Elizabeth David's Pizza al Tegame: Excellent Home-Made Pizza In Like Forty Minutes Total

[rushthatspeaks]

So we had some mushrooms, as one does, and I was thinking about things to do with them, and I thought pizza, but for various reasons I couldn't start cooking tonight until Ruth got home from work, and all the pizza dough recipes I have take about two hours to rise. Which would have us eating at approximately the time Ruth likes to go to bed, when you add in actual cooking time.

I looked through Elizabeth David's Italian Food, because if there was a pizza variant that would rise faster it was in there, and discovered pizza al tegame, which is an entirely unyeasted pizza, requiring no rise time because it is fried. So we went from zero to dinner in about forty minutes, and this may be the best homemade pizza I have ever had, though it also tastes very different from any other pizza I've ever had period, in a way it's very hard to put a finger on. It's definitely a thin-crust pizza, of course, but it's doughier than most thin-crust, and, I mean, if I was handed this object without having made it, I would obviously call it a pizza, but it feels as though there ought to be another word. I look forward to trying it with other topping combinations, though I'm writing down mushroom because that's what we had.


Elizabeth David's Pizza al Tegame (Fried Pizza), expanded from Italian Food, pp. 123-4

Allow one 7" pizza per person, if serving nothing else.

For 2 7" pizzas:

2 tomatoes or one can diced fire-roasted tomatoes
1 clove garlic, minced
about 15 baby bella or button mushrooms
black pepper
fresh or dried basil
1 cup flour
2 tsp. baking powder
salt
shredded mozzarella cheese
about a cup of olive oil (don't worry, it really doesn't either stick or seep in)

a frying pan of about 9" diameter

Chop and seed the tomatoes, or drain the canned ones. Get as much liquid out as you can, because you're going to be frying this, and any tomato liquid that gets into the oil will spatter and be dangerous and frightening.

Mince the garlic, and toss it with the tomatoes in a bowl, with a good pinch of salt, and black pepper and basil to taste (bearing in mind that the tastes will become stronger the longer you leave it). Set the bowl aside.

Stem the mushrooms and wipe them off with a paper towel thoroughly. Do not allow water anywhere near them-- just keep wiping until you feel all right about it. Break them into chunks with your fingers, or slice them fairly thickly.

In the frying pan, heat less than a teaspoon of olive oil over high heat, enough to barely coat the bottom if scraped over it with a spatula. Get that near the smoke point. Put the mushrooms in, in one layer, trying not to crowd them. Leave them strictly alone for one solid minute. Cook, stirring, for another two minutes, removing them from the heat instantly if you see them giving off any liquid. Steam is great. Liquid is bad. Once they look cooked, pour them into another bowl, toss with a little black pepper (NO SALT, it will make them weep) and set aside. Turn off the heat for now, and wipe any egregious mushroom residue out of the pan.

I found it easier to make the crusts one at a time because then I didn't have to split the dough, but that's me; you can do them all at once.

Anyway, for each crust, take 1/2 cup (1/4 lb.) of flour, make a well in the center of it, add 1 tsp. baking powder and a generous pinch of salt, and stir in 2 tablespoons of water. Mix it with your hand, adding more water by drops if needed, until it makes an elastic dough. Knead it for a few minutes, although not so long as to become tough, and roll or pat out into a 7" round. You can leave the round sitting for a few minutes without it drying out, but if it's going to be more than that I would recommend covering it with plastic wrap.

Take about a cup of olive oil, or enough that it will come level with the top of your disc of dough, and heat it over high in the frying pan. While it's heating, line up next to the pan your tomato mixture, your mushrooms, your cheese, your crust rounds, a cover for your pan, and a couple of plates to transfer the pizza to.

When the oil is nearly smoking, add a pizza crust, and cook, turning down heat if it seems to be going too fast, for 3-5 minutes or until golden on the bottom. Flip it. Apply the tomatoes and then mushrooms carefully with spoons in the classical pizza fashion. Cook another two minutes, and then add a thin layer of the cheese. Cover the pan until the cheese is all melted, about another three minutes. The total cooking time of each pizza is about ten minutes.

Remove from pan-- a slotted spatula is a help here-- and onto plate. Note that leftovers will have the crust toughen, so get them eaten within a couple of hours, ideally while still hot.

Elizabeth David say "An excellent variety of pizza if carefully made," and I entirely agree.

Comments

[anne]

I got a version of that from the Urban Peasant. It reminded me of my mother's biscuit recipe. Thank you for reminding me of it!

[rushthatspeaks]

You're welcome! It does not remind me at all of my personal biscuit recipe, but I guess I can see biscuits from there, as Ruth used the phrase 'like a cracker, except not hard'.

[anne]

There's no milk, and the oil is on the outside instead of in the dough. Maybe it's the baking soda + flour? No, wait, biscuits use baking powder. Apparently I shouldn't read recipes when it's past my bedtime. :-P

[genarti]

Oooh. This does sound strange but tasty! Like savory fried dough pizza.

...By which, I probably unnecessarily clarify, I mean the sort of fried dough one finds at fairs, since that's my primary association with fried dough. Otherwise I'd just be literally describing what you're doing here.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

Sounds tasty!

Are you interested in a yeasted, baked, 15 min pizza dough recipe? Matt got one from a friend here which is incredible and also incredibly quick

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yes, very much! Two hours seems unnecessary, but I hadn't thought a yeasted one could get cut to much shorter than an hour, so I would love to hear about this.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

here you go! we've used this many many times with great success :)

1 1/4 c. flour
1 1/2 t. fast-rise yeast
1 1/2 t. sugar
1/2 t. salt
1 1/2 t. olive oil
1/2. c. warm water

Mix the dry ingredients together. Mix in the water and oil. Sprinkle the counter with flour and knead dough (adding flour as needed) until the dough is resilient and barely sticky. Cover and let rise in a warm place for 15 minutes. Roll out on floured surface. Bake for 8-10 minutes.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

That sounds fantastic. So do I have this right--are you basically deep-frying this crust, like classy fried dough, and then putting the toppings on it while it's still sitting in the hot oil in the frying pan? I'm puzzled how the oil doesn't make the toppings float right back off the crust or overwhelm everything.

Also, it sounds like you have a much different approach to mushrooms than I do. Can you please go into that a little? What is the finished product of cooked mushroom supposed to be like? I ask because I thought they were *supposed* to give off liquid and weep in the process of cooking and becoming tender and meaty. As far as I'm concerned in my own kitchen, I fry mushroom slices till they are limp and defeated, and mushroom caps until they drip liquid (and I sprinkle them with salt to encourage juiciness). Is this frowned upon by other people?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

You are basically deep-frying the crust, yes; you put enough oil in the pan to come up a little around the edges of your disc of crust, but not enough to spill over onto the top, because then you would in fact lose your toppings to the oil. Because the crust does have baking powder and was kneaded, the disc isn't paper-thin. Also, as the bottom fries, the outside edges of the disc curl up just a little. So, after flipping the disc once, you really shouldn't be getting oil on the top at all, and hot oil doesn't stick to or seep into this dough. You put the toppings on the way they would be on an ordinary pizza, with a bit of a margin around the edges for people to hold, and that should keep the toppings and oil separated (though there will be an inevitable few drops of tomato juice in the hot oil, which means I advise standing a bit back from this while it is cooking).

I know of two approaches to mushrooms-- there's the way I grew up doing it, which is just like you, and then there's the way I learned from Julia Child, which I went looking for because I was having an issue with omelet fillings and with French dishes. I wanted a mushroom omelet filling neither to be soggy nor to take twenty-five minutes, and with French cooking generally I was running into recipes that told me to saute the mushrooms separately and then add them. I would add them and suddenly the whole thing would have three times the correct amount of liquid, no matter what I did to drain the mushrooms beforehand, because they'd just keep giving it off. It threw off my cooking times and flavors immensely, because I'd wind up having to reduce the sauce for an extra hour, and this was obviously not what the recipes had in mind, so I looked it up.

I've used Julia's way for this pizza because it is faster and because see above about liquid in the hot oil being undesirable. Her way has these major features: 1) NEVER allow the mushrooms to interact with water in any way before cooking; 2) HIGH heat, no, really, the highest your burner can do and heat the pan very, very hot, you aren't going to burn them, the most you'll do is brown them and that tastes fine; 3) the minimum possible oil, which is far less than you'd think-- I do mean less than a teaspoon for a nine-inch pan-- or slightly more than that of butter, but not by much*; 4) SPACE around the mushroom pieces. Not only should they be in one layer, but ideally no piece of mushroom should be touching any other piece when you put them down. If they touch each other in the first minute they'll start weeping. After that they won't if you keep stirring briskly. I'm not a stickler about this because my pan is too small and I don't want to do them in batches, even three-minute batches, so I always get a very small quantity of liquid, but not like before and they don't keep on producing it.

*butter is the advanced mode because you won't burn the mushrooms but you might burn the butter, so I advise learning the technique on oil

What you get if you do them this way-- have you ever been to a really fancy hamburger place, or had a hamburger at a really fancy steakhouse, that came with mushrooms? Where they're cooked through, and may be brown on the outside, but have retained something of the density of raw mushroom and aren't limp? This technique comes close to what you get if you grill them, but without the charcoal aroma or grill lines. I find this very useful for omelets. For most things that aren't actively French, I don't bother.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the recipe, and also for this explanation. I have a need for good ways to cook mushrooms, so I would like to experiment with this. If I have a notable success or failure I'll let you know.