Baguette Pizza – Sweet Chilli, Cheese & Peppers

A baguette pizza’s easy to make – and I served up this tasty sweet chilli, cheese & peppers baguette pizza from my recently acquired new mini oven from Lidl.  It really is fast at turning a few ingredients into a fast snack or meal.

The “food cheats” part of my baguette pizza recipe is that I don’t use a fresh baguette, I also have a small freezer, so no spare room to freeze baguettes – a freezer can only hold so much food and you have to pick and choose what’s worthwhile.  Instead, I rely heavily on part-baked baguettes – I like the Lidl baguettes as they look a little larger for my pennies than other stores and Lidl is my closest food shop, which is why I’m in there more often than in other supermarkets.  Part-baked baguettes need no special storage, they are vacuum packed, so I just keep them in the bread bin, they have a shelf-life of a couple of months, but I’ve actually eaten one pack about two months beyond its date as it looked fine to me.  Waste not want not!

These baguette pizzas started when I opened the fridge and realised I still had part of a red pepper that needed to be used up.  I’ve a zero waste policy which dictates what I eat/when as I have to eat everything.  There’s always cheese in the fridge; sometimes there’s ONLY cheese.

I’d recently bought a bottle of sweet chilli sauce – and it’s rather a large bottle.  It was one of those impulse purchases one sometimes makes for no sane reason 🙂  It’s annoying as it doesn’t actually fit in the cupboard with the rest of the sauces, so it’s sitting on the worktop all the time, which grates a little!

Ingredients: 

• One half of a part-baked baguette (mine come in a pack of two, so this is 1/4 of a pack).
• Tomato ketchup
• Oregano, or you can use mixed peppers
• Red peppers, chopped into small pieces
• Grated cheese, I had cheddar
• Sweet chilli sauce

Method:

1. Part-baked baguettes need to be baked for 10 minutes in the oven – but as I was also topping this I sliced my baguette in half lengthways and baked it on the bottom shelf of my mini oven at 190°C for 6 minutes, until it’d just started to turn brown. I’ll usually bake two halves at a time, storing the second half in a plastic takeaway box, so this is what I’ll usually do with that second half, so I’ll often have one half already cooked/ready.
2. Next, remove the baguette from the oven, open it out flat to expose the two middle sections, then spread tomato ketchup and oregano onto the bread.
3. Top the baguettes with the cheddar cheese and red peppers.
4. Give a splash of sweet chilli sauce over the top.
5. Return the baguette to the mini oven, this time you need the top element on to brown your baguette pizza.
6. Over the next 4-6 minutes the cheese will melt and the top will brown!  Unless you’re like me and a bit impatient to eat it – I whipped my baguette pizza out of the oven a bit too soon really.  It was fully edible and tasty, just not browned.  I do that a lot.  Food fast, with no extra points for presentation 🙂

You can cook these baguettes up and store them for later, if you wish.  Cool them so the topping sets then either wrap in foil, or put them into lidded plastic storage boxes.  The fridge is the best place – they’ll stay fine for 1-2 days.  You can freeze them, but for the time they take to cook, why would you?

Cost: This is a frugal snack as the half baguette costs £0.11 with the toppings costing just pennies, so probably £0.20 in total, max.