Lola’s Kitchen: French Bread Pizza Recipe

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Lola’s Kitchen is a feature on Lola’s Reviews where I talk about all things related to food, cooking and baking. These posts can be recipe posts, tens list posts about food or recipes or more discussion type posts about food. I love cooking and spend some time in the kitchen almost every day, so I wanted to give it a place on my blog as well. The banner for this feature is designed by Michelle from Limabean Designs.

It’s no secret that I love pizza, but it can be hard to find the right pizza. Some storebrought ones don’t have enough veggies or they are too oily. They have too much cheese. They don’t have the right crust. Not enough red bell pepper. I am a picky eater, but I am really picky about pizza. Ofcourse you can make pizza yourself, but I hate making dough, not sure why, but all the waiting and the rising just rubs me wrong. Then I came across a recipe on pinterest for french bread pizza and I knew I found the solution to my pizza problem. This french bread pizza is easy to make, delicious and you don’t have to make the dough. My boyfriend and I tweaked his pasta sauce recipe to a pizza sauce and combined that with the french bread pizza recipe. If you like pizza, you have to give this a try!
This recipe is based on the French Bread Pizza recipe from Serious Eats. The sauce is based on my boyfriends tomato pasta sauce, which he learned to make from his parents.

Ingredients

• French Bread – 1
• Red Bell pepper – 2
• Tomatoes – 2
• Onion – 1
• Meat or vegetable meat substituion (optional)
• Other veggies like campignon, corn, peas etc (optional)
• Olive Oil
• Garlic – 10 cloves
• Parsley and Basil
• Tomato Paste – 2 tablespoons
• Low salt vegatable bouillon cube – 1
• Sambal – 1 teaspoon
• Water – 1 cup
• Cornstarch
• Oregano (optional)
• Cheese

This recipe feeds about two people, so both have half a french bread. You can add to the sauce whatever veggies you want and even add things like bacon, ham or salami on top later. So just use whatever you like on your pizza.

Method

1. First slice the french bread in two halves, then slice each half through the middle, so you end up with four flat pieces, see picture below. Set the bread aside or put them on the baking plate for the oven.
2. Now preheat the oven to 220 degrees Celsius/ 428degrees Fahrenheit
3. Cut the onion, red bell pepper, tomatoes and garlic in pieces. Put half of the garlic aside for the olive oil mixture. Put the rest of the garlic and onion in a wok or pan and bake it until the onion is translucent.
4. Now add the red bell pepper and bake for a few minutes. Then add the tomatoes and the tomato paste.
5. Mix the bouillon cube in one cup water and add to the sauce. Add any other vegetables or meat you want to add to the sauce now. Add some parsley and basil.
6. Add the sambal and some cornstarch mixed into water to make the sauce a bit thicker. Let the sauce cook for a bit longer while making the olive oil mixture.
7. Now prepare the olive oil mixture. Put some olive oil in a small pan and add the garlic, parsley and basil and any other spcies you want to add. Let it bake for a minute or two until you can smell the garlic. Then remove the oil from the heat.
8. Spoon a few tablespoons of the olive oil mixture on the french bread, try to cover most of of the surface with it. Then put it in the oven for about 8 minutes.
9. After those 8 minutes get the bread from the oven and add the sauce on top. Add enough sauce to cover the bread, but not so much that it drips from the bead. Now add any other veggies or meat you want to add on top. And lastly add the cheese on top.
10. Put the bread in the oven for 10 minutes. After that it’s done and you can enjoy your french pizza bread!

If you don’t like garlic, you can jus put some oil on the bread without baking the garlic in it.

Pictures

Variation Tips

• Vary with veggies, meat and spices. I already mentioned this in the ingredients and method section, but basicaly you can add whatever ingredients you want, only the tomato sauce is required. So vary as much with the veggies and meat as you want. I prefer to cook the red bell pepper in the sauce already, but you can also just add the veggies on top of the sauce. You can also remove the veggies altogether. You can add minced meat or chicken to the sauce or vegeterain minced meat as I did. You can put bacon, ham or salami on top before adding the cheese. Everything is possible. If you don’t like parsley or basil, use soemthgin else. You can also remove the garlic and just use olive oil to put on the bread. You can also skip the olive poil altogether, but in my opinion it really adds somethgin to the flavour. You can add more salt, more cheese, fruit, etc.
• More Cheese. The original recipe recommends adding more cheese. At step 8, add some cheese on top of the olive oil mixture before putting it into the oven. This makes sure there is a layer on cheese beneath the sauce as well. To me this seemed like a bit too much cheese, so I only do cheese on top.

Do you like pizza? What are your favourite toppings?