How to make homemade pizza sandwich – The Accidental Recipe Modified

Tuesday 13th July 2011, Recipe 20110713

Homemade pizza sandwich – an introduction

It was a dark and rainy night. Peter looked out of his apartment window and wondered. “What am I doing? … What am I doing? …” Tonight was the night. The night that would change his life. He turned around and saw the oven door open and said to himself “Everything in life must wait. Pizza must come first.” He mused at the oven door “This time it had to be different.” And that is how the pizza sandwich was born.

I bring you glad tidings, it is possible to make pizza sandwich. It is much easier to carry around especially if you are one of those people who take lunch boxes to school or office. The last episode of pizza (see murphy’s law homemade pizza and homemade pizza sauce) was a disaster so this time around I am trying to make up for it.

You didn’t think it was possible to make a pizza sandwich? I will show you what the ancients have tried and failed at and that is the reason why there are no historical records of pizza sandwiches. … just may be they ate all the evidence. A pizza sandwich is two pizza doughs with a cheese and tomato and other ingredients stuffed in between then baked. Yes it is possible and may be easier to bake then a standard pizza.

 

The homemade pizza sandwich recipe is as follows – the Straight Dough Method.

Let me tell you a little about wheat flour first then you will understand the recipe. As I had run out of bread flour I went to the supermarket to stock up on bread flour. In fact I went to several supermarkets and found that there was no bread flour available. In general, all-purpose flour or plain flour as about 3% less protein then bread flour. It is the protein content that produces the gluten and makes the bread ‘bready’ and traps gasses to make the bread rise. Pizza is about 50% all-purpose flour and 50% bread flour. So when you are in a situation like what I experienced then you make your own pizza flour or bread flour. You can buy gluten and add it into plain flour to make it pizza flour or bread flour.

To make Pizza or Bread Flour add
Gluten to All Purpose Flour
Type of Flour	Add gluten (%)
Pizza Flour	1.50%
Bread Flour	3%

 

That is if you have 300g of all purpose flour you add 4.5g gluten to the flour to make it pizza flour and 9g of gluten to make it bread flour.

 

 

Item	Ingredients	Percentage	Weight		Weight
		(%)	(g)		oz.
Sponge
1	All Purpose Flour	100	500		17.60
	Sub Total	100	500		17.6
2	Instant Dry Yeast	2	10		0.35
3	Sugar	7	35		1.23
4	Gluten	1.5	7.5		0.26
5	Water, Cold	80	400		14.08
Additives
6	Salt	1.5	7.5		0.26
7	Butter	2	10		0.35

 

 

Tomato sauce and topping recipe
Item	Ingredients	Percentage	Weight		Weight
		(%)	(g)		oz.
Sauce
1	1 tin mackerel in tomato sauce		400		14.08
2	button mushrooms		200		7.04
Topping
	grated cheese		35		1.23

I should have used 100g to 150g of cheese gratings.

 

 

 

Photos of homemade pizza sandwich making process

 

Weigh and mix all the ingredients together without the water so that they are uniformly distributed within the flour. Don’t add water yet as we will prepare the baking paper and the other ingredients such as the mackerel and cheese …

 

 

Cut two sheets of baking paper the size of the baking tray. On one of them you rub a little butter firstly, so that the pizza dough will not stick to the baking paper. Secondly, the butter will fry the dough from the bottom when it is baking in the oven and thereby making the bottom of the pizza crispy or crusty.
On the second baking sheet rub some flour. This is to prevent the dough from sticking like glue to the baking sheet.

 

I mashed the tin of mackerel in tomato sauce, into much smaller pieces and cooked it a little so that some of the water will evaporate. I used a tin of mackerel in tomato sauce, so that I didn’t have to make my own tomato sauce. Do make sure that the it is a good quality tin of mackerel otherwise your pizza will taste very fishy like sardines. Mackerel is quite chewing and meaty in texture so don’t mash them too much.

 

 

Drain the tin of mushrooms (400g tin) and you will have about 200g of mushrooms, about 10 mushrooms.

 

 

Slice the mushrooms and dry them on a cloth.

 

 

I sliced a large tomato. Having done this we can now go back to the pizza dough process.

 

 

Add the water to the flour mixture in one go.

 

 

And mix them. As you can see in the picture the sponge mixture for the homemade pizza sandwich is very wet. I had bought the cheapest all purpose flour in town to see if it would work properly and it resulted in a reasonable pizza.

 

 

Take a little more than half of the dough and place it on the buttered baking paper. This part of the dough will be the bottom pizza. Sprinkle some flour on the top of the dough so that you can use a rolling pin to roll it out. Do rub the rolling pin with flour before rolling so that the dough will not stick to the rolling pin.

 

 

I guess I must have been dreaming about Australia when I was rolling the dough out. Anyway this is the ‘down under’ dough and you will see what I mean when it is baked.

 

 

As usual I’ll never use half a tin of anything; I put all the mackerel on top of the bottom pizza.

 

 

Then I laid out the sliced mushrooms on top of the mackerel.

 

 

This was followed by the tomatoes.

 

 

Sorry I forgot to take pictures of the other half of the homemade pizza dough. Remember the second baking sheet was rubbed with some plain flour. Drop the other half of the dough on top the second baking paper and sprinkle some flour on top. Rub the rolling pin with flour and roll out the dough. Then lift the dough with the baking sheet and flip it over on top of the dough and pizza. I forgot to put the cheese on top of the tomatoes. I should have added about a 100g to 150g of cheese gratings on top of the tomatoes but I was so focused on getting this homemade pizza sandwich working that I forgot about it.

 

 

Leave it for four hours for the dough to rise. The top pizza dough had stretched when I was flipping it over and those stretched areas had torn open as the homemade pizza dough rose.

 

 

I was worried that the fresh tomatoes would introduce too much moisture into the pizza so I cut some openings on the top dough and sprinkled some cheese and sesame seeds on top. (Like I had nothing else to do!)

 

 

I baked it for 45 minutes at 210C (410F) as I was worried that the tomatoes would dampen the inside of the pizza. You could bake the home made pizza sandwich a little longer than half an hour.

 

 

Some of the juices from the tomatoes boiled and oozed out of the pizza sandwich.

 

 

Here is the sliced homemade pizza sandwich. It was not damp inside and it did come out quite well. I should have added some cheese and chilli to give it better flavour. Please do ensure you use a tin of good quality tasty mackerel or else this homemade pizza sandwich will not taste that good. Otherwise you could add some garlic, herbs and spices to get better results.

 

 

The main advantage of the homemade pizza sandwich is that you could use drier ingredients for your ‘topping’ or stuffing, as the top layer of pizza helps retain the moisture content and your topping or stuffing will not dry out and burn to a crisp.

 

 

This article on “How to make homemade pizza sandwich” was researched and written by Peter Achutha, 16 July 2011