Farm to Table Permaculture Pizza
By Marco, Apprentice 2020
Why pizza?
Pizza. What a concept. Basically just some bread with tomato and cheese on top. But, we all know it’s so much more than that. I’d go as far as to say it’s probably one of the, if not the, most widely adored foods in the world. In fact, it sometimes feels like people answer “what’s your favorite food?” with something other than pizza just to not come across banal, even though deep down they know all they really want is a calorific disk of doughy deliciousness. At the Ranch we don’t kid ourselves. We know what we want and we satisfy that desire whenever we find a good enough excuse to fire up the cob oven – i.e. birthdays, leaving parties and periods of over a month without pizza.
Rancho Pizza Parties
Our new cob oven with just a few finishing details left
Our farm-to-table pizza parties are pretty epic, and not just because of the pizza (though, obviously, they’re awesome). No, a pizza party entails the whole community coming together and working towards a common goal. They take up most of the day and require a fair amount of coordination. We divide the labor up like so: 3 people on toppings, 3 people on dough, 1 person on tomato sauce, 1 person on fire building, and 1 person cooking. The fire alone takes 3-4 hours to get the cob oven up to the right temperature (800-900°F); the dough must be prepared 4-5 hours in advance to give the dough enough time to rest and the dough makers enough time to mix, knead and roll 40+ pizzas; sauce is usually made a day in advance to give it a chance to really cook down and yummify, and the toppings…well, you get the picture. All of this we try and do with permaculture principles in mind, which is what drives the evolution of our pizzas forward…
Farm to Table Pizza
Being a permaculture and sustainable education centre, we try to source as many of our ingredients either directly from the farm itself, or from the local community. Some parts of the pizza are easy to source locally, others not so much. This has come to pose a few challenges at times, and often we make some compromises for the sake of indulgence. However, it has encouraged us to become creative with our recipes; trying to find local, tropical alternatives to some of the classic Italian
ingredients. So, below is a break-down, top to bottom, of our permaculture pizzas…
Cheese
The cheese we use on our pizzas comes from our friends’ farm about 1/2km down the road. It’s the same place where we get our milk (learn to make dairy kefir here) and the cow manure for our biodigester. Needless to say, they make good sh*t.
Toppings
Easy. You can put anything you want on a pizza! Here are some examples of toppings we make on the Ranch:
Fried banana flower – tastes a bit like artichoke when it’s been lacto-fermented for a few days and then fried with a bit of garlic (and soy sauce, if we’re feeling naughty). Learn about how amazing bananas are here.
Katuk shoots – katuk is an edible green that grows abundantly on the Ranch. The new, young shoots from these are crunchy and slightly nutty, reminiscent of asparagus. Learn about greens that thrive in the tropics here.
Grilled pineapple – Classic. Suffice to say that I am 100% a fan of pineapple on pizza *Italian ancestors turn in their graves*. Sorry, not sorry. Sweet and salty combo. It’s delicious. Plus, we grow a lot of them so, perfect for farm to table.
Farm fresh papayas
Tomato Sauce
A tough one. Tomatoes don’t grow well in this area, so we have to buy our tomatoes from elsewhere, they are typically coming from the highlands of Cartago about 100km away. Can’t be having pizza without tomato sauce, it’s just not right. And hence, this was one of the areas where we compromised… was. Then, we discovered papaya sauce! I must admit, I was skeptical at first. Being half-Italian, I grew up with nonna’s and mamma’s sugo di pomodoro, and a good tomato sauce is a rite of passage in my family… but this papaya stuff is really good! In fact, when it’s on a pizza with the cheese and toppings, it’s quite difficult to tell the difference. It’s also way quicker to cook than a tomato sauce as there’s less moisture in papayas. The recipe is the same as it would be for a tomato sauce – oil, onions, garlic, oregano, basil, splash of vinegar (banana vinegar recipe)/lemon juice – just that you replace the tomatoes with papaya and add a little more vinegar and salt to compensate for the added sweetness of the papaya. We also tried a 50-50% mix of tomatoes and papaya, which actually was my favorite of the 3 sauces we trialed (tomato sauce, papaya sauce, tomatoes + papaya sauce) as it had a great balance of sweet and sour. Now, with every passing pizza party, we are reducing our dependence on regional tomatoes and turning towards our locally grown, tropical, farm to table variation, and that’s alright with me.
Rolling dough
Dough
This is the biggie. How to replace wheat flour, which has to be imported from the US or Canada, with something from the farm? A question that has no doubt tormented many apprentices before me, and one that will probably continue to torment those after me.
Wheat’s going on?
The thing about wheat is that it’s great. It’s just great at what it does. Or, more precisely, what
we’ve bred its seeds to be able to do for us over millennia. You see, plants want to provide their seeds with the best chance in life and so they store energy in them in the form proteins, which the seed can access, once germinating is triggered, to power its growth. It’s sort of like a tiny packed lunch that it can take with it into the wide world before foraging its own food from the ground with roots. Most grasses have a protein called globulin in their packed lunch, but in wheat’s packed lunch there are two different proteins - glutenin and gliadin. Yum. When wetted these two form an elastic mesh structure known as gluten. They work in unison in dough – one allows the dough to be stretched (gliadin), while the other helps the dough contract back in on itself (glutenin). When baked, this elastic mesh helps trap gases and aromas created by the yeast and bacteria present in the dough, which is why bread rises, or in the case of pizza, why you get those lovely little puffy bits in the base. The trouble is that gluten is difficult to replace and so replicating wheat-based pizza dough is tricky… did we let that deter us? Pff. As if.
Dough experiments
This past pizza party we experimented with a few different doughs. Keeping permaculture principles in mind, I wanted to make use of the resources we have readily available on the farm. In this case, I decided on cuadrado (type of Musa sp.) and yuca. First, we peeled, sliced and dehydrated the cuadrado and yuca. Next, we milled the dried slices in a corona mill to create the two flours (one of each). I then divided them into 6 bowls (3 for each) and mixed them with equal parts water. Each bowl was to be a different combination – solo flour, 50-50% with wheat, dried water kefir SCOBY. (Dried SCOBY is supposedly a sort of faux xantham gum, which we’ve read may provide some of the same characteristics as gluten… worth a shot!). Below is a summary of the various combinations we tried:
Cuadrado flour + water (5-day ferment)
Cuadrado flour + wheat flour + water (5-day ferment)
Cuadrado flour + water + dry SCOBY (5-day ferment)
Yuca flour + water (5-day ferment)
Yuca flour + wheat flour + water (5-day ferment)
Cuadrado flour + water + dry SCOBY (5-day ferment)
Cuadrado flour + water (no ferment)
Yuca flour + water (no ferment)
Cuadrado flour + water + baking powder (no ferment)
Yuca flour + water + baking powder (no ferment)
Cuadrado flour + yuca flour (no ferment)
Local pizza dough trials
There was enough dough to make one small pizza of each. The results? Quite varied, actually, and
surprisingly successful. I must say that I wasn’t particularly hopeful, but was very pleasantly surprised. They had a kind of store-bought frozen pizza vibe about them… not amazing, but also not awful. There didn’t seem to be any outstanding winners either, and people were choosing different ones as their favorites, implying that there is potential to please a variety of palettes. In my personal opinion, the Cuadrado sourdough was the best one as it had a beautiful dark, whole-grain look and a unique but not overpowering aroma and taste. The Cuadrado-yuca mix was also quite popular and seemed to have the closest resemblance to actual pizza dough.
So, in conclusion, I think there is definitely potential and progress has been made… but, that wheat
pizza is still on top. To be continued…
Conclusion
So, there you have it folks, farm to table permaculture pizza, Rancho style. Please comment if you’ve
had any experimental pizzas you’d like to share! Pura vida.
Robin cooking the dough in our cob oven
want to learn more?
Join us for one of our upcoming workshops to learn more about sustainable living and ideas.
Or come stay as a guest and maybe you’ll luck out being here when we have a pizza party! Either way you will enjoy farm fresh meals, access to our beautiful property and facilities including acres of wildlife refuge, and be welcomed into an alternative community living in the rural jungle of Costa Rica. Hope to see you here someday!
Stay tuned for more farm to table recipes and ideas!
Check out past blog articles on food, fermentation and more: