The best pizza

My bread-maker allows me to make the best pizzas ever. The only other pizzas I’ve had as good as these are those I had in Rome.

Ingredients
Dough
200ml water
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
375g/2 ½ cups bread flour
1 ¾ teaspoons dried instant yeast

Sauce
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 tub tomato paste
1 tin crushed Italian tomatoes
¼ cup barbecue sauce

Topping
1 medium ball of bocconcini mozzarella, sliced
3 kumatos* (or 2 tomatoes), sliced
4 slices of prosciutto, sliced into strips
12 basil leaves
¼ cup light mozzarella, grated
4 Swiss brown mushrooms, sliced
½ red onion, sliced
4 slices of Danish salami, sliced into strips
1 tablespoon of Romano (or parmesan) cheese, grated

Instructions
Dough
Follow the instructions with your bread-maker to make the pizza dough. An electronic scale gives the best results for measuring. Remove the dough after an hour (30 minutes of rising). Thin bought pizza bases are an OK alternative.

30 minutes before the dough is ready, turn the over on to its highest temperature and allow to heat. If you have pizza stones, make sure they heat with the over. Pizza stones allow you to get a similar affect to if you used a proper wood fired oven.

Sauce
Heat the olive oil in a saucepan and add the tomato paste. Cook the paste for a few minutes or until heated through. Add the crushed tomatoes and barbecue sauce and cook for another few minutes. Reserve half the sauce and freeze the rest for your next pizza (or use as a pasta sauce).

Dough
Remove the dough from the bread-maker and cut in half. Roll out each half to a thin 30 centimetre circle on a floured board and then place onto the heated pizza stone.

Topping
Spread the remaining sauce over both pizza bases. On one pizza, place the slices of bocconcini, tomato, prosciutto and basil. On the other, sprinkle the mozzarella, then the onions, mushrooms and salami, and top with the Romano. Don’t go overboard with the cheese, there should just be enough to help the topping stick to the base, no more. When cooked you should see the sauce through the cheese.

Place the pizzas into the oven for 20 minutes, swapping shelves half way through, or until the topping is cooked and the cheese brown.

Remove, cut and eat.

Makes two pizzas.

* Kumatos are also called black tomatoes. Originating from the Galapagos Islands, they have the flavour of nicely ripe tomatoes, even when not perfectly ripe themselves.