Whole Wheat Pizza with Cherry Tomatoes and Tuna

As we move into June, the calendar starts to explode: friends come to visit, girls have social events (and school only sporadically), work nears its end. In other words, it becomes difficult to plan a family meal at home. But one we managed to squeeze in was this pizza.

You have to do a bit of planning ahead for this pizza, in that the crust needs to rest in the refrigerator at least 24 hours. That's not a huge hardship, as the dough comes together in about 5-10 minutes (I mixed it by hand because the mixer was dirty). It's quite a simple dough: white and wheat flour (I used part bread flour and part all-purpose because the flour here is quite low in protein), salt, yeast, and water. I let it rise in an oiled zip-top bag because my fridge is too small and crowded to fit a bowl full of dough. The dough expanded quite a bit and crawled all over the fridge during its rest: give it space. 

On pizza night, all Claire and I had to do was prepare a few simple toppings and stretch out our crusts. You will notice that there is cheese involved: since there are no lactose-intolerant members of our family, we decided that a bit of cheese (mozzarella and some feta left over from a Greek salad) would be in order. Otherwise, we stuck to the program: cherry tomatoes, olives (yummy spicy ones from the market), sliced garlic, tuna.

Claire made her own pizza: she was able to get it quite round and put some nice crimped edges on it. And she was rather conservative with the toppings, not feeling very sure about the whole tuna-on-pizza thing.

We baked Claire's pizza and "my" pizza (I shared with Sami) in a 250 C convection oven for 15 minutes, switching the position every 5 minutes. I don't have a pizza stone, I didn't preheat the baking sheets, and I didn't use the broiler, and yet the pizza turned out really great!

(Here's my misshapen and more heavily loaded pizza) The crust was crackly and yet chewy, and the toppings created a fabulous balance of salty and briny and spicy. We were pretty conservative with the olive oil and did not salt the pizzas (really no need with the olives and the tuna and the feta).

I have to say this is one of the best pizzas I've made. I have a recipe for an overstuffed Chicago-style pizza that I also love, but a pizza like this seems more reasonable to incorporate into the daily routine. 

I had an extra ball of dough since Julia was not available for dinner, and I used it the next night for an appetizer pizza with olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and goat cheese. Unfortunately, I let it bake a bit too long (one pizza cooks faster than two: go figure!), but it also disappeared in a flash. This is a recipe I'll be going back to often.