Cooking with Asia

Servings : 12

DAY 1 - Pizza Crust

Ingredients

• 1 c. flour plus about 1 c. more

• 2 ¼ tsp. pizza crust yeast

• 1 ½ tsp. sugar

• ¾ tsp. salt

• 2/3 c. very warm water – like bathtub water

• 3 tbsp. vegetable oil

Directions

1. In a large bowl, combine 1 c. flour, yeast, sugar, and salt.

2. Add very warm water. Mix until well blended, about 1 minute.

3. Add enough flour to make a soft dough (3/4 to 1 ¼ c.)

4. Dough should form a ball and will still be slightly sticky.

5. Knead on a floured surface adding additional flour if needed, until smooth and elastic; about 4 minutes.

6. Cover in plastic wrap and label.

Day 2

Ingredients

• Pizza dough

• 2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened

• 1 cup mayonnaise

• 1 (1 ounce) package dry Ranch-style dressing mix

• 1 cup fresh broccoli, chopped

• 1 cup chopped tomatoes

• 1 cup chopped green bell pepper

• 1 cup chopped cauliflower

• 1 cup shredded carrots

• 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (190 degrees C).

2. Roll out the pizza dough onto a pizza pan.

3. Bake crust for 12 minutes in the preheated oven. Once finished cooking, remove crust from oven and let cool 15 minutes without removing it from the baking sheet.

4. In a small mixing bowl, combine cream cheese, mayonnaise, and dry Ranch dressing.

5. Spread the mixture over the cooled crust.

6. Arrange broccoli, tomato, green bell pepper, cauliflower, shredded carrots, and cheddar cheese over the cream cheese layer.

7. Chill for one hour, slice and serve.

So before we even made the vegetable ranch pizza I thought that I wouldn’t enjoy it. I was excited though to make the pizza dough and spread it out like how the professionals do, although I wasn’t very good at it. During this cooking lab we really worked the dough but it was really hard to make it the perfect texture and smoothness. In the end it still came out fine, it came out hard but softened up afterwards. We really worked well in the kitchen and even though we came close to not having enough time we finished just in time. We all worked together to chop and slice the vegetables and we all had fun putting all the vegetables on. Something that helped me during this cooking lab that I learned in class was that when you get down to small pieces while shredding you use the palm of your hand to finish it off. In the end though after most of the guys ate a piece of pizza and liked it, I was curious on how it tasted. Before I had a taste it wasn’t exactly appealing to the eyes but when I had a bite it was so good. If I were to make this at home I’d use fewer vegetables because they seemed to be falling off a lot. But overall I really liked this recipe and it surprised me because I don’t like raw cauliflower.