Meatball pizza
From Cookipedia
To my mind this is about the pizza and the sauce, not the actual meatballs, hence using shop-made meatballs. By all means make your own if you feel so inclined.
Use a pizza stone! It makes such a difference. Your pizzas will go from those soggy-based shop bought shockers, to Pizza Express perfection in one simple step!
Ingredients
Ingredients
Printable 🖨 shopping 🛒 list & 👩🍳 method for this recipe
- 1 portion pizza dough
- 1 300 g pack of cooked meatballs of your choice
- 1 150 g pack of mozzarella cheese
- 1 large can tomatoes, chopped. Lots of supermarkets do chopped tomatoes, flavoured with chili/basil/oregano etc, and though it's as easy to do this yourself, they are quite handy for pizza toppings
- A good glug of olive oil
- 1 onion, peeled and sliced
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
- 1 dried chile de arbole, ground to powder in a coffee grinder or pestle and mortar (or ½ teaspoon chili powder)
- 1 glass red wine
- A pinch of sugar
- sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
- Yellow cornmeal for dusting
Mise en place
- Make the pizza dough as instructed
- If using a pizza stone, pre-heat the pizza stone under a very hot grill for about 20 minutes. Place it about 8cm (3") from the heat source.
Method
Meatball sauce
- Fry the onions and garlic in a few glugs of olive oil seasoned with black pepper until soft, about 10 minutes.
- Add the meatballs, tomatoes, red wine, chili and simmer until reduced and very thick - you don't want a wet pizza.
- As I have plenty of time on pizza day (Friday!) I make the sauce early in the afternoon and put it on the heat for 5 minute batches every hour or so, leaving it uncovered to 'dry-out' in between. You can of course just simmer to reduce, but you need to watch it and keep stirring all the time.
- Season to taste
Putting it together
- Pre-heat the grill to high as you can get it
- Set the pizza stone about 8 cm (3") below the heat source or the pizza may burn
- Dust the work surface with yellow cornmeal and then stretch or roll the dough into two thin rounds
- Grill the pizza for about 2 minutes on one side only or until browned.
- Remove from the oven, flip over and ad the topping.
- Divide the meatballs and sauce between the two pizzas, cut the meatballs in half and spread over the pizza
- Cover with sliced mozzarella cheese, drizzle with a little olive oil and bake for for 3 to 5 minutes (depending on how hot your oven is) or until the cheese browns a little. Watch it carefully as it's easy to burn at such a high heat.
- Serve!