Flat bread is a great solution if you’re looking for a quick pizza fix. Another perk is that because it is so thin, you don’t fill up on thick, bready crust. This version, adapted from Robert Irvine’s Flatbread Pizzetta on Food Network, doesn’t have yeast so it comes together in less than 10 minutes (give or take a little resting time).
Though a thin crust may seem like just a vehicle for the toppings, this flat bread {flavored with spinach, garlic and feta} is actually very tasty on its own or as a simple cheese and/or pesto breadstick. To make the dough naturally green, I used spinach juice as a natural green food coloring for half of the liquid. If you’re not making it for St. Patrick’s Day or the solid green color is simply not a priority, you can leave out the spinach juice.
If you want a more traditional pizza crust you can use the same spinach juice-liquid ratio in other pizza crusts. I have tried it, however, with a basic pizza crust and it ended up having too much of a plain spinach flavor. An easy solution is to either flavor the pizza crust with garlic, feta and other ingredients or use a richer, sweeter dough recipe. For my boys, I made the spinach rolls that they love so much (this time also using spinach juice for half of the liquid to get a solid green color) and instead of forming the dough into rolls we rolled it out as a pizza. The resulting pizza (pictured right below) was thicker, fluffier and a bit richer just like the rolls. They loved it, even the leftovers!
I used a large heart cookie cutter and assembled the hearts together to form a shamrock, cutting a scrap of dough into the stem. You can make the shamrocks smaller in size but I liked the idea of a larger pizza where each “heart” of the shamrock has different toppings and can be personalized by your little pizza chefs. Everyone can be responsible for a section of the pizza while working together to create one edible masterpiece.
For the adult version of my St. Patrick’s Day flat bread, I had fun using shamrock and other festive {green} toppings. I topped the entire flat bread crust with {green} pesto. I used a mini heart cookie cutter to cut ham and {green} zucchini slices to make mini shamrock toppings. I topped one section with a pile of peppery {green} arugula. In the third section I used a {green} bell pepper slice filled with an egg. (I intentionally looked for a bell pepper with three sections so that when sliced it resembled a shamrock). Pepperoncini slices, feta and oregano garnished the entire pizza.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 Tbsp minced garlic
- 2 Tbsp feta cheese crumbles
- 2 Tbsp chopped spinach
- 1 tsp oregano
- 1 tsp salt
- ¼ tsp pepper
- ¼ cup spinach juice, optional (or use additional water)
- ¼ cup water
- Pesto
- Mozzarella cheese
- Feta cheese
- Parmesan cheese
- Ham, cut into shamrocks (or hearts arranged into a shamrock)
- Pepperoncinis, sliced
- Zucchini slices, cut into shamrocks (or hearts arranged into a shamrock)
- Arugula
- Green bell pepper, sliced in shamrock rounds
- Egg
- Oregano
- Mix the flour, spinach, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano and feta cheese crumbles with the whisk attachment in a mixer.
- Add the spinach juice and/or water and blend until a smooth dough forms. (It should not be too sticky.)
- Form the dough into a ball, wrap the dough ball in plastic, and refrigerate it for 30 minutes.
- Cut the dough in half and roll each half into a 14-inch crust (or simply roll out to ⅛-inch thick). The dough is very easy to work with so you shouldn't need much flour to shape and roll out the dough.
- Place on a pan and bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes.
- Then top with sauce and toppings and bake for an additional 8-10 minutes, until the cheese melts and everything looks bubbly and lightly golden.
- Cut the ⅛-inch thick dough into large hearts and arrange into a shamrock.
- Use a scrap of dough as the stem.
- Cover with pesto and mozzarella cheese.
- Decorate each section as you would like, using ham shamrocks, pepperoncinis, zucchini shamrocks, green bell pepper shamrocks, egg, oregano, arugula and feta cheese.
- Bake for 8-10 minutes until the cheese is melted, bubbly, and starting to turn a light golden brown.
