Pizza

I am very hungover. It needs medicated with cheese and carbs.

‘Oh, you ordered a pizza. That is clever of you.’ is exactly what you will be thinking. NO. NO I DIDN’T. I MADE A PIZZA FROM SCRATCH. With my own bare, boozy hands. And it was great, though I cried at least twice making it because I’m slightly hysterical today.

This dough is a. very easy and b. can be frozen so you don’t have to live off pizza for a week. Unless, like me, you want to.

You need:
500g of strong bread flour. Use white, you hippy.
1 tablespoon of salt
330ml of tepid water
A 7g sachet of yeast (or just 7g of yeast if you like to measure things)
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 tablespoon of brown sugar
2 Nurofen Express for your pounding headache

Sift the flour and the salt into a bowl bit by bit. Don’t do it like this, because that’s stupid and frustrating. I used organic flour and kept having to pick sharp, brown bits of organic out of it, but that’s another story for another day.

Take the Nurofen and pause for a minute waiting to see if you’re sick.

Mix the water, yeast, sugar and oil together and make a well in the flour. Pour your liquid in bit by bit and mix it all together with a metal spoon. You shouldn’t use wooden spoons for stuff like this as they soak up too much liquid. You can have that one for free.

You’ll end up with a slightly sticky dough, which you now need to knead for at least ten minutes on a floured surface. Listen to the radio or watch telly while you do this or you’ll go mad. This may have been one of the times I cried. It’ll go all nice and springy, and then you need to let it prove.

Lightly oil a large bowl and pop your dough in. Cover with clingfilm and leave for an hour or so somewhere warm. It’ll get MASSIVE. If it doesn’t either the water you used was too hot and killed the yeast, or it was just a shonky packet. There’s nothing you can do to fix that.

See? Massive. Pull off a bit about the size of a lady’s fist – find a lady to help you with this. Guess what? You have to knead it again. You’ll know when it’s done. I can’t explain how. You just will.

Flour a surface and a rolling pin and roll your dough out preeeeeetty thin into some sort of pizza shape. It doesn’t really matter and I’m too tired to care about your pizza shapes.

Plonk it (by ‘plonk’ I mean ‘carefully place’) onto some lightly floured foil and add toppings. Whatever you like. I’m not going to tell you what to eat, what am I? your mother? Just stick loads of cheese on, because everyone knows that cheese is made of magic.

I like onion, so what?

Stick it in the oven at 220ºC for ten to fifteen minutes. Tadaa! Remember how I told you to flour the foil? Can you guess who didn’t?

Now get back into bed, eat it and try and stop your hands shaking.