Hello Diners!

This month our good works take us to Tanzania. Our grantee, Global Fund for Widows, is dedicated to empowering widows and female heads of households to overcome poverty through skills-based training, job creation, and micro-finance. Ultimately, the goal is to help widows achieve financial stability, self-sufficiency, and importantly, become role models within their family and community.

Although this month’s grantee is specifically located in Tanzania, I am sharing a recipe with you that is popular in Zanzibar. Zanzibar is a small island off the coast of East Africa, and it merged with Tanganyika in 1964 to become the United Republic of Tanzania. The recipe that I came across for Zanzibari Pizza sounded so fun that I had to share it with you.

Zanzibari Pizza is a quintessential street food (and you know how I love sharing street food with you!), particularly in Stone Town, the capital of Zanzibar. There you will find Forodhani Gardens Night Market where all manner of prepared foods and fruits and vegetables are for sale. In the two decades since its introduction to the market, the pizzas have become the hottest selling item. They can be savory or sweet, pretty much anything goes these days for what you can use as a filling, but topping it with an egg and some soft white cheese is pretty standard. To get a better idea of this process and how to make one, take a look at this YouTube video.

Although this is not “technically” pizza in the terms we know of, it is dough folded around filling, similar to a calzone. I decided to do a riff on the popular East African dish Sukuma Wiki – braised kale or collard greens with tomatoes and spices – and use that as my filling. Along with the requisite egg and soft cheese on top, it made a very satisfying and quick lunch.

Zanzibari Pizza

Makes 4 individual pizzas

Time: About an hour

Zanzibari pizza is made from a thin unleavened dough, similar to a chapati. You can make your own chapati dough to be really authentic, that’s how they do it in the food stalls. But I found that a very worthy time saving substitute is just to use purchased pizza dough. (I used one from Trader Joe’s.) I used the pizza dough straight from the fridge and didn’t let it rise at all, so it was pretty close to an unleavened dough.

The trick is to oil your countertop and try to press the dough out as thinly as possible. Using cold dough helps, if the dough gets warm it’s difficult to control.

Ingredients:
2 bunches of kale, I used Tuscan kale or dinosaur kale, stripped from the stems and chopped roughly
1 cup diced onion
4 canned plum tomatoes, diced
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 teaspoons minced ginger
Oil
Salt to taste
1 pound of pizza dough, divided into 4 balls
4 eggs
½ pound cream cheese
Spicy ketchup dipping sauce (just mix some ketchup with your favorite hot sauce)

Directions:

Heat up a large sauté pan and drizzle with a couple tablespoons of oil. Add the onion, garlic and ginger and sauté until onion is translucent. Add the chopped tomatoes and continue to simmer a bit until they start to break down. Add the chopped kale in batches. You will probably need to add half, let it cook down, and then add the other half. I like to cover the pan with a lid at this point to help it steam. Remove the lid and let the kale finish cooking until it is soft and the liquid had been cooked away. This should take about 10 minutes. Add a splash of liquid if the mixture is too dry. Make sure to let the filling cool before assembling your pizza.

To assemble:

Coat your countertop generously with some oil. Place one of the dough balls on the counter and press and stretch it out until it is quite thin, about the size of a dinner plate. Place ¼ of the cooled kale filling in the center of the dough and spread out to cover the middle third of the dough.

Crack an egg on top of the kale and give it a gentle poke to break the egg yolk. I like to leave the egg mostly intact, but you’ll notice if you look at the video that they mix the egg in more thoroughly. Scatter ¼ of the cream cheese on top.

Fold up the perimeter of the dough to cover the filling, one side at a time, doing all four sides, leaving a small opening in the center where you should see the egg yolk showing through. Here’s a link so that you can see exactly how this is done. Note: you will also see in the video that they put a pre-cooked mini disc in the middle of the dough, just to strengthen it, I did not find this necessary. The video is about 4 minutes long, but the most relevant section is from the 30 second mark to around 1 minute 30 seconds.

On medium heat, warm up either a griddle, a cast iron pan, or a non-stick fry pan. Err on the side of lower heat rather than too high. If the heat it too high, the pizza will burn and the egg won’t cook properly.

Gently lift the pizza off the counter – you may need a pancake flipper to help you do this. Place in the preheated pan and cook for 4-5 minutes. Take a peek at the underside, it should be a toasty golden brown. Have some confidence and flip it quickly so that the egg doesn’t spill out!

Let this cook for another 3-5 minutes. If it’s obvious to you that the dough looks cooked, then it’s done!

Let rest for 5 minutes, then cut in half and serve with spicy ketchup dipping sauce.

Recipe and photo credit: Linda McElroy