Heritage Wheat Wholegrain Pizza with Summer Pesto and Grilled Vegetables

Name: Heritage Wheat Wholegrain Pizza with Summer Pesto and Grilled Vegetables
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 20 min
Total time: 140 min
Yield: 4 people
Ingredients: 1 tsp fast-action dried yeast; 250 grams Dove’s Farm Heritage Wholegrain flour; 1 tsp sea salt; 1 tsp honey; 2 tbsp sunflower oil; 150 ml lukewarm water; 80 grams Sacla' Summer Pesto; 1 red onion; 1 green pepper; 1 courgette; sunflower oil (to brush); 125 grams mozzarella cheese (I prefer to use a ball of cheese in liquid); coriander leaves (to serve)

Published on August 22, 2014 by Elizabeth 51 Comments
Last Updated on January 28, 2019

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A deliciously wholesome pizza made with 16th & 17th century heritage wheats, grilled vegetables and a roasted red pepper, mozzarella and rocket pesto.

Pizza doesn’t have to be plain, boring and ordinary. Jazz it up a bit with some grilled vegetables and pesto!

My first experience with pizza was from a box. Not a ready-made pizza in a box from the chilled foods section in the supermarket, but a boxed pizza kit. I can’t remember the brand (this is going back 25 years) but it was a red rectangular shaped box and included a sachet of pizza dough mix, a tin of ready-made tomato pizza sauce, a sachet of dried Parmesan cheese and a sachet of mixed herbs.

I absolutely loved that boxed pizza.

It was one of my favourite meals growing up, but I do recall the pizza dough rage I used to get when I tried to spread the dough out on the baking tray and it would tear every… single…. time! I still have a slight aversion to spreading pizza dough out by hand and if I can convince my husband to do it for me I will.

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-teens out on an overnight at a friend’s house when I found out you could put vegetables on a pizza. Vegetables, on a pizza – how extraordinary! There were giant chunks of broccoli (broccoli on a pizza?!), green peppers, red onions (I’d never seen these before), and olives. That pizza changed the way I look at pizza and I have been experimenting every since.

Our home made pizzas (yay for bread makers making the job of dough-making take a whopping 2 minutes of work!) tend to have a home made tomato based sauce (Jamie Oliver’s basic tomato sauce recipe, cooked for at least an hour with the lid off so it reduces all lovely-like), with an Italian deli assortment of meats (pepperoni, chorizo, parma ham, etc.), plenty of vegetables (including broccoli if we have it!) and balls of mozzarella cheese torn over the top. This is our family favourite way, but sometimes I like to do something a little out of the ordinary.

This pizza was created because a) I was out of white bread flour, b) I had 250 grams of Doves Farm Heritage wheat flour sitting in my cupboard since April when I’d bought it to recreate a Mediaeval Horsebread recipe from Ken Follett’s novel Pillars of the Earth (have you read it – it’s fantastic!). It was needing used up. c) I had a jar of Sacla’ Summer Pesto – made from roasted red peppers, mozzarella cheese and rocket – sitting in my cupboard and d) there was a glut of courgettes from my veg box. So I made pizza.

I confess my husband had a bit of a face on him (“a face like a slapped erse” they say here in Scotland) when I explained what I was making for dinner. Pizza is only pizza if it’s made from white bread flour, tomato sauce and plenty of meat, in his eyes, so he was rather reluctant to try my experiment.

It took a few bites but my husband soon changed his tune and said he would very happily eat that again.

The heritage 16th and 17th century wheat varieties in the Doves Farm flour blend (look out for this in your local wholefoods shop) made a delicious wholesome pizza dough with an earthy flavour, and topped with the summer pesto and grilled vegetables it was really rather lovely indeed. So much so I am sharing the recipe with you all, should you wish to try it for yourselves.

If you would like to win a Sacla’ Pesto Hamper pop over to my Giveaways page and enter!