Seafood Cocktail Pizza

Dough

1. Make the dough: a 34 cm pizza needs about 400 g. The recipe for Pizza dough, which we use as our basic one, gives you almost any yeast dough for pizza. The dough can be thin or fluffy, soft or crisp, as you like. It all depends on how you prepare it.

   

2. Once the dough has risen, stretch it onto a pan greased with a little olive oil, cover with a towel and let it rest for up to 30 mins so it becomes a little fluffier. Be sure to prick the dough with a fork in several places.

   

Topping and sauce

3. Boil the seafood cocktail in boiling water for 2-3 mins. You can often buy a pre-boiled frozen “seafood cocktail”, a mix of different seafood: mussels, shrimp, cuttlefish, octopus and squid. It only needs to be thawed. Cut large pieces into smaller ones.

   

4. Pickle the onion: cut a small onion into thin strips and add 1 tbsp of wine vinegar. If you are in a hurry, pour a cup of boiling water (200 ml) over it along with the vinegar, then after 5 mins rinse the onion with water and squeeze it dry.

5. Make a little homemade tomato sauce or use your own preserves. Don’t use tomato paste or ketchup from a sachet. If you can’t use fresh or canned tomatoes, as a last resort you can simmer tomato juice of reliable quality with spices in a pan until the sauce thickens.

Assembling and baking

6. Spread 3 tbsp of tomato sauce over the pizza dough, especially carefully along the edge, the rim. Very little topping reaches the edge, and baked dough brushed with tomato is tasty on its own.

   

7. Add the topping. Spread the seafood cocktail evenly over the sauced dough and sprinkle with a pinch of dried oregano.

   

   Cut the tomato into thin rounds and lay them on the pizza. Removing the seeds and skin is optional. To do that, before slicing, just scald the tomato with boiling water and peel off the thin skin. Then cut the tomato and scoop out the seeds with a spoon.

   

   Add the pickled onion, spreading it evenly over the pizza.

   

8. Add the cheese. Cut the ball of mozzarella into thin slices and lay them evenly. It’s fine if there are gaps; that’s acceptable. You can also grate the mozzarella if you prefer.

   

   Sprinkle the pizza with finely grated Parmesan.

   

9. Put the pizza in an oven preheated to 200°C and bake for up to 20 mins. Since ovens differ a lot, always check the pizza by lifting the edge of the dough on the pan. It is done when the dough is cooked: once it starts to turn golden, the pizza is ready.

   

Serving

10. Cut the finished pizza into 6-8 slices with a pizza cutter. Pizza is best eaten while hot.