Pizza with Cured Meat, Olives and Parmesan

Dough and topping

1. Make a yeast pizza dough. Simple dough is quick to make and needs no special skills. With this recipe you can shape the dough to your taste: thin or thick, soft or crisp, as you like.

   

   Once the dough has risen, knead it again and stretch it onto a pizza pan, lightly greased with olive oil beforehand. Be sure to prick the dough with a fork in several places. If you want a thin, slightly crisp crust, you can lay the topping on right away. If you let the dough rest for up to 30 mins, the pizza will turn out soft and fluffy.

2. Prepare all the ingredients for the pizza in advance. Slice the meat thinly if the shop has not done it for you. By the way, ready-sliced cured meat is very convenient to buy. The size of the slices is up to you, but remember that meat is fibrous and hard to bite through, so do not cut it into large pieces.

   

3. Peel a small onion, cut it into very thin strips and pour over 1 tbsp of wine vinegar. Leave to marinate for 10 mins. Then pour boiling water from the kettle over the onion, leave for 2-3 mins and rinse under cold running water. Squeeze out the excess moisture a little. This quick way of pickling onion for pizza has proved itself: it is fast and convenient.

4. Grate the Parmesan on a fine grater and, if you like, grind it further in a blender to fine crumbs. I deliberately left the basil out of the topping so the pizza tastes only of the cured meat, but while grinding the Parmesan you can add the leaves from 1-2 sprigs of basil. Then the Parmesan turns a pleasant green and the dish gets a barely noticeable taste of fresh basil. Cut pitted black olives in half lengthwise, or leave them whole if they are not too big. You can scald the tomato with boiling water, peel it and remove the seeds. But it is perfectly fine to just cut the tomato into thin slices and lay them over the pizza. Then the pizza looks festive and beautiful.

Assembling and baking

5. Spread the tomato sauce evenly over the dough in the pan. If you have no homemade sauce, do not reach for a packet of ketchup. Just take the flesh of one large tomato, purée it and simmer it in a frying pan with spices: salt, a little sugar, black pepper, aromatic herbs and a pinch of nutmeg. After 2-3 mins let the excess liquid boil off.

   

6. Lay the pickled onion over the tomato sauce, separating it into individual strands. Top with sliced smoked meat, ham or balyk.

   Do not try to pile on a lot of meat, covering the whole pizza. If the meat is cut in large pieces, the pizza is just as tasty but much more attractive.

   

   Add the tomato slices and black olives. It only seems at first glance that there is little topping on the pizza. The meat pizza will be quite filling.

   

7. Sprinkle with 1-2 pinches of dried oregano, then with grated Parmesan, taking care not to cover the tomatoes and olives too heavily with cheese. It is also worth sprinkling a bit more cheese on the edge of the pizza, where little of the topping reaches.

   

   Press the topping down lightly with your palms and drizzle the pizza with olive oil.

8. Put the pizza in an oven heated to 200°C. Pizza with meat bakes in up to 20 mins. Ovens differ, so check the dough by lifting the edge: when the underside starts to brown, the dough and the whole pizza are done.

   

Serving

9. Cut the finished pizza into 6-8 pieces with a pizza cutter. Lay a few fresh basil leaves on top.

   

   Pizza with meat, tomatoes, cheese and olives is served hot, right away. There is no need to reheat it, and there will hardly be anything left: it gets eaten at once, to the last crumb.