Monday, 17 September 2012

Notzarella Pizza


We love pizza.  I know everyone says that, but we REALLY love pizza.  I make this pizza about once or twice a fortnight.

I've been making this style of pizza for about 4 or so years.  The dough is the VWAV recipe.  I'm super lazy and make it in my KitchenAid stand mixer.  Damn that thing saves me time!

The secret ingredient to our pizza is Notzarella.  In our opinion this is the best vegan melting cheeze on the market.  And it's an Australian product!  I normally get two pizzas out of a block (I grate it all at once and freeze the second half - the dough recipe makes two pizza bases too, so I get to be lazy the second time around).  And in the last few weeks (or so) the block size is up to 300g, so it's even more cheeze!

The other toppings are (all purchased from Green Edge) are: Redwood Cheatin' Pepperoni Style Slices (half the pack), Lamyong Vegetarian Salted Crispy Chicken, and Lamyong Vegetarian Soy Sausages.  I use pizza sauce from the supermarket and add Smoky BBQ Sauce.

I get the best results with the dough when I cook it on a pizza stone.  I preheat the pizza stone in the oven for 25 mins as high as my oven will go.  Once the pizza goes in, I turn the temperature down to about 200C.  The Notzarella usually takes about 25 mins to melt at this temperature, but it may depend on your oven.  You can always finish it under the grill (if you have one!).

Before it went into the oven
After!
If you live in the land of Oz, hunt this stuff down and eat lots of it!  (This is not a paid Notzarella advertisement - I just love the stuff)

Saturday, 8 September 2012

Gnocchi with frizzled leeks, mushrooms and truffle oil

I made the biggest batch of gnocchi this evening.  I started out with 2.5kg of potatoes (I knew I should have weighed them at the fruit shop).  Which turned into about 3kg of gnocchi.

Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of the dough - it was huge!

I made the gnocchi specifically to use the truffle oil that we got from Green Edge.  The recipe was based on something I had in a fancy restaurant eons ago.

Things to do next time: work out how to pan fry the gnocchi (the entire bottom of the pan was covered in potato bits), add more truffle oil, fry for longer so the gnocchi gets crispier.

NOM!  I got two gold stars from Cam for this one.  Luckily I have ballet ALL DAY tomorrow (WOOOO!) so I can probably afford a few extra calories.


Can you believe I took this photo on my phone?  Samsung Galaxy for the win!