I visited some friends over the weekend and they taught me how to make pepperoni pizza at home, using yogurt and flour for the dough. I wanted to try and replicate his recipe, however, it was late in the day and my immediate goal was to eat, not to shop for groceries. The ingredients I had on-hand, however, substituted nicely to make a dessert.
His pizza used a cup of plain yogurt and 1 ½ cups of self-rising flour for the dough. I had yogurt with bits of strawberry in it – and it didn’t amount to a cup, but the fruit made it juicier, so I still needed 1 ½ cups of flour. He used tomato sauce, I used butter. He used mozzarella, I used cheddar. He used pepperonis, I used blueberries. Pictures of the process are below and here comes the recipe.
INGREDIENTS:
- 1/3 cup yogurt with fruit
- 1 ½ cups self-rising flour
- handful o’ blueberries (fresh or frozen)
- Pam or some kind of cookie sheet spray
- 1 TBSP soft butter
- handful o’ shredded cheddar
TOOLS:
- measuring cup
- fork
- rubber stir thing (optional)
- cutting board or clean counter top
- rolling pin (optional)
- cookie sheet
- pizza cutter
VIVA LA INSTRUCTIONS:
First thing, turn the oven on to 400°F. It should be ready by the time you are. I started with this cute little cup of yogurt and fruit. You could change out the yogurt flavor, but I had strawberry, so that’s what happened. It was only 1/3 of a cup, but it was more liquid than plain yogurt, so I added 1 ½ cups of self-rising flour.
Mixing the yogurt and flour: I tried stirring it in this measuring cup with the rubber stir thing, but the flour started to poof out of the cup, so I went with a fork instead and that did the job nicely. Note the red plastic on the counter. This is what I use for a cutting board and for when I need to knead dough. Do you feel the need for knead?
I don’t have an in between picture, but I sprinkled extra flour onto the red plastic sheet and then used the rubber stir thing to rake all that bidness out of the cup and onto the flour. It doesn’t matter how much of this you do with utensils, you will end up get big blobs of dough on your fingers, so go ahead and fall in love with it.
Take a handful of blueberries and lob them on top. Fold the dough over itself two or three times, adding flour to it to make sure you don’t have wet parts. It should be similar to Play-doh, but it should definitely smell better.
Use the rolling pin to feel like a big fancy chef while you’re spreading out the dough. Be careful because you can pop a berry with that thing. If you don’t want berries to die, you can always spread the dough just using your hands. Don’t spread from edge to edge – just spread from the middle out. If you feel like you are going to have a psychedelic freakout because the edges are uneven, you can cup one hand on the outer edge while you spread the dough into it with the other hand.
Spray your cookie sheet with Pam or something like it (vegetable oil spray). To get the dough from the red plastic to the cookie sheet, I put the cookie sheet on top of the dough/plastic and then flipped the plastic over, so the pizza is now upside-down from what I had been looking at.
This butter and cheese part came as an afterthought, because the above effort was too naked to be pizza, not sweet enough to be cake and too flat to be a muffin. Slather on some soft butter with your fingers, then add a handful of shredded cheddar. Maybe you don’t normally think of cheese and fruit together, but imagine it as some guys that were on a party platter together one time and they decided to get together to make a jazz band.
Now that you have the raw pizza made up, your oven is probably up to 400 degrees, so put that feller in the box. Set the timer for 10 minutes. Note that I used a convection oven, so your time may be a little longer – like 12 minutes. Just be sure to check that the middle is done. You’re going to end up with this bad boy here. Plate it and survey its majesty. It’s still too hot for your human mouth.
After shaking off the magnetism of its beauty, grab the pizza cutter and slice it into sub-shapes that are acceptable to your brain’s organizational makeup.
Put a piece on a place with those taquitos you were making in the toaster oven this whole time. Eat one taquito and one piece of blueberry pizza before you take any pictures, to make it look like you eat less food than you really do.
Mmmmm…
This recipe was originally posted on MySaline.com on July 21, 2015.