Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

I was so appalled by the price of a decent pre-made pizza base ($4.79 each!), that I made a quadruple batch of parbaked bases today.

It’s easy to do – make the basic dough recipe, let it rise, then divide the dough into four balls and allow it to rise a second time.  Tip each ball onto a sheet of parchment paper and work it out with your fingers into a large flat circle. There are some photos here of the shaping process.

Now, instead of topping it, slip the base (on its sheet of paper)  into a  hot oven and bake for one to two minutes.  We use preheated pizza stones, but you could always put the base on a tray if you don’t have these. You want the dough to puff up just the tiniest bit, but ideally it shouldn’t brown at all.   In our oven, that’s takes a minute and a half, baking four bases at the one time.

Remove the parbaked bases from the oven, discard the paper and cool  completely on a wire rack (this bit is important, or they’ll end up wet and sticky).  The bases can be frozen for ages, separated by sheets of freezer or parchment paper, then well wrapped in clingfilm.

I’ve delivered eight bases to the neighbours and stashed a further eight in our freezer.  We would normally prepare our pizza dough from scratch, but it’s nice to have some reserves for when things get really hectic!

. . . . .

Edit 31/05: Have just tried making multi-grain pizza crusts as suggested by Patrick in the Aussie Pizza post below.  They’re delicious!  I used Kevin Sherrie’s grain mix (90%) combined with a little bakers flour (10%), omitted the salt (as it’s already included in the grain mix) and increased the total flour weight by about 10% to compensate for the extra grain mass. Here’s a photo of the last slices of the two test pizzas, plus the bases parbaked and ready for the freezer.