Late Night Pizza

I made the Master Recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day on Sunday, and it's been proofing in a bowl in the fridge since then.  I put the grill pan on high, turned the broiler on high, and rolled out a mini-pie for myself.  I grilled both sides of the dough, slathered on some homemade tomato sauce (which is one of those things that will never taste better from a jar), tossed on fresh mozz, and then let it finish in the broiler for a minute.

Took about the same time as your average frozen tv dinner.  And much faster than making a loaf of bread from a book that is the ultimate lie.

This has been posted in The Pineapple Spoon Rest too.

p.s. You know there is a specific line in my lease about NOT using knives directly on the counters?  Because there is.

This was supposed to be about Indian food.

I try to bring lunch to work every day, and I try to cook dinner Monday through Thursday and Sunday. I do not often cook from a box or bag, and I try to make everything relatively healthy. But Friday and Saturday are no holds barred, and I love my local Chinese take-out spots. Like, love them. I guess that's how some people love pizza - in all its disgusting, congealed mozzarella glory. I like pizza enough, but I only really love it when it's grilled. There was this place in New Brunswick called Jack 'N Grill, and they used to make really awesome grilled pizza. The problem is they only ever made this awesome grilled pizza once, and every other time it sucked so bad that until Adam and I finally gave up and moved on to Tido's (note to self: discuss Tido 'n His Junkyard Dogs at another point in time).

Al Forno in Providence, RI has the most amazing grilled pizza, which is what the restaurant is famous for. It's topped with strands of scallions, and it's BANANAS. I celebrated my 27th birthday there, and now that I'm heading deeper into my late 20's, I realize how important it is to mark your birthdays with memorable food experiences.

Anyway, this post was supposed to be about bringing lunches, cooking dinners, and how I've cooked Indian food twice in the past week and how much I love it, but then I got distracted by pizza. I'll save my green chicken masala for another time.

A slice of the future

As the title suggests this is my first post but it certainly won't be my last. This is the first pizza I made, I won't get into the specifics of the dough (as my recipe is quite unique and employs a rare blend of flour, water and yeast). The cheese is a combination of part-skim mozzarella and some shredded Monterrey jack, also as soon as I removed the pizza from the oven I used a carrot peeler to shred off some chunks of romano cheese. I look forward to my second attempt at this as on the first go around I didn't have a pizza paddle and was relegated to rolling the dough out on the counter, placing it on a deformed cookie sheet, and then used a combination of a large spatula and my hands to pull it from the sheet onto the stone in the oven.

Hopefully within the next several weeks and months I'll have some new dishes to post and perhaps a more detailed pizza post (as I do consider myself something of an aficionado). With that being said it's good to be on the blog and I look forward to showing ya'll the simpler side of collegiate cooking.

Whole Wheat Pizza with Rapini Pesto and Roasted Garlic/Tomato/Red Pepper Puree

This is the pizza I made. It was amazing. AMAZING. I had tentative plans to make pizza this week anyway because of this new recipe I saw for whole wheat crust. I have made whole wheat crust before just by subbing out half of the white flour for whole wheat, but having an actual recipe in front of me lit the fire. I probably could have let thing slide, but Ryan got in touch and said that HE was interested in pizza-making this week as well.

So, I got up early and got the dough going. Dough advice: do not bother with the food processor. There is no reason that I can see to dirty the most annoying appliance in the world to wash, just to do something that is easily executed with a large mixing bowl and a spatula. While the dough was rising, I started preparation for the topping elements. My original concept for the pizza was the standard vegan white sauce (ie nutritional yeast, flour, soy milk, mustard, etc) with some veggies on top. On the way to the store though, I started thinking about Two Boots pizza with its sauce layers and varied crusts and I got the idea for a pizza with side-by-side purees and sparse cheese.

I already had some pesto made earlier in the week, so I decided to do a rapini (broccoli rabe) puree with the pesto worked in (which I have done before as a pasta sauce with great success) and a roasted red pepper and tomato puree alongside. To do the tomato-pepper business, I first blanched a tomato to remove the skin. I cored it and cut it lattitudinally (poles being on the stem ends), then removed the guts so that all was left was the tomato meat. I put the halves on some parchment paper, drizzled them with olive oil and sprinkled on some basil, bay leaves, salt, and pepper (terragon also works but I was out), then put them in a hot oven. I don't have a gas oven (arrggghh) so I let the red pepper char in the oven along with the tomates. When the skin of the pepper was blackened most of the way, I put it in a paper bag for a few minutes to steam the skin off, then wiped off the charred skin, cut off the top, and cleaned out the seeds and membranes. I had also roasted some garlic with the other guys, which involves taking a few cloves and wrapping them in foil, still with the husks on. When the cloves are soft, they can be de-husked. All of this got tossed into the food processor with some olive oil and a dot of tomato paste. The rabe puree was just a matter of lightly sauteeing the rabe and then food-processing with the pesto and many squeezes of lemon juice; salt and pepper to taste.




By this time, Ryan had gotten here and we rolled out the dough. I usually do the pat out from the middle with the fingertips style, but Ryan recommended a rolling pin, which ended up giving a more even thickness to the crust. I spread out the green element and piped on the red using the plastic bag with the corner snipped off method.

I call it Green Pie with Red Suspenders:



Disaster was narrowly avoided when we made the decision not to corn meal the underside of the dough before sliding it onto the pizza stone. We tried all kinds of pulling and coaxing with multiple spatulas. The solution was pivoting and nudging with spatulas a little at a time to sneak bits of cornmeal underneath, until shimmying the board got the pie sliding around on the meal.

You can see how much less adorable it was by the time we got it into the oven.



What's that you say? It looks equally adorable as before its near miss? Oh, alright.

Note the pizza stone. This is essential to a delicious crust. We let the pizza hang out until the underneath of the crust was the color of a crust of a pizza that you would want to eat. Then we put Ryan's pizza in. It gets honorable mention, hence fewer pictures:




Ryan went the extra cheese, sliced tomato, and scallions route. Not bad actually.

Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!

Pizza is best with fresh ingredients and the ONLY way to guarantee that you're not going to waste your money on something with rubber mushrooms on it is to make it your damn self. For the past 5 months I've been making a pizza every few weeks. Pizza dough is easy and cheap to make. All you really need that might be hard to come by is a couple of hours to let the dough rise. There are a ton of recipes for pizza dough online, but almost every one I saw was basically the same, so I just use the one in the good ol' Joy of Cooking with a few minor adjustments. First, I half the recipe because it is for two pizzas (you can freeze half of it or whatever but I'm not really into that scene). A strange feature of Joy's recipe is that it lists "1 tsp of sugar" in parentheses. I suppose that means that it's optional? I've tried it with and without, but lately I've been using honey instead and it may or may not have made all the difference. Not everyone keeps honey around because it's a little pricey, but most recently I've been "borrowing" a teaspoon here and there from my roommate who is never home. That tends to keep the price a bit more reasonable for me. Joy wants us to let this dough rise for about 1.5 hours, but I leave it for 2 full hours and it's kind of amazing how much more it rises in that last half hour. Finally, Joy suggests that we set the oven at 450. Screw that. You have to crank your oven as hot as it will go. When you open the oven door you should feel a blast of heat in your face as you watch the anti-glare coating melt off your glasses. But first comes the fun part: toppings. This part is so fun that even your girlfriend will help. For this pizza I grilled some chicken while the dough was rising. Then Sara and I cut up onions, mushrooms, green peppers, a little broccoli, and minced some garlic. Sara's more of a fan of peppers and broccoli on pizza than I am, so I just stuck with chicken, onions, and mushrooms.