Pizza the Hutt

The Sunday before the jubilee found me on a wonderful walk with an old friend that saw us stumble across my parents and their ginger Dogg, lots of remarkable wildlife and a fistful of wild garlic that went into a gluten free pizza recipe.

After returning from my walk I opened the conservatory door and let sunshine slide in while I put on Status Quo's powerful and direct 2002 effort "Heavy Traffic". The Quo's music always sounds better on long, sunny days when cooking or going on a long drive. The record begins with the skilled shuffle of "Blues and Rhythm" and takes in along the way a strong cover of "Jam Side Down" with a good deal of trademark piledriving thrown in for good measure. 

For the Pizza dough I placed into a mixing bowl 400 hundred grams of gluten free bread flour, a heaped teaspoon of xanthan gum and five tablespoons of olive oil. I made a well in the middle of the mixture and gradually added in 250 millilitres of warm water. Then I added all the dry parts of the mixture into the water and then kneaded the dough powerfully to create a flat circle at the bottom of the mixing bowl. I covered the bowl with clingfilm and left it in the fridge for a couple of hours. 

When I resumed making the dish I took the pizza dough from the fridge and rolled it out on a greased baking tray. I spread evenly over the top of the dough, until it covered it, slices of charcoal cheese that I found at the wonderful Stretton Hall Farm | Facebook   . I used two of the five leaves of Wild Garlic that I had foraged locally to place on top of the cheesy base. 

Next I spread a tin of chopped tomatoes atop the pizza and the three other Wild Garlic leaves together with a diced, homegrown Cayenne Pepper. 

I cooked it in the oven for ten minutes on Gas Mark Seven and then served the Pizza with a side of homegrown lettuce. It proved to be a pizza that was spicy and rich with a dough that didn't make me bloated what with the lack of gluten. 

Gluten Free Jubilee

 I'm no Royalist but I do like the excuse to make a good biscuit and this week set to work on some gluten free jubilee biscuits. 

I made these jubilee biscuits, which were shaped roughly like the flags found on Royal Navy Ships of yesteryear, by taking 140 grams of Demerara Sugar and creaming them in a mixing bowl with 100 grams of Unsalted Butter until the mixture was rather fluffy. 

Then I added 350 grams of Gluten Free Plain Flour and a heaped teaspoon of xanthan gum. This gum takes place of the gluten as an agent to bind the mixture together. After stirring this into the butter and sugar it was time to soften the dough mixture with seventy five grams of treacle and a beaten Duck Egg.  Once this had been carried out, I squeezed the dough mixture to ensure the cold butter was crushed and I kneaded the dough.

With more Quo, this time their fine 1986 effort  "In the Army Now", playing; I rolled out the dough and cut rudimentary flag shaped pieces from it. 

The pieces were added to greased baking trays and cooked for ten minutes on Gas Mark 6 before they were put out to cool and then placed in an airtight container. 

A couple of days later I came back to the biscuits to make the icing. On the player was the Verve's excellent "Urban Hymns" album which has the right mix of stadium filling energy and mellow introspection. 

I took some blue rolling icing and red rolling icing and arranged it atop the biscuits to make a rudimentary Union Jack. The only thing that didn't quite work was that the white icing sugar was too runny to use effectively, but the general pattern of the flag just about made the design work. 

What the biscuits might have lacked in accuracy, they certainly made up for in taste as the treacle gave a burned feel to the biscuits that stopped the rich topping being too overpowering. Tasting the biscuits for the first time just before my weekly cricket training session was just one of several things I was to discover during this week that were exciting and new. 

The taste was a little better than the design, but you get the idea.