Pizza Sauce

 
One of my favourite things to cook and to eat is pizza.

Before I move onto dough here's my recipe for pizza sauce.

I've tried a lot of different recipes for pizza sauce and have found that the old rule still applies - the simple things are often the best.

Ingredients

 

• One 400g can of whole peeled Italian tomatoes.
• 100g of tomato paste.
• 1 tablespoon of sumac
• 2 cloves of diced garlic.
• Drizzle of olive oil.
• A few leaves of fresh basil.

Process

 
Combine all of the ingredients and process in a blender or using a stab mixer.

Will make enough sauce for 4 large pizzas or 6 small.

You can make this the night before and keep it in the fridge. The flavour does develop a little more but it doesn't seem to last much longer than a day.

Sumac is a middle-eastern spice which has a deep red colour and a lemon flavour - fantastic for pizza sauce. My discovery of sumac for pizza sauce was rather accidental. I was planning on trying sweet paprika in pizza sauce one day and had run out. I had a few bags of sumac - only because I had bought it from the local green-grocer to get my purchase over the $10.- eftpos limit. I'd never seen it previously and never really heard of it but just grabbed it off the shelf because I liked the look of it. Once I tried it in pizza sauce I was hooked and I've been using it ever since.

Serendipity I think they call it.
 

Laksa Obsession

 

Apologies to all for my lack of blogging of late. I have been on hiatus since moving into the new house. Deciding to do the landscaping and retaining wall myself seems to have taken up a lot of my time and focus.

But that's no excuse really - one cannot stop eating when one has work to do - in fact one should probably eat more at a time like that. The cooking must go on!

Which brings me back to one of my favorite topics - 'Laksa', or rather 'Laksa Obsession', or perhaps instead 'What it Sometimes Takes to Find a Good Recipe'.

A friend first introduced me to laksa at the Sussex Centre Food Court in Chinatown, Sydney. This wonderful soup seemed to be the most amazing thing I had sampled with a heady smell of tumeric and spices, silky noodles, and an assortment of chicken, prawns, and something called a 'tofu puff' which became wonderfully juicy in the soup and soaked up all of the flavours. Any self respecting laksa fan will know what I'm talking about.

But there are laksas and then there are laksas.

It's a bit like pies - you buy enough cheap pies at the local service station and at some point you will swear off them - promising never to eat a pie again. Then one day you'll buy one again as made by the experts and then remember why you started eating them in the first place. The humble pie has redeemed itself.

And thus redemption came in the form of a laksa at Chinta Ria in St. Kilda.

We swung by there on a Saturday for lunch and the laksa that I had was amazing. So fresh with complex flavours of spice without being too hot. If the man in the kitchen can create this then surely I can too! Thus began an obsession to cook the perfect laksa.

A couple of weeks later I was shown an article in the Melbourne Age - a recipe for Laksa from none other than Chinta Ria. Woohoo!!! I got busy collecting ingredients and stayed up late making it that night.

What a disappointment.

There's laksas and then there was that laksa...

Well I guess a good chef wouldn't give out the REAL recipe now would they.

So my search continued for a good laksa recipe.

I learnt pretty quickly that the internet is not necessarily a good place to find recipes. There's a LOT of recipes on the net but not a lot of good ones, you really need to know your sites.

My search soon led me to Metropolis Books in Acland Street, where (swinging by on another Saturday lunch-time) I came across what appeared to be a comprehensive and genuine laksa recipe - starting with making the paste from scratch.

Thanks go to Christine Manfield for her fantastic laksa paste and laksa recipe in her book Stir.

I was so inspired by the result that I also made most of the other spice pastes outlined in the book and worked my way through a good number of recipes.

I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to get back to 'spice basics'.