One day, me and Mario were at the grocery and he requested that we bake our own pizza… So naturally I said, we can’t, because we don’t have an oven… So then I suggested, we can make pizza “pandesal”, or even pizza baguette and just use an oven toaster (hassle)… ^_^; But then I had a lightbulb moment! I want my pizza to still be that wonderful iconic circle of goodness, can hold tomato sauce on top and not absorb it, can carry toppings and not be soaked and soggy, I want my pizza to be crispy, if it’s not deep dish then I want the crust to be crazy thin! The perfect idea, a Tortilla Pizza! I’ve been playing with tortilla bread for a long time now, cooking my version of KFC’s twister and then before they had that sandwich style chicken in a tortilla (I forgot what they called it). So now, pizza is the game! Here’s my Tortilla Pizza recipe!
Tortilla Pizza Recipe
Ingredients:
Tortilla bread
* You can choose any kind you want – wheat, regular, vegetarian — and any size as long as it fits in your pan. You can buy this in the freezer section of the grocery, together with the ready-made pizza crust and lumpia wrapper (at least for SM Sucat Hypermarket that’s exactly where you’ll find it.)
Tomato sauce
Quickmelt cheese (Mozzarella cheese if you have budget)
I’ve tried brands Magnolia and Che Vital. Magnolia melts quicker and all the way through while Che Vital doesn’t really melt well but that’s 30PHP cheaper.
Toppings
This can be anything you want, I prefer red onions, greenbell pepper, mushrooms, pre-cooked and seasoned ground beef.
Other things you’ll need:
A pan with cover (to keep the hot air inside the pan and heat the pizza evenly on top. Otherwise, the tortilla will get burnt while the cheese isn’t totally melted.)
A flat spatula (I recommend something that’s really wide and flexible so it’ll be really easy to slide under the pizza for getting it into the pan and out of the pan)
Simple steps:
1) With the covered pan in place, put the stove on in low fire/heat and leave it closed while we’re preparing the pizza.
2) Use a spoon or a ladle to get some tomato sauce into the tortilla bread and use the bottom of the ladle to spread the sauce all over the bread.
3) You can start piling up the toppings at this point. You can either put slices of cheese first before the rest of the toppings, or leave the cheese for last so that they melt on top of the toppings and bind them together. Or, you can always put a thin layer of cheese at the bottom, then rest of the toppings, and top it with a thin layer of cheese.
* Note: If you’re using Magnolia Quickmelt, you don’t really need to grate the cheese because this brand of cheese melts easily and completely. You won’t even notice which block of cheese was what and where after it’s been melted. But if you’re using Che Vital Quickmelt cheese, better to grate or cut really thin slices. This cheese will melt but not completely, so you’ll still see rectangular cheese slices in the pizza.
4) With the help of the flat spatula, place the “pizza-to-be” in the pan, and place the cover back.
5) Pizza will be ready in 5 minutes, and you can open the cover to check on it every now and then even before 5 minutes is up, so you can decide whether to let it stay for a while more before take it out using your flexible flat spatula.
This is really easy, and pizza will be flying out of the kitchen in quicker time than in takes to finish the 1st batch! Mario and I have been having this pizza feast for 1 week now and because of the 100% control over which toppings you can add to the recipe (or prefer not to have), there can be a number of variety of pizza flavors you can experiment with! Every dinner time, our kitchen smells like Pizza Hut kitchen (no joke)! It makes me hungry just thinking about it now… ^_^ Another thing I like about this Tortilla Pizza recipe is that I can enjoy more toppings, less bread… ^_^;
Have fun with this recipe and the different pizza flavors you come up with! Hmm…. how about dried squid pizza instead of anchovies…? Hmmm….
*** Quick tips:
– Don’t put cheese at the very edge of the tortilla because once it melts, it will have a tendency to spill over the bread and make a hot sizzling pan of cheesy mess.
– If you want a great bargain on tortilla bread (50% off of the usual price which is around 100PHP for 12pcs of 6inch, or 120PHP for 10pcs of 12inch tortilla), you can wait for the half-off sale (closing sale) of French Baker. The Mall of Asia and Megamall branches have a good number of tortilla breads left over at the end of the day and nobody, except for me and my bro (that I know of) buys them.
