It seems odd to have learnt how to make perfect pizza dough from a Scot named Ron Mackenna while touring Michelin-starred restaurants in South West France. His portfolio career is as intriguing - he's a defence lawyer in Glasgow and restaurant critic for a national newspaper. But it is his family recipe that I have used recently to great effect (no criticism, which speaks silent volumes). The story behind the recipe is that his ancestry is part Italian.
Previously I used a bread-maker dough that included sugar and pretty much worked but didn't quite hit the spot. Ron's recipe is wonderfully simple, always a quality to be praised in cookery - if it works, and this does.
The ingredients: 500g flour (I use a roughly 50/50 mix of white bread and plain as the latter makes the bases crispier), 325ml of cold water; 13g of salt; a 7g sachet of dried yeast. To this after a few experiments I now add 2tbsp of olive oil to make the dough more elastic. Mix the ingredients well in a big bowl, knead for 10 minutes then leave somewhere warm to rise - the old double-in-volume cliche is a good marker. Divide the risen dough in four lumps and roll these out into pizza shapes then leave them for half an hour or more to rise again. Put on your toppings and cook in the hottest temperature your oven can reach - mine is 250 Celsius but it struggles to stay there.
On my birthday recently I thought I'd be lazy and bought two pizzas from M&S. They were disappointing in so many ways - badly seasoned, mean toppings with little flavour, but most of all the base was nowhere near as tasty and properly pizza-y as Ron's.
Pizza is a perfect Thursday meal, in two ways. Like half the country I do the main food shop on Friday, so by Thursday the cupboard may not be bare, but the lumps of meat tend to have gone - though there is always a tin of chopped tomatoes. That - drained - does for two bases, with additions that tend to include garlic, briefly sweated mushrooms, more garlic, thinly sliced onion, a few prawns left in the freezer, slivers of the last pepper in the fridge, a tin of sardines with the bones removed by the maker or me, slices of ham or salami, and if I have remembered mozzarella. Elizabeth David (great writer, great inspiration, huge snob) demanded minimalist pizza toppings, I dare to disagree - it is a using up meal, a making the best of stuff meal, but with judgement.
It's a Thursday thing too in that we always eat our meal in the lounge that day for some long forgotten reason. And pizza is perfect for that, Ron's perfect pizza making it even more so if that were not philosophically impossible.
Update: I tried this using the dough setting on my breadmaker, and it was better than my hand-kneaded version.
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