How to make homemade pizza sandwich Turkish delight – The Accidental Recipe Modified

Homemade pizza Turkish Delight. Saturday 13th August 2011, Recipe 20110813

Homemade pizza sandwich Turkish delight – an introduction

 

I was one of those days after experimenting with homemade pizza sandwich that I had one of my Eureka moments. It began like this …

 

 

 

 

Last month I raided my mom’s kitchen to make a sandwich for breakfast . There was nothing with a hint of meat in her fridge or larder so I tried something different.

I made a sandwich with cheddar cheese, dates and some hot anchovy chilli spread. It was delicious. Then I thought, wouldn’t that be a good homemade pizza. As many of my visitors to this blog are from Turkey I decide to call this homemade pizza sandwich Turkish delight and please don’t confuse this with the real Turkish Delight.

In the last pizza sandwich recipe I had used all purpose flour (plain flour) with additional gluten to make the pizza dough. This time around I decided to make it the more ‘traditional’ way by mixing bread flour with plain flour but I used the most expensive bread flour and the cheapest plain flour I could get my hands on. I found out that the really cheap plain flours are just difficult to handle when you want to roll it out and shape it. Do note that the recipes here are the basics and I have not added ‘secret’ ingredients like milk or yogurt or herbs and spices to improve the flavour.

 

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

Item	Ingredients	Percentage	Weight	Weight
		(%)	(g)	oz.
Sponge
1	Bread Flour		250	8.80
2	All Purpose Flour		250	8.80
	Sub Total	100	500	17.60
2	Instant Dry Yeast	2	10	0.35
3	Sugar	7	35	1.23
4	Water, Cold	80	400	14.08
Additives
5	Salt	1.5	7.5	0.26
6	Butter	3	15	0.53

 

 

Tomato sauce and topping recipe
Item	Ingredients	Percentage	Weight	Weight
		(%)	(g)	oz.
Sauce
1	1 tin tomatoes		400	14.08
2	1 tin tomato puree		145	5.10
Topping
	sliced dates		145	5.10
	5 Cheese slices
	Anchovy Chilli Flakes
	Chilli Sauce

5 slices of cheese was not enough cheese. I should have used 10 slices or two layers of cheese slices. And I forgot to add the chilli sauce.

 

 

Photos of homemade pizza sandwich Turkish delight making process

Let us make the sauce first as it should be allowed to cool down before spreading it on the homemade pizza sandwich dough.

 

 

Fry two finely sliced onions and two sliced cloves of garlic.

 

 

Add the can of tomatoes and then the tomato puree. Do note the final quality of your sauce will be very dependent on the quality of the tomato puree. If the tomato puree is sour than the sauce will turn out to be very sour.

 

 

Just let it simmer and let some of the water content evaporate away.

 

 

Get 18 dates and remove the seeds

 

 

Slice the dates so that they can be evenly spread on the homemade pizza topping.

 

 

Slice the tomatoes into thin slices as they hold too much water so we don’t want to much tomatoes in the topping.

 

 

Let us make the homemade pizza dough. Mix all the dry ingredients into the flour so that they are uniformly distributed within the flour.

 

 

Add all the water in one go.

 

 

Mix well. The homemade pizza dough will be very damp and sticky since I have used the cheapest plain flour I could buy as I wanted to see how the homemade pizza turns out with real cheap flour. If you don’t want the dough to be sticky and damp you could use less water when using the cheapest flour. You could try 65% water content instead of 80%. 80% is good when you are using good quality, high water absorbency flour.

 

 

Dump half the dough out on the kitchen work surface that was sprinkled with a lot of flour. Sprinkle a lot more flour on top of the homemade pizza dough before rolling it flat with a rolling pin.

 

 

If the homemade pizza dough sticks to the rolling pin rub some more flour on the rolling pin. The sticky dough will dry up and fall back onto the rolled out dough.

 

 

Smear half of the tomato sauce on top of the homemade pizza dough. Remember the tomato sauce is sufficient for two pizzas.

 

 

Place all the sliced dates on top of the tomato sauce.

 

 

Then place the sliced tomatoes on top of the dates.

 

 

Cover the dates with cheese slices. I found that 5 cheese slices were not enough and it needed a second layer of cheese slices, making it 10 cheese slices. I am trying cheese slices as the price of ready made grated pizza cheese has shot up by 33% in the past few weeks. So don’t waste your money on pre-grated cheese. In fact since this is a homemade pizza sandwich you don’t need to use pizza cheese. Pizza cheese is a high moisture content soft cheese that can survive the baking in a hot oven and will not dry and become brittle. As I am making a homemade pizza sandwich, the top layer of pizza will enclose the cheese topping and prevent it from drying and becoming brittle hence you can use drier, harder cheeses that have strong flavours and you will find that you are making a variety of wonderful pizzas.

 

 

Smear the anchovy chilli spread all over the cheese. In fact, for my taste, I hand not put enough of the chilli spread as I had forgotten to spread the chilli sauce on top.

 

 

This is what anchovy chilli spread looks like. They do have a prawn chilli spread too in the supermarkets.

 

 

Roll out the other half of the homemade pizza dough and place it on top of the topping to cover the entire homemade pizza sandwich bottom. Sure, it will tear as you try to pull it to the very edges but that is okay as that will allow excess moisture from the sliced tomatoes to escape. Leave it to ferment for 4 hours.

 

 

After 4 hours of fermentation the homemade pizza sandwich will be bloated.

 

 

I baked it at 210C (410F) for 45 minutes. 45 minutes baking time allows the surface, especially at the edges become hard and crusty. If you wanted it to be soft I would suggest a baking time of at least 30 minutes.

 

 

This is what the sliced homemade pizza sandwich Turkish delight looks like. The dates gave a it sweet flavour and the chilli gave a hot, hot kick.

 

 

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