Catalan Pizza (p. 183)

Catalonia is in Northern Spain and has it's own specific style of pizza, which I made last night. Why, you ask, did I make so many pizzas last night? Pretty much because they're easy, and because I'm going out of town for the weekend, and leftover pizza will be lovely to leave for my husband.

So, Catalan Pizza. This uses a different dough than the basic kind I've used for other pizzas, and it has a base of cornmeal. The dough still uses flour and yeast, but the yeast is dissolved in water, and olive oil is also used to add both flavor and elasticity to the dough. It takes about 10 minutes to knead the ingredients together to the point where it actually starts to resemble dough, at which point it's placed in a bowl to rise for a couple of hours.

While the dough is rising, the vegetables (onions, peppers, and peeled/de-seeded tomatoes) need to be chopped to create the "sauce" of the pizza. Catalan Pizza doesn't have sauce in the traditional sense, just very finely chopped vegetables that are mixed with a little bit of sweet paprika and salt. The mixture smells delicious and fresh and promises for a pizza with wonderful flavor.

Once the dough is ready, you quarter it and make a four thin crusts with slightly upturned edges to hold in all the veggies. Then just load them high and bake. Mine took a little longer than the recipe called for -- maybe about 40 or so minutes.

I didn't actually get to try these until lunchtime today, and I think they probably would have been better soon after coming out of the oven. Still tasty, mind you, but the juices of the veggies had soaked into some of the crust, so it wasn't quite as firm as it could have been. Next time I might use a little more salt, pepper, and paprika as well to give it more of a punch in terms of flavor. 

onion -- $.84

2 red peppers -- $4.58

2 ripe tomatoes -- $3.24

Total Cost of Catalan Pizza: $8.66