Onion White Anchovy and Tapenade Pizza and Thank You to All Our FoodBuzz Friends

Thank You!

I’m usually too busy bossing my Mummy and Daddy around to have time to express gratitude. After all, there is so much that I can complain about – the fridge door is never kept open long enough for me have a thorough inspection, there are never enough chillies or kiwifruit in this house to satisfy my chilli & kiwifruit seed-munching frenzy, and they even tried feeding me plain (not multigrain) toast this morning!!!!! It’s lucky I’m such a patient and forgiving birdie 🙂

But this post is all about saying a big Thank You to all our friends who have literally been showering us with their kind comments and lots of “buzzing” that made it possible for our White Chocolate Rocky Road to be featured in the Foodbuzz Top9! It’s been an enormously pleasant surprise for us and we have been truly humbled by all your lovely comments, congratulations and words of encouragement. We may be a bit slow in replying, but Chef Gerald will personally ensure that his Mummy responds to all his friends 🙂

Today’s recipe is another example of things born out of necessity – or an overflowing vegetable compartment in one’s fridge. The culprit in this case was a huge stack of onions. You see, spring was rather cool and wet here in Melbourne, so root vegetables were even more bountiful than usual. And our weekly veggie box seemed to deliver much more than we could possibly ever use up in cooking, so over the course a few week we managed to amass an enviable quantity of pretty onions of various shapes and sizes….

Now, Chef Gerald is not a huge fan of onions and his Mummy says they’re not really that good for parrots. So he is – mostly – a good boy and doesn’t even try to sample it 🙂 But he loves pizza, especially the one with a crunchy base made with kamut flour…. And this is how he came up with the idea for today’s recipe, which is a cross between the French onion tart called Pissaladiere and an anchovy pizza….

We understand that the French tart version is made with a bread base but, since we didn’t really want anything too time consuming, we chose Nancy Baggett’s terribly easy no-knead pizza dough recipe from Kneadlessly Simple. You can get the recipe here – the only modification we made was that we used 300 g all purpose flour and 140 g kamut flour instead of the all white version. We are finding that kamut flour lends a lovely golden brown colour and a beautifully earthy flavour, much better than the plain version. We’ve used this recipe many times, always with really good results, and we absolutely love it because it’s so easy and quick to make. All you need is just a few moments to measure and mix the ingredients in the morning, then leave it on your benchtop and you’re ready to bake pizza by the time you get back from work.

 

Onion White Anchovy and Tapenade Pizza

1 quantity white flour and kamut pizza dough, prepared according to the instructions provided in the link above

7 – 8 small to medium sized onions, peeled and very thinly sliced

20 g butter

1 tbsp olive oil

100 g good quality black olive tapenade

200 g marinated white anchovy fillets

3 ripe tomatoes, thinly sliced, each slice quartered

Heat the butter and olive oil in a large heavy bottomed frying pan until the butter has completely melted. Add the onions, toss to ensure they are thoroughly overed in the butter and oil mixture, then reduce the heat to low and cook for about 20 – 25 minutes, stirring frequently, until the onions have started to caramelise. Remove from the heat, set aside to cool a little, then add the tapenade and mix thoroughly.

In the mean time, drain all marinade from the anchovies, then slice each fillet in half lengthways.

Pre-heat the oven to about 240 degrees Celsius.

Shape the pizza dough according to your preferences, place in a flat tray or on a pizza stone if you have one, leave it to rise for anouther 20 – 30 minutes, then bake in the lowest part of the oven for about 15 minutes, until it has started to brown around the edges.

Remove from the oven, then spread the onion and tapenade mixture evenly across the pizza base, ensuring you leave a 2 – 3 cm border.

Lay the anchovies in a neat grid-style pattern over the onion mixture, then place a piece of tomato in each square.

Return to the oven for another 7-10 minutes, then remove and let it rest for a few minutes before cutting with shears or a pizza cutter.

We served ours with a crisp green salad made with wild rocket, sunflower sprouts and cucumber, dressed with a little white balsamic.