HBin5: Whole Wheat Olive Oil Pizza

We’ve been big pizza-eaters around here, lately, so the timing for this assignment couldn’t have been better!

To review, Michelle over at Big Black Dog, organized a group to bake from the book by Dr. Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe François, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

Our assignment was to make a batch of the Whole Wheat Olive Oil Bread and make several things, including pizza!

This one’s oven-baked, as we don’t have an outdoor gas grill, just at the moment. Actually, it’s been a couple of years since we’ve had one. Sucks. I’ve always wanted to try grilling pizza, and it will happen, someday. But I digress.

This dough was pretty easy to work with, although I’m now in the habit of wearing disposable gloves when I do so. The instructions say to roll it out using flour to keep it from sticking, but I prefer good old corn meal for that purpose. Corn meal doesn’t get absorbed by the dough, therefore making it easier to move the dough disk around, and gives a nice, crispy bottom crust – a texture I’m fond of.

I baked this directly on the stone, loading it up with mozzarella cheese, raw spinach, and sliced tomatoes. I sprinkled some salt, pepper and garlic powder over the spinach leaves before placing the tomatoes, thereby getting both the spinach and tomatoes seasoned, without burning. The spinach cooks nicely, picking up moisture from both the cheese beneath it, and the tomatoes above it. Lastly, I sprinkled a little extra virgin olive oil on the top.

I’ll definitely make this again, trying to get the crust a bit thinner. If you’re not used to whole wheat pizza crust, the taste will kind of throw you off, initially. But after the first couple of bites – especially with delicious toppings – your palate will become accustomed pretty quickly.