Middle Eastern Pizza

Oh chickpea flour. You rock my world. Free of gluten, high in taste, low in carbs and you even make a flatbread. You just give, give, give. Thank you.

I had some ground lamb on hand, chickpea flour and a garden full of weeds, um, I mean mint. Sounds like Middle Eastern Pizza to me!

I started with Mark Bittman's Flatbread recipe (which I adore. He shows some other versions here.) using chickpea flour or besan. I've also made it using Bob's Red Mill Chickpea/Fava blend which has more carbs, but also more protein.

The instructions for the flatbread are pretty simple, mix flour and salt, stream in water. I think I can handle that. Since I was going to use this for a pizza crust, I opted not to add additional flavorings like rosemary or onion.

The Kitchen Express recipe for Middle Eastern Pizza is also pretty simple. You take a half pound of ground lamb, a chopped onion, a chopped tomato, garlic, a couple tablespoons of tomato paste, fresh mint and salt/pepper. Spread it on a pita and bake at 450 until the lamb is cooked. Sounds delish.

However, since ground lamb is notoriously fatty, I decided to pan cook a pound of lamb and rinse to remove as much fat as I could. I was pretty darn sure that there would be plenty of fat left in the meat for flavor (and there was). I cooked it in my new Cuisinart Chef's Classic Stainless Steel Sauté pan (lovin' it) and then reserved about a tablespoon of fat for coating my pizza pan. I rinsed/drained the ground meat in very hot water three times. While the batter was resting, I added a large yellow tomato, a fresh onion from my CSA, tomato paste and salt/pepper.

I coated my pizza pan (which unfortunately was 13 inches, rather than 12 making the crust too thin) and then carefully poured in my batter. It is very easy to spill the batter out the sides when putting in the oven. I've done it twice...

I've suspected for a while that my oven hasn't been getting up to temperature, and BOY WAS I RIGHT! I bought an oven thermometer yesterday at Cost Plus World Market. I need to keep testing the oven at different temperatures, but when I preheated the oven to 450 degrees, the thermometer only read 360! I blame all cooking mishaps on my oven's faulty heating. I cooked my flatbread at "450" for about 25 minutes. It was spread too thin and would be much improved by using an 11" pie plate.

I covered it with the lamb tomato mixture and sprinkled on about a tablespoon of zaatar as well as some chopped mint that has taken over my yard. Zaatar would make an excellent Scrabble word, by the way. Did I mention I have a lifetime supply of zaatar? (Why buy one container when you get get a three pack at Amazon.com? Now what am I supposed to do with all of this spice?! My odd impulse purchases also apply to online shopping.) I put the pizza back in the oven and broiled for a few minutes.

And.... voila! The crust was too thin to hold well in the hand, but with a fork it was delicious. The pizza was did not receive a four-year old's stamp of approval unfortunately.