Jewish Pizza?

This is typical of my decline. Baguettes started in the morning become a single loaf in the afternoon after a good lunch when I can’t be arsed to divide and roll out the dough. This time it was challah.

Mixed the dough for wholemeal challah intending to make three small loaves at 300g each. Come the afternoon lethargy struck. Couldn’t face dividing the dough into nine pieces, rolling them out and making three plaits. The dough went into the fridge overnight.

Next morning, regretting I hadn’t made pizza dough, something stirred in the brain department – why not use the challah dough for pizza? So what if it was 80% wholemeal and had egg in it? Baking needs to go off-track sometimes.

So, 400g became a pizza base and 500g became challah.

I realise that religions deal in absolutes, so for Jews something is either kosher or not kosher, but, speaking as an amateur, I would say the challah is getting on for kosher. The pizza is definitely not, for after a layer of burrata and a layer of tomato there comes a layer of cured pork. The final layer of a sprinkling of parmesan and a little chopped lettuce is probably innocent enough but the damage lies below.

The thing is, it was a great pizza. I baked it in stages – the base had about 6 minutes (at 300C), followed by the burrata, follwed by the tomatoes, then, briefly, the pork, and, finally, out of the oven, the parmesan and lettuce.

The word “biscuity” is rather overused in descriptions of darker crusts, but this was beautifully biscuity – light and crunchy, firm enough to eat with fingers, full of flavour.

Also recently, a true, one-off mongrel bread.

I was given a litre bottle of very creamy, unpasteurised cows milk. You’re probably too young to remember bottles of milk that came (were delivered to your doorstep) unhomogenised with a couple of inches of cream at the top of the bottle and, if you weren’t quick, a blue tit pecking its way through the foil top to get its share.

Unable to resist the offer of a hard-to-find ingredient, the milk went into the fridge where it remained for several days. Zilch inspiration. Ended up making a cheese sauce for a baked layered pasta dish, not very imaginative but very nice. Some sauce remained.

Knocked up a dough based on my Classic but using spelt as the second flour. Mixed in the remaining cheese sauce and then had to work in additional flour to make a usable dough. Dug out a couple of my languishing bread tins – long time since they’ve been used.

The result (never to be repeated) was surprisingly pleasant – the cheese flavour was mild but definitely made its presence felt.