Upside-down Red Pepper and Tomato Pie

From Market Vegetarian, Ross Dobson, Ryland Peters and Small, 2008.

Upside-down recipes are always, for me, slightly magical. You never quite know what it’s going to be like until you turn it over. Sometimes there’s no magic at all and you end up with a disaster but it’s certainly fun trying. So I was tempted by this upside-down pie.

The pastry was a cheese one. Flour, cheese and salt were mixed. Then melted butter, eggs and milk completed the mix. It was kneaded for a little and then left in the fridge for half an hour. The recipe calls for the dough to be made in a food processor but I usually tend to opt for hands.

While the dough was doing its wait, I put some onions, garlic and sliced red capsicum in a frying pan and cooked them for a good 10 minutes. A can of tomatoes was then added with seasonings and cooked for another 5 minutes. This was then left to cool.

The dough was now rolled out to about the size of the frying pan. This was placed over the mixture in the pan and placed in the oven for about 20 minutes until it had browned. When it was ready it was taken out and let cool a little. It was then upended onto a serving plate.

The result was rather like a pizza with a thicker than usual base. The savoury sauce was tasty and the slices were soon demolished.

While I don’t always stick rigidly to Ross Dobson’s recipes they can generally be counted on to work. For this one I did not use buttermilk in the dough and used hands instead of processor to make it; small variations which didn’t seem to affect the final product.

Taste: ✔✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔