Tag Archives: pizza

A couple fall meals from the last few days

Posted on by

Since it’s been getting a little colder in the last few days as evidenced by the need to improvise new sartorial accessories:

Shef shows off the latest trend in proboscular thermal regulation

We’ve been using the oven a lot too cook, not only because we’ve been doing a lot of baking and slow roasting, but because it warms the apartment.

Last weekend Shef cooked this wonderful and simple lamb dish because she was inspired by a recipe she saw in the latest issue of Saveur Magazine. Basically it consists of a bunch of vegetables (green beans, onions, tomatoes, garlic, leeks, eggplant, peppers – basically whatever vegetables you think will roast well) tossed with olive oil salt and pepper and laid out in a casserole dish or roasting pan.  Onto the vegetables you lay lamb shoulder chops which have been seasoned with salt and pepper.  Cover this with foil and cook at 350 for an hour.  Uncover and let the lamb chops brown and roast for another 45 minutes to and hour.  The end result: so good.  The lamb juices seep down and flavor the vegetables so you have this rich, savory, mildly lamby, broth.  We ate it over couscous.

inspired by Saveur

hmm, do I eat the magazine or the real thing?

And then a couple nights ago.  I decided to make pizza using the sourdough recipe which I wrote about a few months ago.  But this time, my starter was a bit flat. So, after the first 18 hours I added commercial baker’s yeast (about half of one of those packets you can buy at the grocery store).  I put the yeast in about 1/4 – 1/3 cup of warm water to which I had added some honey in order to feed the active yeast.  After about five minutes the yeast was frothing up so I added the yeast and water and about half a cup more of bread flour to the existing dough and put it all in the mixer to incorporate. I let this dough proof for another few hours during which time it rose dramatically (thanks to the new yeast).  And this was the result:

Pizza before the baking - loaded down with toppings

Pizza toppings: homemade tomato sauce, mozarella, olives, bell pepper, leaks, beet greens, squash, Italian sausage.

after about 15 minutes in the oven... ready to eat!

The verdict: Delicious!  The dough was sour and tangy, bready and chewy. Success!

For dessert, I made a rustic pear and apple tart.  I used pears because the pears we’ve been getting from our CSA have been uniformly bad.  Well they taste okay, but they’re super hard and instead of ripening, certain parts just rot as if they’ve been bruised really badly.  So I salvage the pears that I could, added in some apples (also from our CSA and actually pretty good), cut everything up and tossed it with sugar and cinnamon and corn starch (at three teaspoons I think used a bit too much as I was flashing back to the tasty but liquidy strawberry rubarb pie which I wrote about earlier this summer).  Per PK’s suggesting I cooked the pear apple mix first in pan to cook out some of the liquid – again the corn starch more than took care of this.  And then laid the mix onto a pie crust that I’d prepared earlier (1 1/2 cup of flour + 1 stick of butter cut in+ about 3-4 tbsp of ice water  to bind), folded over the crust and popped it into the oven.

the rustic tart ready to go into the oven

Half an hour later…

Ready to eat! See? I cut into eat before I remembered to take the photo.

Share

Sourdough pizza…dough

Posted on by

Remember Matt’s sourdough starter baby?  Well two years later, it’s still alive and kicking (figuratively speaking).  I’ve made numerous  bread loaves – some successful, others, to be honest, terrible.  But it’s been a learning experience throughout and it’s been great to pass on the starter to friends and see what they’ve done with it.  It’s like watching my friends raise their kids.  For example, PK has become and ace waffle maker, adding corn meal to the recipe which adds a whole new dimension of flavor and texture to the already sumptuous and rich sourdough waffles.

And my friend Niels has from the get go baked beautiful and tasty loaves and was the first person I knew to do a sourdough rye which he brought to our last dumpling party but which was unfortunately  consumed before I had a chance to take a photo.  It was delicious though. And he’s also the one who advised and reminded me that to bake  a good loaf, you have to get the starter going again so it’s really active and really productive.  So recently, if I make bread, or waffles or pizzza dough, I make sure – per Niels reminder – to take the starter out of the fridge in the morning, stir it up and get it bubbling again, feed it once or maybe two times over the course of a day (maybe pouring off some of the excess  (I know wasteful, but if you’re not making waffles or pizza dough what are you going to do with so much starter).  So by the time I’m ready to make the dough some time in the evening, it’s super bubbly and has that really fermented sour smell.  The last few times I made bread this is what I did and it made a noticeable difference.  I also made a really good sour dough pizza dough.  Here’s the rough recipe:

1 cup of starter
3 cups of bread baking flour
about 3/4 cup – 1 cup of water (you can add a little more or use less depending on how wet you want the dough)
1 1/2 tsp of fine sea salt
1 1/2 tsp of sugar

Mix all the contents until you have a nice dough and like the no knead bread, you let this dough mixture proof for about 18 hours until it gets really bubbly and rises until it’s about twice its original volume. Then you can punch it down and roll it into you pizza crust and let the crusts proof for about fifteen minutes to half an hour – per Saveur Magazine‘s recommendation – so they’ve risen again too. Then put your toppings on and bake in your preheated to 500 degree oven. Hopefully you have a pizza stone. The dough should be crusty, chewy and tangy. And the pizza should be delicious. If not, you failed.

Here's my pizza baking in the oven

The finished pizza (toppings: pepperoni, olives, mushrooms, bell peppers, cheeze, sauce)

Share

Matt’s Wood Oven Pizza!

Posted on by

Okay maybe I should rename this site “Cooking with Matt”.   What can I say?  He’s a great cook, he makes preparing food easy and accessible and he always lets me shoot him cooking.  See that’s all you need to do to be a star on this amazing blog. Alright so we already know Matt’s the Dumpling King.  And in the last post I dubbed him The Earl of Sourdough.  Now I must give him another alias: Pizza Maestro.  Read on for the full story.

Every front yard should have one of these.

Share