Eastern Mediterranean Pizzas

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is for Eastern Mediterranean Pizzas. There isn’t a host for this week’s recipe, but a search online will find the recipe without too much trouble. You can also check out the links from other Tuesdays with Dorie bakers over on the TWD blog. This is a pita pizza topped with seasoned ground lamb and tomatoes. I thought that this recipe would be super easy to put together, until I realized I had to make the pita bread! The pita bread thankfully wasn’t too hard to put together, and you can make it in advance and refrigerate it, which was really convenient.

I made the dough one day, starting in the morning, letting it sit, and the finished it in the evening. It’s simple dough, but I found the dough to be very sticky. When I was kneading the dough, it seemed like I kept adding flour and it was still sticky. It was still fairly sticky when I was shaping the pita breads, but at least at the point it was workable. Maybe the smaller pieces of dough were easier to deal with or something.

You top these pitas with just a couple of tablespoons of the lamb/tomato mixture. I think I would have liked a little more topping. There were good and I liked the flavors, but they weren’t very pizza-like for me. I served them for dinner and they were well received. I didn’t top my pizzas with pine nuts as I don’t like pine nuts all that much. Now I have the rest of the pita dough and I think that I will try making some pitas on the griddle.

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, page 156

Pizza with Onion Confit

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is Pizza with Onion Confit. The host is Paul of The Boy Can Bake and you can visit his blog to get the recipe for this pizza. This recipe just provides the basics, leaving you to choose to top your pizza with whatever you would like, so make sure you check out all of the variations on the Tuesdays with Dorie blog. I’ve been out of the country for the past three and a half weeks, and this was the first thing I baked once I got home. It was good to get back in the swing of things!

This recipe has two main components: the dough and the onion confit. The dough isn’t that specialized really, but it does take a long time to put together. Make the sponge, make the dough, let it rise. Pizza crust is a fairly simple thing, and I am not sure why this needs to take so long. The onion confit is the real star here, and I really loved that! I topped mine with parmesan and prosciutto, which were fantastic. I know a lot of other bakers topped theirs with goat cheese, which is something that I am looking forward to trying.

The onion confit does take some time, but it is really simple. Just have it cook on the stove on low for an hour, stir it occasionally and you are good. I think I might try to get my onions sliced even thinner next time, but they were fine the way they were. I don’t have a pizza stone of any form so I cooked mine on a baking sheet sprinkled with cornmeal. That worked just fine, even without preheating or anything. I really liked this recipe, and I look forward to using the onion topping again for another recipe.

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, page 159