I don’t know if you know this, but I’m not a huge pizza lover. I adore pasta, so I’d never turn down going to an Italian restaurant, but I’ll always choose pasta (or meat/fish) over pizza. I think it’s the sheer amount of tomato paste, the often slightly soggy base, and the fact that every mouthful tastes the same, that generally makes me ignore that side of the menu. The only exception was when we were in Italy last year. The flavour of the dough seemed to be every bit as important as the toppings. Simple ingredients and only a few of them. I still picked pasta more often, but I did go for pizza a couple of times and it was delicious.
That simple, tasty (and not overly-tomatoey style) was what I was looking to recreate when I started out with this pizza bread recipe. Garlic bread is always a great starting point - I mean, who doesn’t love garlic bread! So the addition of a few more simple ingredients - namely cheddar, mozzarella and fresh cherry tomatoes - seemed like the perfect way to go. I use a classic pizza dough recipe for this Cheese and Tomato Garlic Pizza Bread - bread flour, yeast, warm water and a touch of sugar and salt, and give it one decent hour-long prove before shaping the dough and allowing it to rest for 5 minutes before dredging in fine semolina (this gives the pizza a slightly rougher finish with a little more flavour and extra crispness) and shaping. That homemade taste is just perfect - I could totally have eaten the whole thing if Chris and the kids weren’t clambering over each other to grab a slice!
So, getting onto ’the news’……. No I’m not pregnant, and nor to I have a cookery book deal (in my dreams!!), but… We do have a new blog going live! An idea I’ve had for over a year now is finally starting to come to fruition (made much easier with Chris finishing work to join me on Kitchen Sanctuary a few months ago). It’s call Living the Blog and it’s basically going to be a place to write about how we, as a family of four, living in the UK, run our blogging business. This is a totally new thing for us, but based on comments and emails we’ve received from publishing our income reports, we thought it would be fun to show people how we do things.
Whether that’s how we get freelance work, our steps for updating WordPress, what’s in our camera bags and what my everyday timetable looks like - we’re hoping that if you’re a blogger (or if you’d like to start your own blog), then they’ll be something there to help you. If things go smoothly, we should be making the site live (along with the first few blog posts) later this week. I’ll announce it on Kitchen Sanctuary as soon as it’s up. ????????????
The Cheese and Tomato Garlic Pizza Bread Recipe:
