Market dinners: Pizza, Irish-style

Until recently, I had a weird fear of yeast-based baking. I imagined it to be a long, laborious and risky sort of process. How wrong I was! Sure, the kneading takes a while, but it’s a therapeutic way to spend ten or fifteen minutes while I fantasise about some day owning a KMix with a dough hook.

I’ve made Imen’s lovely pizza dough countless times since April, with consistently tasty results, and finding some Toonsbridge mozzarella – Ireland’s only buffalo mozzarella – at Saturday’s market was all I needed to make it again. Except, when it came to it, Himself ended up doing the honours while I faffed about in the garden. Is it weird that I talk to my pea plants?

Once the dough had proven, this evening’s pizzas were quick and easy to throw together. For the tomato sauce, I fried off two crushed cloves of garlic in some olive oil for a few seconds before adding a tin of chopped tomatoes, a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, lots of cracked black pepper and a few basil leaves. After simmering the lot for a few minutes, I tipped the mixture into a blender and whizzed until smooth. Along with the sauce and the mozzarella, we topped our pizzas with thin slices of Gubbeen salami and smoked sundried tomatoes from the Real Olive Company. Ten minutes later, we were sitting down to this.