Whole Wheat Pizza with Romesco Sauce, Chorizo and Carmelized Onions

After missing a week of The Food Matters Project, I’m right back at it this week with a recipe for everyone’s favourite – pizza!  Before I tell you about this recipe, I want to tell you a little about why I failed to post one last week for FMP.  Last week’s recipe was “Fish Nuggets Braised in a Rhubarb Sauce.”  Like you’re probably thinking right now, I also thought at first glance – this sounds weird!  But after a read-over of the ingredients and steps involved I came to the conclusion that it looked alright.  I added a few tweaks here and there to put my own stamp on it.  Cooked up some Soba noodles tossed it altogether and lo and behold . .  I was not impressed.  I didn’t like it at all. The dish to me, tasted too fruity. It needed more savoury-ness, more umami, more umph!  Frankly, the flavour fell very flat for me.

Some bloggers would have posted the recipe anyway, wanting to show the successes and failures that occur in their kitchens equally.  I admire this outlook and appreciate when bloggers are honest and disclose when something doesn’t work and dedicate whole posts to a recipe that just didn’t pan out.  I on the other hand am a perfectionist – to my detriment.  While I think I am quite forthcoming with tips and ingredient changes that I feel will make the said recipe better, I don’t post recipes that did not turn out, or recipes that I  myself wouldn’t prepare again.  That’s why you didn’t see my take on last week’s recipe or the recipe from week 8 - my results weren’t good enough to share.

This week’s recipe however, was a keeper!  While I would make a couple of changes to the pizza dough recipe next time, I think the recipe is a great one for a whole wheat crust.  I doubled the recipe to make two large 16” pizzas.  When I mixed the ingredients I found that the dough wasn’t very wet as the recipe described.  Bittman explains the dough should be, “sticky and wet, like biscuit batter” and if it’s not, to add more water.  At the time, this made sense because I made Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread boule in the past and recalled that this dough was also very wet.  So I added extra water, combined, set it near my kitchen window and didn’t think much of it until about 10 hours later. 

When it came to start prepping the dough, I generously oiled a pizza pan as Bttman suggests and stretched out my dough.  I made my own pizza dough in the past.  These experiences told me that the amount of oil I used in the pan this time around should have been enough and the thiness of the dough in most cases would have been just right.  However, when I pulled the pizza out of the oven, the crust was quite thick and almost completely fused to the pan in some spots.  My consensus, the dough was too wet and I didn’t stretch it out enough.  Next time around I will not add extra water.  A generous sprinkling of corn meal will also ensure the crust doesn’t stick next time around.  When it comes to the thickness of the dough, it needs to be as thin as possible.

Finally, the ingredients!  I told you in my last post that I’ve been on a Spanish kick lately, so when I found a link of cured chorizo in my fridge I knew I wanted to embrace those flavours yet again.  So I whipped up a batch of romesco sauce – a roasted red pepper sauce with toasted ground almonds, garlic and smoked paprika – carmelized two very large Spanish onions and grated a generous hunk of sharp and creamy Manchego.  The result is a very flavourful and complex pizza that is close enough to traditional pizza ingredients but different enough to keep things interesting.

Whole Wheat Pizza with Romesco Sauce, Chorizo and Carmelized Onions

For Bittman’s ”No-Work Mostly Whole Wheat Pizza Dough” visit Niki’s blog, Salt and Pepper, our host this week.  For more pizza inspiration and to see how the bloggers did click here. 

Makes 2, 16” pizzas and enough toppings to cover both pizzas.

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

See link above.  For this recipe I doubled the ingredients.

Romesco Sauce

Taken from “Grilled Skirt Steak with Quick Romesco Sauce,” by Lori Longbotham; Fine Cooking

1 thin slice white sandwich bread, darkly toasted

2 tablespoons toasted sliced almonds

3/4 cup roasted red peppers, drained

1 teaspoon sherry vinegar

1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

2 medium cloves garlic

1 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 teaspoon smoked sweet paprika or plain sweet paprika

Tear the bread into large pieces, put in a food processor, and process to fine crumbs. Add the almonds and process until coarsely ground.  Add the roasted red peppers, vinegar, and pepper flakes and process until the mixture is fairly smooth, about 1 minute.

Chop the garlic and sprinkle with 1/2 tsp. salt. Using the flat side of a chef’s knife, mash the garlic to a paste (you can alternately make a paste using a mortar and pestle).  In a 10-inch skillet, heat the oil over medium heat.  Add the garlic paste and paprika and cook, stirring, until the garlic is fragrant but not browned, 20 to 30 seconds.  Add the pepper mixture and cook, stirring, until heated through and thickened slightly, about 2 minutes. Set aside at room temperature

Carmelized Onions

2 large Spanish or yellow onions, sliced thinly

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon sugar

In a large skillet, heat oil over medium heat  and add onions.  Sweat onions for 5 minutes, tossing occasionally.  Sprinkle with salt and sugar, lower the temperature to medium-low and continue sweating onions.  Stirring occasionally until onions have reduced in volume by half and are soft and golden.

For the pizza

125g (1/2 cup) cured chorizo, thinly sliced

250g ( 1 cup) grated Manchego

Preheat oven to 450 degrees farenheit.  If using a pizza stone, preheat the stone in the oven at this time as well.  If using a pizza pan, generously oil it with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and sprinkle with  to 2 tablespoons of coarse corn meal.  On the pizza pan, (or pizza peel, if you are baking your pizza on a stone) stretch out the dough as thin as possible, being careful not to tear the dough.

Brush 2 tablespoons of olive oil on the pizza dough.  Spread half of the romesco sauce over the dough.  Divide the onions, chorizo and cheese between the two pizzas.

Bake in the preheated oven until the bottom of the pizza is lightly browned and the top, golden.  Slice and serve immediately.