With apologies to both India and Italy, this is their unapologetically delicious lovechild.
If you have leftover chicken tikka in the fridge and you don’t feel like making a salad, I’ve got you covered… it’s the very definition of a low effort/high flavour weeknight dinner. Makes 4 individual pizzas
The pizza sauce … Although of course you don’t have to make sauce from scratch, it is super-simple and tasty – and I’m more likely to have the ingredients lying around than I am to have a ready-made sauce. And this is a modified butter chicken sauce, so it tastes brilliant. And can be made in advance to save time on for dinner.
- 3 tbsp veg oil
- 3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
- Thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
- ½ onion, roughly chopped
- 300 g tomato passata
- ½ tsp ground fenugreek
- 1 tsp ground coriander
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- ¼ tsp cinnamon
- 2 tsp paprika
- ½ tsp kashmiri chilli powder
- ½ tsp honey
- Salt and pepper
- In a little whizzer, blend the onion, garlic and ginger
- Heat the veg oil in a saucepan and add the onion mix
- Cook for 5 mins or so until soft
- Add all the rest of the sauce ingredients and stir together
- Bring to a bubble and then cook over a low heat, stirring occasionally, for about an hour
- It should be thick, dark red and reduced – more a paste than a sauce
And then it’s just a construction job!
- 2-4 ready-made pizza bases (depending on size)
- Pieces of chicken tikka, cut into bite-size morsels
- ½ red onion, sliced into thin half moons
- 1 large green chilli, deseeded and sliced into thin rings
- ½ red pepper, cut into thin slices
- 400g grated mozzarella
- Fresh coriander, chopped
- Pre-heat the oven to 200C fan (220C)
- Smear the sauce liberally over the pizza bases
- Divide the toppings evenly between them
- Sprinkle over the mozzarella
- Bake for 12-13 mins until the cheese is melted and bubbly and the crust is brown
- Pull out of the oven, sprinkle with fresh coriander and cut into slices
- Serve straight away, with a small bowl of plain yoghurt topped with a swirl of mango chutney for dipping the crusts in
Sophie cooks 