Pizza with chilli-garlic prawns

Friday night is firmly pizza night in our house. Maybe not every week, but any Friday when we're struggling to come up with a plan for dinner, there's a good chance we'll end up having pizza. This is clearly not a problem (who doesn't love pizza, especially on a Friday??) but does mean we're always on the look-out for tasty meat-free pizza toppings (just a point on definitions, fish is not meat on Fridays). Anyway... last Friday, true to form, we were going through ideas for dinner and settled on dinner. The only decision left was what to put on top? In a slightly reckless fashion, we made a decision while standing in Sainsbury's - prawns with rocket, garlic and chilli. Possibly one of our finest decisions for a long time!

This pizza really packs a punch, plenty of garlic and a good kick of chilli. However, the absence of cheese means it's not too heavy, perfect for a summer's evening (when they come around).

Now, we've been making pizza for a while, following the slightly unorthodox approach of Franco Manca (more on that later). We like to leave our dough to prove for at least 6 hours. Our latest approach involves making double the amount of dough we need and freezing the rest for a later date. The dough defrosts in a couple of hours meaning you don't need to be quite so prepared for your pizza. Anyway, details on how to make the dough can be found here. Double this and you can save some for later.

Moving on...

Ingredients

1 quantity of pizza dough (using 100g flour)
6 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tin tomatoes
Tomato puree
1 red onion, finely sliced
150g raw prawns
1 red chilli, finely sliced
Olive oil
50g rocket

1. Add four cloves of crushed garlic and chilli to the prawns with a little olive oil. Cover and leave in the fridge for an hour or so.

2. Make your tomato sauce, fry two of the crushed garlic cloves in a little olive oil until golden (and smelling amazing). Add in the tinned tomatoes, breaking them up as necessary. Stir in the tomato puree and simmer until reduced. Taste and season as necessary.

3. Stretch out your pizza dough on a floured surface. Heat a heavy-based frying pan and toss in the pizza base. Cook for 3-5 minutes until the base starts to cook, bubbles may appear under the surface of the dough.

4. Spread the tomato sauce over the base and sprinkle over the red onion. Transfer the pizza to a preheated grill and leave there for around 5 minutes until the edges of the dough are cooked.

5. While the pizza is under the grill, cook the prawns in a frying pan - frying for 3-4 minutes on each side until pink. Once cooked, sprinkle over the pizza and cover with the rocket.

And there you have it. Cheese-free but altogether amazing Friday night pizza.