Pizza

One of the interesting things about blogging for me is seeing how I go through cycles with food. I return to recipes and modify them a lot – I guess it’s a process of refining as much as it’s a desire to eat something I’ve enjoyed in the past. This is a modification of an earlier pizza recipe. The mushrooms are smoked briefly with hickory. The smoking isn’t essential but it does add a really great note to the pizza, so smoke them if you can.


There are a couple of differences in this version. The herb aioli is out of the Millennium cookbook, but this version has less lemon juice. I also added some seitan sausage to it. It’s a recipe that you can adapt to whatever suits your fancy.

Pizza dough

2 cups of white flour
1 cup of whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon of dried yeast
1 teaspoon of kosher salt
1 1/3 cups of water

Mix the dry ingredients together and add the water. Knead the dough on a floured board for several minutes until it’s smooth. Let it rise for several hours until doubled and then punch it down.

For the toppings:
6-8 large white button mushrooms, sprayed with oil and smoked for an hour, and then sliced
4 jarred piquillo peppers, julienned
20 black olives, halved
1 seitan sausage, sliced into thin slices
Herb aioli (recipe follows)

Herb Aioli

1 - 12.3 oz. package of silken tofu
1/3 cup of roasted garlic
2 teaspoons of white miso
1 teaspoon of kosher salt
Fresh ground pepper
1-2 tablespoons of fresh basil, chopped (or cheat like I do and use the frozen cubes of basil from Trader Joe’s – I use four cubes
½ teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried tarragon
Lemon zest from 1 lemon finely minced
¼ cup of lemon juice
1 - 2 tablespoons of water

Blend all of the ingredients in a blender until smooth.

Assemble the pizzas: Divide the dough into 4 pieces and stretch or roll it until it’s thin. Add some herb aioli to each as a base. Divide the seitan sausage, peppers, mushrooms, and olives between the four pizzas. Bake in a 500 degree oven until the crusts are just starting to crisp, about 10-12 minutes