Pizza with ’nduja, peppers and ricotta

Prep time: 50 minutes, plus proving time Cook time: 8-12 minutes per pizza

Makes 4 x 26cm pizzas

You need to heat your oven to the highest temperature it can reach. Mine goes to 270C on the fan setting. If your oven’s highest temperature is lower, you will cook these for longer; if it goes higher, they will cook more quickly. They take eight minutes at 270C, but all domestic ovens differ so do keep a close eye on them. I know it’s accepted that you can’t cook a pizza properly in a domestic oven, but I love these and, even though someone gave me a pizza oven last year,

I often opt to make them in my kitchen oven.

You can add herbs to these, too. In summer I throw on fresh basil leaves once the pizzas are cooked, or you can add dried oregano to the tomato sauce.

INGREDIENTS

For the bases

– 250g strong white

bread flour

– 250g plain flour, plus

extra for dusting

– 1 tsp caster sugar – 350ml warm water – 5g instant yeast

– 1 tbsp olive oil, plus

extra for greasing – polenta, for dusting

the baking sheets

For the topping

– 3 tbsp olive oil

– 1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes (preferably Mutti) – 1 garlic clove, grated

to a purée

– 2 large red peppers,

deseeded and cut into broad strips

– 150g ’nduja, broken

into chunks

– 200g ricotta, fresh rather than UHT, broken into chunks – 35g Parmesan, freshly

grated

– extra-virgin olive oil,

for drizzling (optional)

METHOD

Sift the flours into a bowl and add the sugar along with a teaspoon of salt. Make a well in the centre. Add a splash of the warm water to the yeast, mix and pour this into the well. Add the rest of the water and the olive oil, then mix until it forms a ball. This is a wet dough so don’t add too much flour when working with it. Knead the dough for 10 minutes on a lightly floured surface until it’s smooth, satiny and elastic. If you have a mixer with a dough hook, use that for kneading instead. Transfer to a clean, lightly oiled bowl, cover with a cloth and leave somewhere warm to rise until the dough has at least doubled in size.

Make a tomato sauce. Pour a tablespoon of the

olive oil into a saucepan and add the tin of

tomatoes, some salt, pepper and the grated garlic. Heat this until it’s almost boiling, then turn the heat right down and leave to simmer for about 30 minutes, checking to make sure the sauce hasn’t ‘caught’ on the bottom of the pan. You want to end up with a thick sauce.

Heat the rest of the oil in a frying pan and fry the peppers until they’re soft but not collapsing or scorched. Season and leave to cool.

Heat the oven to its highest setting and put a pizza stone or a heavy baking sheet – it needs to be heavy otherwise it will buckle in the heat – into it. The sheet needs to be sprinkled with a little polenta.

Sprinkle another baking sheet with polenta. Take a handful of dough – about a quarter of it – and pull it off. Roll this, on a very lightly floured surface, to a circle about 26cm across, and put it on the second baking sheet.

Working quickly, spread minimal tomato sauce on the pizza – smear it, you shouldn’t have a lot – leaving a 1cm rim. Add peppers and clumps of ’nduja (don’t make these too small or they’ll burn). Slide the pizza on to the stone or baking sheet in the oven. Cook for eight minutes, or until your dough is golden and the peppers are charring at the edges.

If your oven doesn’t go to 270C, then cook a little longer, watching the colour of the dough to assess the doneness.

Scatter nuggets of ricotta on the hot pizza, followed by Parmesan and black pepper. Drizzle with a little extra-virgin olive oil, if you like, and serve immediately. Quickly top and cook the other pizzas in the same way.