The art of the jerusalem artichoke

Sourdough jerusalem artichoke pizza and a wild arugula salad

Serves: 2, with enough leftovers for lunch the next day
Takes: 1 hour cooking time, 6-24 hours preparation time (for the rise of the dough).

Ingredients

Pizza dough

130 g sourdough starter (fed and 100% hydrated)
270 g water
2 T olive oil
460 g flour (stoneground, good quality organic bread flour, or Tipo 00 pizza flour).
10 g sea salt

Pizza toppings

250 g jerusalem artichokes (around 6)
250 g baby new season potatoes
1 small red onion
handful kalamata olives
small bunch seedless red grapes
1-2 balls fresh mozzarella
100 g grated hard goat’s cheese or mozzarella
250 g ricotta
1 lemon
black pepper
2 cloves garlic
olive oil
fresh herbs, eg thyme, basil
1 T drizzly honey
red chili flakes

Salad and dressing

Large bunch wild arugula/rocket
1 T rice vinegar (or use other vinegars if you prefer, cider or red wine also work well)
juice 1/2 lemon
1/2 t honey
1/2 t dijon mustard
2 T olive oil
pepper and salt

Method

1. Make your pizza dough at least 6 hours (and ideally 24) before you want to make pizza. (If you don’t have or don’t want to make a sourdough starter then I recommend this recipe for a yeasty base; or you can also use pre-bought bases.) Mix the salt and flour together in one bowl. Mix the olive oil, water and sourdough starter in another. Then combine and knead lightly, adding a little flour or water to get the right consistency. It may be a little sticky, but it should not feel wet or sloppy. Now transfer to an oiled bowl, cover with a plastic bag and leave it to rise for 1-3 hours in a warm place. Transfer to the fridge until ready to use.

2. Pre-heat your oven as hot as it will go (for ours, around 250°C on bake works best) at least one hour before you plan to cook your pizzas. If you have a pizza stone, place this inside the oven so that it also heats up.

3. Zest one lemon with a microplane or the fine setting of a box grater. Set the zest aside for later use.

4. Scrub the potatoes and jerusalem artichokes to remove any dirt. Cut the ends off the jerusalem artichokes. Then slice them as thinly as you can. Place on a tray lined with baking paper, drizzle over a little olive oil, juice of half the lemon you just zested, and salt. Place in the heating oven for 10 minutes. Remove from oven, turn over the vegetables and rotate the tray, then return to the oven. You may find it easier to do this is on two trays. Yes, this recipe is basically homemade vegetable crisps on pizza!

5. Meanwhile, prepare the other pizza topping ingredients. Thinly slice the red onion, slice or halve the red grapes, rinse the kalamata olives and remove any stones, slicing or leave whole or in halves. Mix the ricotta, the lemon zest, a good few grinds of black pepper and two microplaned (or smashed) cloves of garlic, along with a good glug of olive oil and some dried chili flakes. If you wish to make a dessert pizza, then leave around 50 g of the ricotta plain, mixing only 200g of ricotta with the other ingredients.

6. Make your pizza bases. Shortly before you wish to use it, remove the pizza dough from the fridge. Divide it into the number of pizzas you wish to make. It should be enough for 4-6 small pizzas, 2-3 large ones, depending on how thick. Working on a floured, dry bench, press the pizza dough out with your fingers, working it flat into a rough circle without squashing the sourdough bubbles. You can also roll it out for a flatter and more consistent base, but you risk compromising the sourdough texture.

   

7. Cooking fried pizzas: heat up a frying pan with some olive oil and fry the base in the olive oil, turning over half way through so that it is a pale golden brown on each side. It should puff up instantly. Then transfer to a pizza peel (line with paper if you like), add toppings, and place directly onto the hot stone in the oven until cooked. For the toppings, first add ricotta mix, then layer on the jerusalem artichoke and potato, then the red onion, grapes and olives (or some combination of these) before ripping over chunks of mozzarella and a small handful of grated cheese.

8. Cooking normal pizzas: flour the pizza peel (some rice flour or polenta can work well here), or use baking paper if you prefer. Place the base on the peel, top with toppings, shake the peel to transfer the pizza to the hot stone.

9. After 5-10 minutes, once the topping is browning and bubbling, remove the pizza from the oven. Tip: for maximum browning and charred edges of the pizza, place directly under the grill for the last couple of minutes of cooking time.

10. For the salad, wash and dry the wild arugula leaves, using a salad spinner or dry them gently with a tea towel the way Alice Waters does. Mix the dressing ingredients, seasoning to taste. Lay out the leaves in your favourite salad bowl, pour over half the dressing and toss the salad. Then top with the remaining pizza ingredients, the jerusalem artichoke and potato slices, a handful of grapes, the red onion, the olives. Pour over the remaining dressing.

11. Serve hot, garnished with all or any of chili flakes, honey, fresh herbs, black pepper and olive oil, with the salad on the side.

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The story behind the recipe

When we first met, he drove a grey Peugeot 206 so small he could only fit behind the steering wheel with his knees folded up to his ears. Driving was a form of origami. That was the tiny car we went on holiday with the next Summer. We packed a tent and sleeping bags and drove to the fabled South of France.

First, I had a week of French classes at a local Alliance Française. The teacher had a fantastic bouff of orange, hennaed hair and was to be referred to only as Madame. She was old-fashioned in every way. Computers and phones were banned inside the classroom. She insisted on starting every class with le dicté (dictation) and refused to bow to the modern syllabus, which was more relaxed in matters of grammar. Instead, she had the other student and I repeat grammar exercises from books long out of copyright. I soon ceased to see learning a language as anything at all about art, and started to see it as a form of mathematics. There were rules, you learned them, you applied them, there was a wrong and a right answer. It seemed most of what emerged when I tried to speak this language fell squarely into the wrong answer category, but at least by the end of the week I could furiously transcribe the short Proust and Victor Hugo passages she dictated to us and read aloud in an accent she deemed passable. Into the heat of Summer I emerged, clutching my hard-won certificate, badly in need of the promised holiday.

Nothing was planned, nothing booked. I had a romantic idea about swilling wine on vineyards and a much less romantic idea about the amount of time I was willing to spend cooped up in that tiny Peugeot when the sky was all fierce blue and sunshine. We chose our destination by the weather and a promising swathe of green on Google maps, driving towards Luberon, a region above Provence. It was hot and parched, but dotted with lesser known vineyards and there was some sort of regional park where we might find walking trails. We spent the first day touring around a vineyard by ourselves, eating a picnic among the vines, then doing a tasting in the cellar, where I quickly realised that my week spent hobnobbing with a grammar pedant and the greats of French literature had given me little in the way of useful vocabulary.

Evening was creeping towards us as we drove away from the vineyard, car laden down with wine, and now I raised for the first time the question of where we were going to sleep. We drove down a series of increasingly smaller and smaller roads, past La Tour d’Aigues, past municipal campgrounds with “Complet” (no vacancy) signs, full of Dutch tourists, past smaller and smaller villages. It was a Friday night, in the height of Summer, in peak tourist season. We seemed by this stage to be taking turns at random and it was decidedly dusk. This was our first day of our first real holiday together and I had no idea where we were going.

At some point, we turned the car around and doubled back to the village we had just whistled through. Finding food suddenly seemed more pressing than finding a place to sleep. We got a table on a stone terrace in the only restaurant in town. We seemed to be the only non-locals. There was no accommodation to speak of in the village, there were barely any houses at all. The terrace looked out over vineyards and arid agricultural land in one direction, and, in the other, over the heart of the village, a small church, a shallow rectangular stone pool of green water flanked by leafy green trees. We ordered a giant pizza between us.

It was the first time I’d ever eaten a white pizza. It was topped with fresh figs and honey and tiny, half-dried olives, olive oil, goat’s cheese and the wild thyme that grows everywhere in Provence even when the land seems to have no water left in it. It was heaven. It was as if that pizza taught me the meaning of terroir, the dry peppery local red wine echoed in the pungent, dusty thyme, the sweetness of the figs and honey, the spicy underbelly of the olive oil, the bubbling yeasty base of the pizza. All seemed to be jostling within the same circle of flavours.

In the end, we spent the night in a tent, hastily erected after dark with head-torches on, in a little clearing not far from the road, tucked between vineyards. Before the sun was up the next morning, we heard the sound of a tractor, steadily coming towards us. Lying in my underwear in a sleeping bag in the tent, I panicked. I imagined a confrontation with an angry French farmer. We pulled on clothes, pushed the tent into the back of the car, morning dew and all, and drove away hurriedly.

Jerusalem artichokes (aka topinambour or sunchoke) have the knobbly, gnarled look of flower tubers because that is precisely what they are, the roots of a sort of sunflower, with more modest flowers than the extravagant one you’re probably picturing. The name is a misnomer. Jerusalem artichokes come from North America and the name is said to be a corruption of the Italian for sunflower, girasole. They have a dark purplish outer and a creamy inner. The Dutch name, aardpeer (ground pear) makes more sense, since they are confoundingly sweet and savoury at the same time, almost nutty. I recommend making the salad as well if you do make this week’s recipe. The acid in the salad dressing is a great balance to the creamy sweetness of the pizza.

Enjoy!

Amelia

PS Here’s a dessert pizza with plain ricotta, cheese, grapes and honey. The idea to put grapes on pizza came from Jamie Oliver. The idea to first fry the pizzas before cooking came from Giorgio Locatelli.