Holy crow! Two posts in one day?! Indulge with caution, my dears.
My family tends to be the type that when summer produce hits the farmer’s market, we get a little shop-happy. Before we know it, there’s a flat of peaches, a few pounds of cherries, some plums, a bowl of apricots, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries bursting out of fridge drawers. We know how to load up the summer fruit. And our eyes are always WAY bigger than our stomachs.
As another way to enjoy—and use up—some of the stone fruit populating our kitchen, I adapted a recipe from a pizza I saw on the menu at Café Flora (a usual haunt for my family). The inspiration pizza had a mixture of French cheeses and an almond-parsley pesto, but my version is just as luxurious. It is an unexpected combination of roasted stone fruit and a creamy, nutty spread. We served it up with a bean salad and braised collards. It was a refreshing meal for a hot (well… Washington hot) summer day J
Stone Fruit Pizza
Ingredients:
1 batch of pre-made pizza dough + extra flour
Macadamia-garlic spread
½ cup macadamia nuts (unsalted)
1 head of garlic
2 tsp olive oil
Tamari or shoyu
2 cups stone fruit, sliced and pits removed
*I used apricots and rainier cherries
Handful of flat-leaf parsley
2 – 4 tbsp unsweetened coconut
2 – 4 tbsp sliced almonds
Directions:
Preheat the oven to a piping hot 450deg F on convection. The convection part is particularly important since it will help circulate the heat enough to make the crust crispy! Traditional pizza ovens in Italy can reach up to 800deg F…unfortunately for us, we will have to make inferno magic in an inferior baking chamber.
Roll the pizza dough out onto a thin layer of flour and cover with a paper towel. Allow the dough to rest and come to room temp. This could take a half hour to all day depending on how frigid your refrigerator is. The dough ball should expand as it warms—if not, you’ve got a problem Houston.
While the dough warms and rises, make the macadamia-garlic spread. Peel all of the garlic cloves and toss with the 2 tsp olive oil to coat. Wrap the cloves up in some aluminum foil place in the oven to roast for about 15 to 25 minutes. The cloves should be soft enough to smash, but not pudding. Place the roasted garlic cloves and macadamia nuts into a food processor with a few tablespoons of tamari. Blend until it is a spreadable paste, adding more tamari or olive oil as needed.
Once the pizza dough reaches room temperature, oil a baking sheet. Punch down the dough and roll it out onto the baking sheet. Use the palm of your hand to flatten the dough out into circle roughly 16inches in diameter. If the dough puts up a fight and starts to contract, allow it to sit for about 5 minutes to relax and then return to manipulating the dough with the palm of your hand. Sticky is you friend. Sticky pizza dough makes yummy pizza. Flour your hands. Not the dough.
Spread the macadamia-garlic spread all over the pizza leaving an inch border of crust. Arrange the stone fruit slices evenly across the surface of the pizza, sprinkle with as much parsley leaves, coconut and almonds as you desire. Note, when I said UNSWEETENED coconut, I meant unsweetened coconut. None of that sugary, chunky crap. The sugars will just burn in the oven and you will have coconut-characol-grit all over the pizza you just slaved away on rather than toasted, fragrant coconut. Choose your shreds wisely! I like the Let's Do Organic Brand, they toast up really nicely :)
Put the pizza in the oven to bake for about 20 to 25 minutes. Half-way through baking, slide the pizza off the baking sheet directly onto the rack. This allows the air current to help finish off the center-bottom of the crust sans a pizza stone.
Let the pizza sit for a few minutes on a cutting board before digging in. The fruit will have a chance to cool down from nuggets of molten heat, and the pizza will be multitudes more cooperative about being cut up. J Patience yields a friendlier mess.
Have fun trying different combinations of fruit and nuts on the pizza! Let me know if any of your experiments turn into keeper recipes.
Cheers, kaite ;]
