Whole Wheat Pizza With Pesto Sauce

Whole Wheat Pizza with Pesto Sauce

Directions:

Dough:

The dough is prepared in much the same way as you would normally prepare pizza dough. We used the more active yeast to cut down on the rising time, so that we could prepare the dough at around noon and eat by 7 or 8pm. The original dough recipe calls for 1 cup of whole wheat flour and ¾ cup of white flour, we simply used 2 cups of whole wheat flour. If I were to make this again, I would probably add the white flour back in. In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt and sugar. Dissolve the yeast in the warm water, and then slowly mix the water into the flour. Add the olive oil and knead the dough for about 10 minutes. The dough should become a smooth ball. Coat the dough in a small amount of olive oil, cover and let stand in a warm place for an hour. Once the ball has doubled in size, place the dough onto a lightly floured surface and let rise until ready to use.

About 25 minutes before you are ready to get things all put together, you should pre-heat the oven to 450°F. If you have a pizza stone, pop that in the oven while it pre-heats. After you have taken care of that, move on to making the pesto. When you are ready, work the dough out into the desired shape.

Pesto:

Fresh pesto is fairly easy to make, and you can play around with the ingredients a bit to figure out what you like. The listed ingredients is what I typically use, though we don’t always have sundried tomato. All you really need to do for this is to clean off the basil, pull the leaves off and place them in a food processor with all of the other ingredients. It might actually be a good idea to make two or three times what you want to use for the pizza, and use the pesto in other meals throughout the week, like a pasta, or as a sandwich dressing or something. Combine the ingredients in a food processor and turn it on until they are all blended as shown below.

Putting it all together:

At this point, your dough should be ready, your oven pre-heated and pesto ready to go. Start with getting all of the toppings prepared and ready to place on your pizza. Start with the veggies, clean out the inside of the bell pepper, leaving the outside in-tact, but hollow. Lay the pepper on its side and thinly slice it until you have enough. Remove the skin from the onion, and slice it such that you are left with some thin rings. Grate the parmesan, and set it aside. Depending on what type of mozzarella you picked up, there are different ways to handle it. I really like the small balls of mozzarella, and with those, I like to just crush them onto the pizza individually, which takes no preparation to do. If you have one large ball, I like to slice it into about 8 or so slices to lay out evenly on the pizza.

Now that everything is ready to go, pull the pizza stone out of the oven and sprinkle some flour or cornmeal onto it. Next, spread the dough out onto the stone, trying to cover as much of the stone as you can without tearing apart the dough. Once you have the dough spread out, evenly cover the dough with pesto. If you are using the prosciutto, this should be the next thing to get placed on the pizza. If you put the prosciutto on top, it will get very hard and crispy, I think it’s better on the bottom. Next goes the mozzarella, again, laying it out evenly. Then your veggies, and top it all off with the parmesan. I also added some red pepper flakes to mine. Pop it in the oven for 10-15 minutes until the cheese is melted and you can see it starting to brown a bit. Keep a close eye on this, because you don’t want it to burn.

Discussion:

This pizza is delicious and healthy. We love making fresh pesto as a sauce for something different. It tends to be high in calories but provides plenty of healthy fats. This recipe for whole wheat crust came out really good. We used all whole wheat flour, and it still has enough flavor without tasting too dry. It would be perfect if you added a little honey to it. If you’ve never had prosciutto on pizza, you should try this. Fresh mozzarella also makes a big difference. Our recipe makes one round pizza (about 8 slices). Each slice is a great source of protein and whole grains. Enjoy!