for the past month now and I’m still nowhere near bored!