Russell's wood fired pizza recipe

Back to search results

Add a comment

Enlarge text

Rate this recipe

Cuisine: Italian

Ingredients

For the pizza dough
3 kg unbleached bread flour
1 kg stone-ground wholemeal flour (Russell uses biodynamic 80% light which has the coarser bran sifted out)
1 tsp dried yeast
2 tbsp salt
2600 ml rain or filtered water

For the pizza topping
1 thinly sliced onion
Olive oil
2 capsicums
1 zucchini, sliced
1 handful pitted olives
4 tbsp parsley
Salt and pepper

View conversion table

Preparation

For the dough
On a table, mix the flour and yeast and form a well in the middle.

Dissolve the salt in half a litre of boiling water, and add remaining water. If the ingredients are cold the water needs to be hotter. (Work towards body temperature dough). Pour water into the well using one hand to gather in the flour to make a paste first and then a dough. Keep one hand free for adding more water or flour.

When the dough is cohesive but wet and sticky, begin to knead with both hands. Keep a plastic pastry scraper handy to scrape the dough from the table and your hands. Continue folding and turning until a smooth, cohesive, easy-to-work dough has formed.

Place the dough in a steep-sided container like a bucket or pot. If it is cold, put it somewhere warm. If it is very cold, put it in a sink of warm water.

Cover with oiled plastic and a blanket. (Russell uses a foil space blanket from the camping shop).

For pizza, the dough can be used straight away but results will be better the longer it proves.

After about an hour, roll out into balls and set aside to prove for a further 30 minutes or so. Then stretch each ball into a round, about 2.5 cm in thickness.

For the pizza topping
Brown the chopped onion in olive oil and set aside.
Slice zucchini into thin strips, lengthways.
Cut capsicums in half and remove seeds. Place capsicum, skin side up and sliced zucchini in roasting pan and sprinkle liberally with oil. Roast in hot oven.
Remove zucchini when it is cooked .

Once capsicum blisters, take it out of the oven, peel off the charred skin and slice.

Roll out the pizza dough, spread browned onions on top, layer capsicum, zucchini, olives and sprinkle with parsley, salt and pepper.

Leave patches with no ingredients on the pizza dough as this allows the pizza to cook from the bottom up and the top down.

Russell recommends keeping the ingredients to a minimum as the secret to making a great pizza. “Less is more!”

If you enjoyed this Russell's wood fired pizza recipe then browse more Italian recipes, pizza, pie and tart recipes, vegetarian recipes and our most popular hainanese chicken rice recipe.

Italian Restaurants

Displaying 10 of 2156 Italian Restaurants.

	Restaurant	Book Online	Suburb
1.	The Beresford Hotel		Surry Hills
2.	Cellar 47		Shepparton
3.	Valentino's		Northbridge
4.	Smithfield Tavern		Smithfield
5.	Benny's Bar & Cafe		Fremantle
6.	Universal Bar		Northbridge
7.	Arch Rival		Palmerston
8.	Railway Hotel		Fitzroy North
9.	Vibe Cafe Restaurant		St Kilda
10.	Morning Star Estate		Mt Eliza

View all Italian restaurants | Start a new search

Comment on this recipe

PLEASE NOTE: All submitted comments become the property of SBS. We reserve the right to edit and/or amend submitted comments. HTML tags other than paragraph, line break, bold or italics will be removed from your comment.