Welcome to Topped & Tested!
This is our new series of pizza blogs where we bring you new pizza topping ideas to liven up your pizza nights. There's going to be classic flavours like this one, but we're also going to take some risks and bring you pizzas that are a little more out there!
First up's a pizza that we eat on repeat! The fennel sausage brings a rich, savoury depth with the subtle aniseed bringing warmth; sweet drop peppers add bursts of tangy sweetness to cut through the fattiness; finally, a drizzle of honey rounds everything off, balancing the heat and enhancing the flavour of the sausage.
Ingredients
250g Neapolitan doughball (recipe here)
Neapolitan style tomato sauce
Parmesan or pecorino
Fior di latte mozzarella
4 high quality pork sausages
Tablespoon fennel seeds
Teaspoon cold pressed rapeseed or olive oil
Jar sweet drop peppers
High quality honey
Makes enough fennel sausage for 2 pizzas... if you can resist a second, it keeps in the fridge for 3-4 days and it's DELICIOUS in a tomato pasta!
Method
Strain some of your sweet drop peppers and roughly chop them - you want little pops of flavour, rather than full peppers!
Lightly toast your fennel - I do this in the wood fired oven while it's heating up, but you can do this over the hob if you prefer.
Grind the fennel seeds in a pestle & mortar - you want to keep some texture rather than achieving a fine powder.
Remove the skins from your sausages and mix your ground fennel seeds through the sausage meat. Add to a cast iron with a little oil, and head back to the wood fired oven.
Cook the sausage meat off at high heat until you've achieved nice caramelisation on the sausage and it's cooked through.
Open your dough, top with tomato sauce and a liberal amount of grated parmesan or pecorino. Layer fior di latte, your fennel sausage and sweet drop peppers. Leaving the honey off for now, head to the oven and get it baked.
Cool for 30 seconds on a wire rack, then transfer to a serving board before adding your honey. Pick a good one... lots of supermarket honey comes from China despite misleading branding, and it's simply not the same, so check your labels people!
You want a very fine stream of honey - it's there to balance the flavours of the pizza, not overpower them.
That's it - time to slice and enjoy!
Please tag us using @planetfriendlyfirewood if you make this one, but more importantly, if you have any favourite pizzas you'd like us to feature on Topped & Tested, please leave them in the comments or email me using paul@love-logs.com.
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