Ongoing discussions about food icons... Heston Blumenthal's Pizza

This weekend we made Heston Blumenthal's pizza and the results were excellent.

This pizza is a real winner but is very time consuming with a lot of prep work.

You make a pre-ferment for you dough the day before. You mix flour, honey (one of our substitutions) and water and let it rest for an hour before adding the dry instant yeast and salt. The pre-ferment gets added to your fresh dough the next day after sitting in your fridge. Any time you make pizza dough it will taste better if it has sat in your refrigerator for a day or two.

Pre-fermented dough

The sauce is a real winner, we will use this again, and gets made in two parts. The first part uses seasoned (salt, pepper, sugar fresh herbs) oven dried tomatoes. The second is a salty and tangy tomato sauce, almost a paste) that is partially made in the pressure cooker. The two flavor combinations and consistency of the sauce make for great flavor and crust that is not soggy. We kept the olive oil that we covered our tomatoes with the day before because it was infused with flavor.

Oven dried tomatoes

Tomato sauce: stems are put in after to enhance flavor

The finished pizza is very tasty because of the sauce and the dough is really puffy and fluffy.

Uncooked pizza

Finished pizza

Puffy crust