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Margherita Pizza

Now how do you do justice to a tomato like this? You can stuff up beautiful produce by overelaborating. It’s hard to go past just a slice of sourdough toast, a drizzle of olive oil, and a beautiful, vine ripened Brandywine tomato in thick slices with salt and pepper.  Tomato on toast for dinner – if you have real bread and a real tomato, you could elaborate a great deal without improving either the flavour or the nutrition.

I think a Margerita pizza is about as far as you can go without going backwards.

The Recipe:

The Crust:

To do this in half an hour relies on you having sourdough or bread dough ready to go.  I am in a rhythm of making sourdough every second or third day, usually my Oat and Linseed Sourdough. But although I will usually go for heavy wholegrain every time, I have to admit, for Margherita, I like plain, white pizza dough.  So I just reserve a bit of starter in the morning, mix it with unbleached baker’s flour and a bit of salt to make a dough, stretch it out by hand to cover my pizza tray quite thinly (given that it will rise by at least double), and leave it covered with a clean tea towel on the kitchen bench for the day.

If you don’t do sourdough, you could use a yeast based dough – I’ve got a recipe in my Pumpkin, Feta and Caramelized Onion Pizza  post, or you could just go with a plain, bought pizza base.

The Topping

  • A little olive oil, easiest spread with fingers, covering the whole base out to the edges, to give you a nice crisp crust
  • A couple of cloves of garlic, crushed
  • A little real mozzarella (the white kind) or bocconcini, torn, scattered over the base
  • A real tomato or two, sliced and scattered over the base – not too much or it will go soggy, not too little because the tomato is the star
  • Salt and pepper – this is important
  • A little sweet basil, roughly torn and scattered
  • A little drizzle of olive oil over the top

Bake in a very hot oven for around 10 minutes.

Did you do the   Tuesday Night Vego Challenge this week? Links are welcome.

Posted in Recipes, Vegetable Recipes

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9 Comments

  1. Jode

    I think i just sorted what we are having for tea tonight…yum! Love the linseed sourdough idea…i really do have to get braver and try to make some sourdough!

  2. celia

    A meal fit for a Queen! Queen Margherita, that is, for whom the pizza was originally created. I wonder if hers was as magnificently fresh as yours? 🙂

  3. Kate

    That pizza looks delicious. Sorry I haven’t been up for the Tuesday night challenge lately, maybe next week if things settle down for me by then.

  4. Elaine coolowl

    Or Dill with fresh Tomato … Basil is divine, Dill is heavenly. Basil grows just about year round and self-seeds freely while Dill (which of course I prefer!) loves only the cool weather and is reluctant to seed. Home grown Tomatoes – is there anything *quite* like a vine-ripened tasty Tomato?

  5. Pingback:Tuesday Night Vego – Tomato, bean and risoni soup « 500m2 in Sydney

  6. Pingback:Tomato Season

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