Micro pizzas

Hungry? Fancy a quick bite? You can’t go wrong with micro-pizzas ('Micro' because of their size, not because you cook them in your microwave oven... They’re cheap, cheerful, healthy, and take less than 5 minutes to prepare.

Pizza base

For the base, you can use any type of bread that doesn’t go soggy. Pita bread is an obvious one, but I personally prefer to use Crumpets - good luck finding those outside of the UK or Australia however. The great thing about crumpets is that they have holes in the top, so your tomato sauce can seep down into the pizza base, saturating it with tomato goodness.

Tomato sauce

Making tomato sauce for micro pizzas is dead easy. Use a little bit of tomato puree, and thin it out with some milk. If you are planning to add spicy pizza toppings later, consider using pineapple juice to thin out the puree - it adds a sweet tinge to the spicyness, which works quite well.

To your mixture, add plenty of ground black pepper, and a bit of crushed garlic (or garlic paste, if you’re lazy). Finally, a smattering of oregano helps making the whole thing smell of pizza.

You’ll want quite a bit of your sauce on the micro pizzas - around two millimeters gives the whole thing a fantastic taste of genuine pizza!

Toppings

Go crazy. Just about any topping you find on normal pizzas can be used, but obviously (because there’s less space), you have to cut everything into smaller pieces.

I prefer to use wafer-thin Chorizo sausage slices, some finely cut pepper, and some finely chopped shallots, but as long as you chop it into small enough pieces, you can use anything: chicken, ham, pineapple, pepperoni, artichoke, egg, chopped pine nuts… One of the great things about the mini pizzas is that it’s an excuse to use up stuff you have kicking about in your kitchen anyway.

Of course, no pizza is complete without a layer of cheese on top - use a fine cheese grater and layer it loosely on top of your other toppings. If you want to be fancy, chuck some oregano on as well - mostly for the smell.

Cooking

Because the pizza bases are already ready to eat, the pizzas only have to go in long enough to warm the bases and melt the toppings. Around five minutes under a hot grill should do the trick.

Serving suggestions

Serve with ice-cold beer, naturally.

Reviews

ascorbic says: This is damn fine pizza.

Wntrmute says re pizza: congratulations! You've created something even I can eat!