Pizza Puttanesca and Pizza with Mushrooms and Truffle Oil

Given our great love of pasta puttanesca with all of its brilliant anchovy-chilli-capery-oliveyness, we figured that the various components would make a good pizza topping.

We made the dough from Jamie Oliver’s pizza dough recipe, which we’ve had some issues with in the past, but it turned out rather well this time, done in a bowl and mixed with dough hooks, which is less messy and also means less manual kneading.

We cooked down almost a whole punnet of cherry tomatoes to make the tomato sauce. It went something like this:

Pour a little olive oil into a saucepan over low heat.
Add almost a whole punnet of cherry tomatoes, along with a couple of peeled and bruised garlic cloves and some torn-up basil leaves.
Cook these down over very low heat until they are quite dry (20 to 30 minutes), remembering to stir often to prevent them sticking.
At this point, add a little water and a tablespoon or so of tomato puree, then cook down until the added water has cooked off.

It works out rather well; next time we’ll have to write down more exact quantities as we’re doing it.

When our pizza stone was hot, we removed it from the oven and put the pizza base onto it, gave it a good spread of the tomato sauce and then topped it with: one chopped red chilli, capers (salted ones, washed and drained), three chopped anchovies, a few chopped olives, some torn basil leaves and some torn bits of buffalo mozzarella (this was really good mozzarella and it’s a miracle that any survived to put on the pizza after we started tasting it).

Back into the oven until the top turned golden, then take out and eat! This worked out better than we had expected. Delicious. In a puttanesca sauce, the different components cook together for about 45 minutes to integrate, but in this case they are all separate but still work very well together. I expect we’ll be cooking this one over and over.

We also made a mushroom pizza, but the poor thing got a bit neglected when compared with the brilliant puttanesca pizza even though it was very tasty in its own right. We fried a mixture of chestnut mushrooms and various varieties of wild mushrooms, then topped the pizza with these (and some of the tomato sauce of course) and some more of the delicious mozzarella. When it was done, we drizzled it with a dash of white truffle oil, which gave it a heady aroma and really brought out the earthiness of the mushrooms.