Thursday, March 29, 2012

Lemon Flatbread and Pizza

I have some beautiful lemons from a friend and the first recipe I thought of was lemon flatbread. I saw the recipe in a magazine and thought I had saved it. Luckily I found it online. The end result was crispy crackery sour salty goodness. I had even cut the amount of salt and it was still overpowering in a junk food sort of way. My yeast was dying so the bread didn't raise as nicely but I wasn't about to complain.
I know it doesn't sound like an "Ohh" "Ahh" sort of recipe but I liked it. I liked it even better when I turned the crust into pizza last night. I had better yeast so the result was less cracker like. I used wheat flour both times - mixing oat flour the first time and a little white flour the second time (both times just to use up the scraps of flour we had around). I made two pizzas - one with organic pizza sauce, grilled onions and peppers, pepperoni and cheese. The second I made a pesto sort of sauce out of pickled green tomatoes, pumpkin seeds and a little garlic. That pizza had sauce and cheese. I did leave a little cheese off the last 1/3 of each pizza so my husband could have some. The end result was wonderful pizza. They were different but so tasty. That was the last of our pickled tomatoes (sadly, no one really liked them when I first made them but since we discovered they are great on pasta, and now pizza, we've gone through them rather quickly) but hopefully, we'll have lots of tomatoes this fall to make more.
On to the recipe - this is on myrecipe.com
I made them with whole white wheat mixed with less than 1 cup of other flours. For the lemon flatbread, I left off salting the bread just before baking. I did notice that it too less time for my flatbread to cook so watch the timing. I think they took only about 15 minutes so start checking at 10 minutes.

Lemon Flatbread
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1/3 cup olive oil, plus more for bowl and pans
4 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons salt, divided (see Notes)
3 lemons
In the bowl of a stand mixer, dissolve yeast in 1 3/4 cups warm water (90° to 105°). Let sit until foamy, about 5 minutes. Attach dough hook and, with mixer on low, add olive oil, flour, and 4 tsp. salt. Mix until dough is smooth, about 2 minutes. (It will still be fairly sticky and won't pull away from the inside of bowl.) Using a spatula or oiled hands, put dough in a large, oiled bowl, cover with a clean towel or plastic wrap, and let sit until doubled in bulk, 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Meanwhile, slice lemons as thinly as possible. Discard any seeds. Put lemons and 1 tbsp. salt in a bowl. Let sit at room temperature at least 1 hour and up to 1 day. Preheat oven to 425°. Lightly oil two 10- by 15-in. baking sheets. Punch down dough, divide in half, and put each half on a baking sheet. Flatten dough as much as possible, pushing gently from the center out. (Dough will pull back toward the center; don't worry if it doesn't stay in place.) Let rest 10 minutes and then flatten again, pushing the edges and corners down to help them stay put (if it pulls back a bit, that's okay, but you want to make the dough as thin and flat as possible). Lift lemon slices out of their juices and lay them evenly over the dough, pressing them into dough as much as possible. Sprinkle dough with remaining 2 tsp. salt. Bake until brown and crispy, about 25 minutes. While bread is still warm, cut each sheet into 15 pieces. Cool on wire racks.

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