Flat Bread, Vaguely Meso-American, Slightly Greek Tasting, Pizzaesque Round Things

I made this up a few years ago, when I found out that I had accidentally began dating a vegetarian. I wrote it up to post on an old website I had back in them days, so it was a very rough draft. There was no less than ten times I said “fucking olive oil.”

It was like someone got sloppy drunk and made hummus in their back yard or something. I revisited this recipe in spirit recently, and would add pictures were my camera not stolen. The only real changes were cooking it inside and using a little havarti along with the mozzarella.

The black beans add a sweeter and earthier flavor than chickpeas would, at least to me. Also, the style and amount of seasoning makes for an almost Moroccan feel. I could see adding some mint and tumeric and dropping the cocoa and cumin. I’m curioius to see what people come up with.

The barley I used was a combination of Irish red, a dark crystal, and a chocolate (very dark) roasted malt. I don’t remember what I used back then, but I bet it was some manner of light roast. If you don’t have access to brewer’s barley, just use more whole wheat flour. You could use anything, really. The flax seed is, of course, optional. I honestly think that this flat bread is almost too good to go slathering in sauces and cheese. Try making it, you’ll see what I mean. It’s almost a shame to not eat it just with some grape seed oil and some salt.

Other ideas I had for the hummus:

• Sweetcorn
• Pine nuts
• Wine
• Olives
• Roasted peppers
• Grapeseed oil (I live in vineyard alley)

Again, if you feel like trying your own take, let me know.

The recipe is as follows.

Flat Bread:

I used regular old white flour, whole wheat flour, barley (making beer leaves you a large amount of good roasted barley), and cooked flax seed. The proportions were (roughly) 4:4:4:1, flour, w.w flour, barley, and flax. I obviously am an expert at this sort of thing. This is the basic flatbread recipe I used:

Ingredients!

• 3 cups of the grain mix
• 1/4 olive oil
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• a small amount of baking soda
• 1 cup or so ice water
• some salt
• Paprika

This is where my cooking style gets complicated. Take about a tablespoonish of the olive oil and get it heating in a well seasoned cast skillet or, if you have not cast iron in your residence (and you should die), use a nonstick pan. If the teflon thing is the case, I think you should use less oil. But I’m not sure.

Now, I am aware of the heart palpitations baking powder causes some gourmands. To which I say, quit being a bitch. I use corn starch in gravy, to0, sugar tits.

Onward. Combine the ingredients and make it into dough. This is a highly technical process of mixing shit together and wallering it around until it forms a big ball of crap on your counter. This is the “dough.”

Divide it into around five pieces if you want roughly eight inch loaves. I like to flatten them out, dust them with some flour and some paprika (not too much), and stack them in a plate next to the fire. Right, forgot to mention. The whole reason for flat bread is that my oven is broken and my landlord’s a dick. So I built a fire in the back yard. Which, again, cast iron works the best. And you never know when you may have vegetarians show up for dinner after the apocalypse comes. Cast iron, bitches. Get some.

So, take those loaves, poke some holes in them for bubble control and place them on the medium hot skillet. Watch them like a hawk. They cook really fast. I don’t have a clock in my back yard, because I am a dangerous criminal, so I just watched them start to bubble. If the bubbles get big, you burned it. Dumbass. Now go back inside.

So, after you got those done up, you now have flat bread.

The Hummus:

This is where I expect hateful comments. But, they will cry, hummus is made from chickpeas! Tahini! Lemon juice! By brown sensitive people wearing sarongs!

To which I say bullshit. Hummus literally translates “bean.” It’s bean dip for pretentious (nearly) white people. Like myself.

So, this is my Vaguely Meso-American Hummus.

Ingredients!

• About a pound of cooked black beans. Cook them yourself, buy them in a can, whatever.
• Olive oil. Not sure how much (as you shall see)
• One jalapeno
• Seven cloves of garlic
• Some cider vinegar
• Some red wine vinegar
• About a teaspoon of Mexican oregano
• Cinnamon (pinch)
• Cocoa (pinch)
• Cumin (pinch)
• Salt
• Lime juice
• About two tablespoons of oatmeal, raw (note: this is just for texture, omit it if you want)

This is pretty straight forward. Make sure the beans are dry, or at least that the cooking fluid is drained off as much as you can. I usually set them to drain first, while I do everything else.

So, about this olive oil. The jalapenos were a present (such are my friends) out of a friend’s garden and were canned in olive oil. So, honestly, I have no idea how much eventual olive oil went into this. I recommend just figuring it out on your own. So, I chopped raggedly and doggedly at the cloves of garlic, but didn’t bother making them too small. I browned them slowly in olive oil with the sliced jalpeno that I had to vein and seed to cut some heat (Goddamn, that woman knows how to grow a chili). Go ahead and brown the garlic pretty good, just don’t burn it.

So, then I dumped everything into the food processer and got it spinning. You’re best off adding the beans last.

Let the blades chop up all the peppers and garlic into the vinegar (only add a little for now). Also, the oatmeal needs to be chopped up before the beans, in my experience with any other bean and oatmeal mixture. You can put in the oregano now if you want, and I really do recommend the Mexican species, but if you only have the regular, whatever.

So, once you got the liquid part processed, dump in the beans and turn them into paste. This is where I added juice of a small lime, the small amounts of cinnamon, cumin, and cocoa, along with rest of the vinegar. I would just add vinegar in slow amounts and keep tasting it until you get what you want. I wonder, and if you experiment, let me know how it goes, if adding a really rich and dry red wine would help this out at all. Like maybe a Sangiovese or Chianti.

That will make more than enough for five of these pizzas with a little left over.

Final Construction:

I slathered some fancy/schmancy bean dip onto the oiled up bread and added a couple chunks of mozzarella and a few slices of zucchini. On top of that, I laid down some spinach and a few more pieces of cheese. I give it a good squirt of olive oil and placed it over a medium hot part of the fire with the skillet turned upside down on top of it, like a lid. This could be done (probably better) on a barbecue grill if you wanted to. Again, the fire was necessity. I can say I love the smell of cedar smoke, and the smoke did get into the pizza.

This recipe is easily modifiable, and any part of it can be adapted to a shitload of other recipes. If you give it a shot, let me know what you did.