Jamie Oliver's Pizza Fritta, 'Fried Pizza'
Jamie Oliver may sound English, but deep down he's really Italian—take, for example, his new chain of Jamie's Italian restaurants slowly spreading their way through England, from Oxford to Bath and beyond. In his book Jamie's Italy, he offers these crisp, petite pizzas as the Italian street food answer to papadum (very popular in the UK)—fried as the "first-ever pizzas were."
Embellished only with buffalo mozzarella, plum tomato sauce, and torn strips of basil, anointed in the fryer and thereafter with a drizzle of golden oil, it's perhaps their simple old-fashionedness that renders them so fresh and modern.
As Jamie would have it, everything in this recipe is from scratch, and probably benefits from it. But if I were doing it, and Jamie wasn't around, I would probably buy pizza dough from the best local pizzeria and use San Marzano tomato sauce—just so that this flash-fried food can be made in, well, a flash.
Pizza Fritta
- makes 10 -
Adapted from Jamie's Italy by Jamie Oliver.
Ingredients
1 basic pizza dough (recipe follows)
Flour, for dusting
Vegetable oil, for frying
1 five-ounce ball of buffalo mozzarella
Optional: 5 teaspoons dried oregano
For the tomato sauce:
Extra virgin olive oil
1 clove of garlic, peeled and finely sliced
A bunch of fresh basil, leaves picked
1 14-ounce can of good-quality plum tomatoes
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Procedure
1. First, make your basic pizza dough. While it’s resting, make your tomato sauce. Heat a saucepan, add a splash of oil and the sliced garlic and cook gently. When the garlic has turned light golden, add half the basil, the tomatoes, and a few pinches of salt and pepper. Cook gently for about 20 minutes, mashing the tomatoes until smooth, then taste, season again, and put to one side.
2. Preheat your grill or broiler to its highest temperature. Divide the dough into 10 pieces and press them flat onto a floured work surface. Roll them out to about 1/4 inch thick and allow them to rest for 10 minutes or so. Heat a frying pan over a high heat, add about 3/4 inch of vegetable oil and fry each pizza for 30 seconds or so on each side. Remove with tongs and place on a baking tray.
3. Once all the bases are fried, smear each one with a spoonful of the tomato sauce and tear over some mozzarella and a leaf or two of basil or dried oregano. Drizzle with olive oil and grill until the cheese is bubbling and the dough is light brown and cooked through.
Basic Pizza Dough
Ingredients
1 3/4 pound strong white bread flour
1 1/2 cups fine ground semolina flour or strong white bread flour
1 level tablespoon fine sea salt
1/4 ounce envelope active dried yeast
1 tablespoon golden caster sugar
Just over 2 cups lukewarm water
Procedure:
1. Pile the flours and salt onto a clean surface and make a 7-inch well in the center. Add your yeast and sugar to the lukewarm water, mix up with a fork and leave for a few minutes, then pour into the well. Using a fork and a circular movement, slowly bring in the flour from the inner edge of the well and mix into the water. It will look like stodgy porridge—continue to mix, bring in all the flour. When the dough comes together and becomes too hard to mix with your fork, flour your hands and being to pat it into a ball. Knead the dough by rolling it backward and forward, using your left hand to stretch the dough toward you and your right hand to push the dough away from you at the same time. Repeat this for 10 minutes, until you have a smooth, springy, soft dough.
2. Flour the top of your dough, cover it with plastic wrap, and let it rest for at least 15 minutes at room temperature. This will make it easier to roll it thinly. Now divide the dough into as many balls as you want to make pizzas, i.e. lots of small ones or a few larger ones, but I suggest that 6 is a good quantity for this amount of dough.
3. Timing-wise it’s nice to roll the pizzas out 15 to 30 minutes before you start to cook them. If you want to work more in advance, it’s better to keep the dough wrapped in plastic wrap in the fridge rather than having rolled-out pizzas hanging around for a few hours. Take a piece of the dough, dust your surface and the dough with a little flour or semolina, and place the pizza base on top. Continue doing the same with the other pieces and then, if you dust them with a little four, you can pile them up into a stack, cover them with plastic wrap, and put them in the fridge.
4. When you’re ready to cook them, preheat your oven to 500F. At this stage you can apply your toppings. Remember: less is more. If you can, cook the pizzas on a piece of granite or marble in your convection oven—if not do them one by one on the bars of the oven shelf toward the bottom of the oven. (If you’re going to cook your pizzas on the bars of the oven, make sure they’re not too big—otherwise they’ll be difficult to maneuver.) Cook for 7 to 10 minutes, until the pizzas are golden and crisp.
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7 Comments:
There was a pizza place in my hometown that made deepfried pizza rolls. An oval of dough was filled with cheese and sauce and whatever toppings you wanted and then folded over (like a calzone but no air vents) and sealed. Then they threw it in the fryer until golden brown. The college students loved them. Perfect food for drunk students.
dhorst at 5:05PM on 10/26/08
This is a lot like Mark Bittman's Neapolitan Fried Pizza recipe with the addition of a broiler run, something I've done since discovering the recipe November last year. I'll give his sauce a try but probably keep to Bittman's technique, which is just nice and simple...
JimInHolland at 5:51PM on 10/26/08
Totino's has been making these for ages:
http://www.pillsbury.com/products/pizza/frozen/Totinos-Pizza-Rolls-Snacks.htm
redfish at 6:24PM on 10/26/08
@ redfish--I had those as a kid and they are nothing like the pizza rolls from this pizzeria. Freshly made dough and not paper thin little pockets. Think of state fair fried dough with a savory inside. These were about 10"L x 4"W x 2" H. Nothing remotely like those little Totinos bombs.
dhorst at 6:45PM on 10/26/08
I just saw deep fried pizza on the menu at Chip Shop. Didn't get it though, I'm not sure how I feel about deep frying pizza. Sounds almost sacrilegious.
bionicgrrrl at 1:34AM on 10/27/08
@bionicgrrrl: You mean the deep-fried pizza at the Chip Shop.
Adam Kuban at 12:29PM on 10/27/08
When I was a girl, about 30 or so years ago, I used to make Pizza al Tegame - frying pan pizza. I think it came from an Elizabeth David book and the dough was a scone-based dough, ie, no yeast, just baking powder. It rose magnificently in the frying pan. I would flip it over, add the topping and finish it off under the grill. My family was mad for it!
snowmoonelk at 1:04PM on 10/27/08