New Year's pepperoni pizza

A homemade spicy pepperoni pizza is becoming a bit of a tradition for us on New Year's day. Perhaps after all the rich fare over the festive season, we just want something simple. I've missed crunchy salad vegetables too, and we made a large salad to serve with the pizza. What a great budget meal this is too - one large pizza costs around £2! Each pizza works out at around 750 calories - great for sharing.
As we return to our normal eating habits we will continue to eat whatever we choose to eat. Most diet constraints revolve around limiting or avoiding certain types of food. By not limiting the types of food we can eat, we've found this aspect of our weight loss method helps make it so much easier to lose weight and keep the weight off. We recognised eating is a habit, and drastic changes can be difficult to sustain so why not start with the idea you can eat whatever you want and watch the quantity instead.

PEPPERONI PIZZA

Ingredients (makes two 12" pizzas)

Base:

300g strong bread flour

175ml luke warm water

1 tsp sugar

5g dried yeast

1 tsp olive oil

1 tsp salt

Topping:

Passata

Garlic clove - crushed

Large red chilli (with seeds if you like heat)

Pepperoni slices (we used Sainsbury's Try Me £1 pack - 12 slices 42g)

125g mozzarella (or use your favourite cheese)
other vegetables e.g. sliced red onion, red & green pepper, mushrooms

***

Mix the pizza base ingredients together: water, sugar and yeast. Leave to activate (5-10 mins). Follow the directions on the pack.

Put the salt and flour into a bowl with the olive oil. Add the pizza base mix and stir thoroughly. Knead for up to 10 minutes. This is the difficult bit if you do not have a food mixer with a dough hook. But, it's a great workout that burns a few calories....

Leave the dough to rise for around an hour, or until double the original size. Knock the air out of it - ie knead it again until it returns to its original size. This will take a minute or so. 

Divide into two equal amounts and form into whatever shape you would like your pizza to be. 

Heat the oven to 200ºC.  Put your pizza tray in the oven to heat up too. TIP: We use an upside down (pre-heated) baking tray, lightly dusted with semolina to stop it sticking. 

If you want a thinner crust (as in our photo), then prick the base all over with a fork. 

Add the crushed garlic to the passata (plus any other flavourings you like). Spread the base with this passata mix.

Place all the other toppings onto the base - everything EXCEPT the mozzarella. 

Cook in the hot oven for 5 minutes.

Remove then add the mozzarella.

Cook for a further 5 minutes or so until the crust is nice and brown.

***

Each pizza works out roughly at 750 calories each. 

****

REMEMBER:  - Do you know how many calories you are allowed each day?

Here's a link to our very first blog post in 2011 about our weight loss journey. We started this blog as a way of recording what we ate while losing weight. The blog is a food diary, and contains lots of recipes, tips and ideas about losing weight.

Copyright © forget dieting forever, all rights reserved.