Showing posts with label pizza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pizza. Show all posts

Friday, July 29, 2016

These happy almost-golden years

I would be insulted if I were Julia Roberts.
Our children have been gone for weeks and weeks. Mark and I flew down to Phoenix last weekend, like the peppy middle-aged couple enjoying their almost-golden years that I guess we are. Damn. I don’t like the sound of that one bit. But the reality isn’t bad at all.

So, Phoenix. It turns out to be a cheap destination in July. Can you guess why? We had two goals and accomplished them both with ease on our 30-hour vacation. Both were delightful experiences that I highly recommend should you ever find yourself in that hot and lunar city. 
Biancoverde
Goal #1: Eat at Pizzeria Bianco. I reported a story about pizza several years ago and the sources kept mentioning Chris Bianco in Phoenix as pioneer/guru/forerunner of American pizza. His pizza was reputedly amazing. Amazing pizza in Phoenix? This was like hearing that the best pulled pork can be found in Anchorage, or the best Thai food in America in Las Vegas. The latter is actually true, or used to be. But it’s bizarre.

We headed to Pizzeria Bianco straight from the airport. We went to the branch in an open-air mall. (There's another downtown.) The restaurant was pleasant, unfussy, and uncrowded, with flea market paintings and mismatched school chairs. It was surprisingly feminine for a pizzeria, but not at all precious. 

I hate describing pizza. I’ve been forced to do it in the past and finding new ways to say that pizza is delicious will drive a writer to verbal extremes that contradict the uncomplicated essence of the thing itself. Here’s a description of a Chris Bianco pizza from an Eater story: “the crust’s lip was full but not puffy, more Julia Roberts than Angelina Jolie, and the lacy mozzarella, butterscotch-tinged onions and hunks of fennel sausage showed a generous hand.”

The second part of the description is fine. The first part? Points for effort.

We returned the next day on our way back to the airport and ordered two more pizzas, including my favorite, the Rosa, an austere pie topped with Parmesan, red onions, rosemary, and pistachios. To quote from the Eater story again, there was an “intricate chemistry between the stinging red onion, the piney rosemary, and the earthy-sweet pistachios.” 

That works, though I think “intricate chemistry” is a stretch. It’s pizza! 

Freaking great pizza. 

Other than a donut, pizza was all I ate in Phoenix. Mark might have also eaten a banana.
Goal #2. Taliesen West. This was Frank Lloyd Wright’s live-work compound for the winter months, a magnificent network of stone buildings in an expanse of cacti, rattlesnakes, javelinas, and rock. There are a few pools and some Chinese pottery integrated into the design, as well as a small auditorium and screening room, but the angular structures were designed to meld with the stark, sere landscape. Gorgeous and strange. I know nothing about architecture but have always loved touring FLW buildings. Mark and I decided that a project for our dotage will be to take short trips to tour FLW sites in Wisconsin, Chicago, and Pennsylvania. At least one of them even offers a senior discount.

Incidentally, we stayed at the Phoenix Biltmore, a stunning hotel that Wright helped to design. Very affordable this time of year. We thought we’d go cool off in one of the many Biltmore swimming pools, only to discover that even pool water is hot in Phoenix in late July. So we sat in lounge chairs in the shade where I drank diet Coke, Mark drank frozen margaritas, and we read our books. 

It’s fun and peaceful being a couple without kids around. You forget. 

In other news, last night, I made this zesty pasta to deal with the cherry tomato bonanza in our backyard. It’s a delicious dish with the gutsy, swarthy flavors of mint, garlic, Pecorino and caramelized sweet tomato. Intense, but not overwhelming, more Robert De Niro than Al Pacino. . . 

Biltmore statuary

Monday, January 06, 2014

Yo, happy new year!

You need hair and eye protection when baking pizza in a cob oven. It makes me look 10x hipper than usual.
For the first time in over a year (and the second time ever), I fired up our pizza oven on Saturday, inspired by a class I took from Kristin Ferguson Smith when we were in Los Angeles last week. I learned so much crust technique in that class I can’t even begin to cover it here. Plus, to paraphrase Aam Gopnik, there’s no bore like a bread bore. (Read his piece if you haven't already; it's wonderful.)   Here’s what I will say: We drove home from L.A. and I went straight to the refrigerator to revive my languishing sourdough starter. I fed it twice a day for three days until it was active and bubbly and then made pizza dough. Kristin’s recipe is similar to the Mozza recipe, but she calls for sourdough starter and has you knead the dough for roughly 8 times as long. Like, up to 45 minutes in the mixer. Does that shock you? It shocked me. But it works. You knead the hell out of that dough and only when it passes the windowpane test can you quit. I have never made better pizza crust. It’s possible I’ve never eaten better pizza crust.  

As for the oven, it performed beautifully. I plastered it a few months ago but ran out of plaster before it was completely covered, so there’s a little patch at the back to tackle soon. Maybe in 2015. The oven’s dimensions are wrong for optimal burning and there are some funky cosmetic details, but I am proud. I am also proud that I didn’t burn the house down while igniting the fire on Saturday without matches or lighter. How did I manage this? I’ll let you use your imagination. What I did was breathtakingly stupid, but I got away with it and will never, ever do it again. 

It was Mark's birthday, so my sister and her family came over to celebrate. Justine and I stood out there in the dusk and talked and made pizzas while our husbands happily watched football upstairs and foolishly complained that they don’t like clams on their pizzas and our four kids decorated Mark’s birthday cake. It was a perfect evening and I don’t say that very often. 
 While I like to think Justine is gazing up at me with the admiration of a younger sister,  there are other possible interpretations.  I bought the goggles for making soap a few years ago, but am never going to make soap and now use them primarily for chopping onions, a useful tip from Smitten Kitchen. For pizza purposes, sun glasses work just as well, but goggles make you look more impressive (or something.) The oven's doorway is too big. I made a mistake in the planning and when I realized what I'd done, it was too late. This tormented me for a while, but now I'm ok with it. Even if it doesn't retain as much heat as it should, the oven works fine. It was a hard project, but ultimately very satisfying. 

Tonight, I will begin cooking five recipes from Cowgirl Creamery Cooks, which Mark gave me for Christmas. It’s a new book, both to me and to the world. The parmesan broth is already made. 

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

chop suey vs. the salted caramel croissant

The Grand Central Market doesn't look like much from the outside. 
I was in Los Angeles over the weekend reporting an 800-word travel story on the city's scuzzy-fascinating Downtown. There’s a lot of scuzzy in Downtown L.A. There’s a lot of fascinating. There’s a lot of everything. Vagrants, hipsters, check-cashing stores, great restaurants, scary restaurants, a Roy Choi restaurant, urine-scented street corners, lovely Beaux Arts buildings, a Chinatown, a 110-year-old mochi shop, a block with nothing but hookah wholesalers. . . 

Yikes. Only a writer version of Houdini could pack Downtown L.A. into 800 words and that isn’t me. Yesterday, after much struggle, self doubt, and ruthless cutting, I turned the story in. I didn’t hit it out of the park, but I turned it in. Today is going to be cake. I'm going to enjoy today.

My hotel was two blocks from the Grand Central Market, a lively 93-year-old urban market with history, lore, and old neon signs advertising chow mein and chop suey. Every time I took a break from running around, I went back to the Market. I could have stood there watching people all day. About 3/4 of the stalls are hard-core ethnic places selling tacos, pupusas, and chop suey. I was curious about the chop suey, which I’ve never tasted, but I was also suspicious because it cost $4. If it had cost $8 I would have tried it. 

Last December, the market’s owners announced plans for a renovation and in the months since they’ve rented empty stalls to vendors specializing in almond milk lattes, salted caramel croissants, and juices with names like “Purity." There’s an oyster bar coming and a cheese shop. In other words, the market is now split between dirt-cheap ethnic food and delicacies with “local” or “salted” in the name. I bought a tiny, delicious salted chocolate chip cookie from a pretty new bakery called Valerie. Ten steps away an enormous cauldron of pig parts was bubbling and people were shouting in Spanish. I tried some of those pig parts (a.k.a. carnitas) and, like the salted cookie, they were delicious. 

The scene was wonderful. It was also dissonant. Can the two realities coexist under one roof? And if not, why not? If I had to venture a guess, I would predict the market will quickly tilt in one direction or the other. While it seems clear that there’s more money in salted caramel, the vast majority of the people there were working-class Latino. They seemed totally uninterested in the $6 bottles of Purity juice.

Incidentally, it turns out that Valerie Gordon, owner of the bakery where I bought the salted chocolate chip cookie, just came out with a beautiful cookbook called Sweet. The publisher sent it to me a month or so ago, and while it contains no recipe for those salted chocolate chip cookies, I’m intrigued by her tangerine poundcake and rose petal petit fours.

As a few of you may recall, I spent some time cooking from Nancy Silverton's Mozza a couple of years ago. Late Sunday afternoon I had an hour to kill before heading to the airport, so I parked across the street from Pizzeria Mozza, supposedly a very tough place to get a seat. Should I try to walk in? Would I feel dejected and hurt if I was turned away? Stupid! I gave myself a brief talking-to and got out of the car. 

"Absolutely we have room!" said the friendly hostess. She seated me at the counter and almost immediately I felt calmer than I had all weekend. The place was warm, welcoming and totally sure of itself. Totally alive. Some restaurants, very few, have this magic about them. For me, Sunday afternoon, Pizzeria Mozza had it. I ordered the long-cooked broccoli pizza, which was fantastic. For dessert: butterscotch pudding with caramel sauce. Do even need to tell you the caramel sauce was salted? It was outstanding. I sat there and thought: what a treat, I am perfectly happy, remember this. 

Then I had to drive to the airport and the spell was broken. That's spells for you

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Syllabub: definitely a classic



Until week before last I'd never experienced syllabub, the whipped concoction of cream, sugar, and alcohol that was popular in Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries. 

There are three syllabub recipes in Classic Desserts and, given that antique desserts with silly/poetic names have always appealed to me, I felt I had to make one. 

I chose the so-called everlasting syllabub, which Classic Desserts editor Richard Olney excerpted from one of Elizabeth David's books. It is wonderfully simple: In a bowl, combine the zest and juice of one lemon with 2 tablespoons brandy and 1/2 cup white wine. Infuse overnight. The next day, pluck out the lemon peel and beat the liquid with 1/4 cup sugar and 1 1/4 cups heavy cream until it forms soft, billowy peaks. Spoon into small glasses and grate a little nutmeg on top. 

I thought, here goes nothing. Another weird creamy dessert. But it was love at first bite. This syllabub was tart, sweet, light, airy, rich, boozy, all the flavors and elements in perfect balance. A recipe for the ages. Even Mark thought so. Make this. It may not be exactly to your taste, but I think you'll have to agree that there is something magical about it. 

I was so crazy about the Elizabeth David syllabub that the following day I made cider syllabub using a recipe from Anne Willan’s Cookbook Library. Willan’s recipe is older than Elizabeth David’s, dating back to 1660 when people still treated syllabub as a drink. Although I served the cider syllabub with a spoon, it was actually a beverage with a thick, foamy head. Or, as Willan puts it, “a feisty liquid topped by a creamy mousse.” I liked it almost as much as Elizabeth David's syllabub. Mark liked it better.

I wanted to know more about syllabub, so I looked it up in The Oxford Companion to Food:

It has often been said that the primitive method of making syllabub, ensuring a good foam, was to partly fill a jug with sweetened, spiced white wine or cider, and to milk a cow directly into it. When this technique was critically examined, and subjected to experiments, by Vicky Williams (1996), it was found to be unsatisfactory; and it began to seem doubtful whether it had ever been a common practice. Ivan Day (1996b) crowned the debate on this particular question by a historical and technical survey of the whole subject of syllabubs, now the locus classicus.

Locus classicus? Sheesh. So much for my American education.

The fact that there are people "critically examining" syllabub and "subjecting it to experiments" interests me more than syllabub itself. And I'm pretty interested in syllabub.

If you have 15 minutes to spare, there are worse ways to waste them than in reading Ivan Day's paper on syllabub. It's scholarly but funny. Day attempted milking a cow into his syllabub and reports: 

Unless your syllabub cow is extremely well-groomed, the congealing milk will also be garnished here and there with cow hairs and the odd speck of bovine dandruff, a most unappetising prospect, at least to our modern eyes. It is possible that a farmhand would have happily slaked his thirst with a rude refreshment of this kind, but surely not an aristocratic banqueteer expecting a “daintie silla-bub” in a delicate spouted glass.

And so on.

Even if you don't read the paper, you should check out Day's web site. For me, it was like falling through a trap door into fantasyland. Pink Twelfth Night cakes, sugar sculpture, jelly moulds. My personal dream.

On another subject, thanks to the reader who recommended Amy Thielen's New Midwestern Table which I picked up at the library. It’s a handsome cookbook, full of dishes I’ve never heard of, like runzas, which appear to be something like Nebraskan piroshki. I have not make those, but did make Thielen's cracker crust pizza. It was easy and very good and I’m not sure anyone but me noticed that the crust was unleavened and totally flat. We are not talking about a discerning audience here. The crust recipe is here.

The other New Midwestern dish I tried was the smoked oyster dip. Hugely popular at my sister’s birthday party. I should note that the recipe contains what I believe to be a significant typo, calling for a 13-ounce tin of smoked oysters when I am quite sure Thielen meant to call for a 3-ounce tin. Anyway, that’s what I used and, as I said, the dip was great. 

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Enough about that blasted oven


You really do need big laborer's arms to build an oven like that.
Saturday, we (sister, brother-in-law, me) insulated the cob oven with mud and straw. Sunday, I lit a fire and let it burn slowly for a while and then I let it rage and then a lot of people (sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew, neighbors Joan and Bill) came over and I pushed all the coals to the back and sides of the oven and we made pizza.

How was it? The crusts weren't as thin and crisp as they should have been and I complained a lot about that, but in fact the pizzas were very successful and the oven did its job admirably. I have some ideas about how to do better in the future and the oven is definitely getting another layer of insulation before I plaster it.

Also, I decided we need a picnic table in the backyard. Half the party was up in the kitchen and half the party was hovering around the oven and it was not exactly restful or communal for the hostess/pizzaiola. Running the pizzas through the bedroom and up the stairs and then down the stairs and then going back up for the welder's gloves and trying to balance a wine glass on the edge of plywood planter beds,  I felt like I was acting in a Marx Brothers movie, except not a very funny Marx Brothers movie.
I think I should have put the pizza in while there were still biggish flames.
I will now shut up about the oven for a while and give you two outstanding recipes.

Since I was using her book to make the pizza dough, I decided to try some new dishes from Nancy Silverton's Mozza. I chose these dishes because looked easy. They were unbelievably easy and unbelievably delicious.

If you can still get figs where you live, make figs wrapped in pancetta right away. Writes Silverton: "I certainly didn't invent the idea of contrasting the sweetness of figs with something piggy and salty: figs and prosciutto is a classic."

That is true, but while I've eaten many tasty sweet/piggy/salty dishes before, this one was special.

fresh figs (they don't have to be soft and perfectly ripe; this recipe will redeem slightly firm figs)
thinly sliced pancetta
your most expensive balsamic vinegar.
wedge of Parmesan

1. Cut off any hard bit of stem and halve the figs lengthwise.
2. Wrap each fig half in a strip of pancetta.
3. Heat a cast iron skillet until very hot and sear the figs, flat side down, for 2 minutes. Turn the figs and sear on the other side for 2 minutes.
4. Arrange the figs on a plate and drizzle very sparingly with balsamic vinegar. Shave strips of parmesan cheese on top. Serve with toothpicks.

Note: Next time I will try putting a shard of Parmesan underneath the pancetta to let it melt a bit. The figs would be easier to eat and you'd be sure to get all the elements of the dish in each bite.

For dessert I made Silverton's Greek yogurt gelato expecting a slightly icy frozen yogurt. What I ended up with was a mountain of ethereal, velvety, tangy, snow-white gelato that I will be making again and again. Silverton says to mix all the ingredients in a bowl, but you can just put them straight into your ice cream machine and spare yourself the dishwashing. I did.

1 quart whole milk Greek yogurt (you can use well-strained homemade)
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1. Scrape all the ingredients into your ice cream machine. Freeze. Serve immediately. Makes 1 quart.

Going forward, I'm wrapping up The Suriani Kitchen over the next week. I have a suspicion most people aren't too interested in this obscure cookbook or obscure cuisine, but I can't quit until I've tried a few more of these dishes, especially some of the rice pancakes and dumplings, the pickled limes and the banana jam. I would be disappointed in myself. After I close the Suriani chapter, I'm thinking Burma.

Friday, October 05, 2012

On fire


We're getting there.
I apologize for my absence. Our household seemed to be falling apart and I decided to devote 2 weeks to getting our lives in order and what that meant was very little cooking or blogging. I started volunteering at the middle school lunch counter, sawed down a small tree, bought earthquake insurance, finished our taxes, acquired a shredder, baked 2 birthday cakes, panned a novel that Janet Maslin loved, spent $40 on drawer organizers at the Container Store, organized drawers, paid delinquent bills, went to Naomi Duguid's talk at Omnivore Books (and bought her new book, Burma, which looks terrific), rewired 3 lamps, and "sold" my mother's car, which has languished in our driveway for the last 30 months. I waited so long to sell that sucker that Isabel grew up and in 65 days will be eligible for a driver's license so I am buying my sister out.

I also worked on our backyard oven. We left this riveting saga at the point where Owen and I had completed construction of a sturdy, well-insulated platform. Then we went to India. Then I went to Utah. Then I came back and, with the help of my neighbor Bill and his rock saw, built an elegant brick arch for the door.
Right about here, Owen lost all interest in the oven.
Once the mortar on the arch had set, I mounded damp sand behind it upon a layer of fire bricks.

harder than it looks
After collapsing repeatedly, the sand eventually held a dome shape. I did not enjoy this step and missed Owen's company.

The next day, I mixed a stiff dough of sand, clay, and, water to cover the sand dome. Mark helped with this part, as did Bill and his wife, Joan, and I am eternally grateful to the three of them because if I'd had to do this by myself, I might be in a wheelchair now. It was hard.
wet clay oven
Two days later, the clay dome felt firm to the touch, so I scooped out all the sand. The hollow dome dried some more. It cracked. I patched it up. It dried some more. This morning I built a fire inside and the dome grew fiercely hot and smoke (or steam?) started seeping out of hairline fissures. I'm not sure what to do about that, as the literature is vague on the topic. Cob oven literature is vague on many topics.

Tomorrow, I'm going to insulate the oven with a thick paste of clay and straw. After that: plaster. If all goes well,  I'll try to make pizza on Sunday. I sure hope it's delicious! Then I can cross this epic project off my to-do list and will really be caught up.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

I have real kitchen swagger!


pan bagnat
I've now made all the sandwiches from Clotilde Dusoulier's Chocolate and Zucchini cookbook, and it gets an A+ for sandwiches. In my view, any book that reminds me how good homemade sandwiches are, how you can get protein, starch, vegetable, and salad in a single easy, cheap package and call it dinner deserves a gold star.

pan bagnat. Classic Provencal sandwich featuring tuna, tomato, olives, olive oil, and greens on baguette. (Or focaccia.) Wet, zesty, refreshing. Much loved by all. I'll make this again for sure.

curried turkey sandwich. Turkey chopped and mixed with curry powder, goat cheese, and raisins. Yellow and softly spicy. Much loved by my husband and me, but not Owen, who objected to the raisins. He is silly. I'll make this again after Thanksgiving.

cantal cheese sandwich with mushrooms. My personal favorite. You cook cremini mushrooms until soft and broil them on bread with cheese. (She calls for cantal, which I've never encountered, so I used tomme.) Much loved by all. Owen apparently didn't notice he was eating mushrooms. I'll make this again.

And last night I served her sardine club sandwich. You spread toast with tomato jam (she offers a recipe, but I used the leftover jam from last month's Mourad dinner), goat cheese, and mashed sardines. Add some greenery. She calls for an extra slice of bread in the middle of all this, but I skipped that. Very tasty, though I probably won't make it again as Isabel wanted to eat neither sardines nor tomato jam. 

I also baked an excellent ricotta poundcake from Dolce Italiano last week. Ricotta is strange. It's so bland on its own, and yet baked in this cake you could taste it clearly through the sugar, butter, vanilla and eggs. This is a wonderful cake. You should make it. The recipe is here.

It looked like this on the first day:


And like this on the second:


And I hardly ate any! As you can see, I baked it in a bundt pan rather than a loaf pan. I also omitted the vanilla bean and used 1 tablespoon of vanilla, and as I didn't have cake flour,  I used all-purpose.

I also reviewed a book for the first time in ages.

On another subject -- perhaps more exciting than sandwiches and poundcake? you think? --  I cooked in front of TV cameras all day Thursday and Friday. The Food Network was making a so-called "sizzle tape" to see if my eccentric cooking life and mild personality have any TV potential.


Whatever! It was fun. I made Nancy Silverton's pizza dough (the best), pizza, marinara sauce, goat's milk mozzarella (not my best; Natalie's milk was off), chevre, pesto, graham crackers, frozen yogurt, flour tortillas, pork-apple sausage patties, croutons, salad. I also milked the goat, talked incessantly, pretended to collect eggs, applied and reapplied lipstick, ate, opined, served a big dinner to my extended family, wished I weighed 12 pounds less.

 One of the cameramen said I had "real kitchen swagger." That made my week.

Then everyone left. Yesterday morning, Owen and I returned to work on the oven. Props to friends Melanie, Tom, and Isaiah for helping mix disgusting, squelching cob with their feet. Twas no walk in the park.
75% of my crew
I'm thinking everyone is bored hearing about my oven. Well, it will stop soon. We've put down the clay sub-floor, built a cob wall around it for insulation, and today we'll put down the actual oven floor, construct a brick arch for the door, and, if we're energetic, build the sand dome and cover it with cob. Then it's a sprint to the finish line.

I mean, really, what does Nigella have that I don't?
 Oh, be quiet.

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Oh Isabel, I would NEVER

meat n' potatoes n' beans
Slab bacon, chorizo, greens, boiling potatoes, white beans, water, salt, heat, a couple of hours. That's the caldo Gallego from Teresa Barrenechea's Cuisines of Spain and it was a tasty, easy, and sensible weeknight meal. You could make this with any sausage, and I would vote against chorizo, or at least the greasy chorizo I bought at The Spanish Table. You could skip the slab bacon, but I wouldn't. You could use any greens, but I'd nix cabbage, which becomes water-logged and makes the house smell bad. The recipe is here, though not exactly as it appears in the book. Be sure to use boiling potatoes, which are creamier and more appealing than grainy russet potatoes in a soup like this. Also, the dish needed a lot more than 1 teaspoon of salt.

The other night Owen and I were milking Natalie when a neighbor walked by on the street with his two goats on leashes. Owen was very taken with this goat-walking concept and asked repeatedly when we could take our goats for a walk. I replied: never.

At dinner, I mentioned Owen's goat-walking idea. Isabel rolled her eyes. Then she gave me a stony look. She said, "You just want me to have a reaction to that so you can write in your blog that I rolled my eyes and gave you a stony look. You'll write: 'Owen was cheerful and eccentric and had a zany plan and then teenaged Isabel rolled her eyes and gave me a stony look.'"

I laughed. My Isabel is so smart!

Speaking of smart, this is a very intelligent post, followed by intelligent and civil debate, on the subject of raw milk.

This week I made two very good recipes, one great recipe, and one unbelievably great recipe. All non-Spanish.

First, the very good:
lemonade cookie, peanut butter-chocolate cupcake

-The lemonade cookie from Karen Barker's Sweet Stuff contains no lemonade and doesn't taste like lemonade, which was a disappointment. It just tastes like a delicious lemony sugar cookie. I'd make these again. Recipe is reprinted here.

-I must have overwhipped the frosting for the peanut butter-chocolate cupcakes from Amanda Hesser's Essential New York Times Cookbook because it curdled and didn't look so hot. But it tasted like creamed fudge. We liked the cupcakes, but liked the frosting even better. Recipe here.

Now the great:

-an 1878 recipe for johnnycake,  also from The Essential New York Times Cookbook, sounds like it will yield one large cake, but actually produces many fragile pancakes. They're trickier to fry than ordinary pancakes, so be sure to read Hesser's footnote on technique. I can't find this recipe online and don't like retyping recipes into the blog except on rare occasions. I feel like I'm stealing. But if I link to recipes reprinted without permission is it any better than printing recipes without permission? What do you think?

Finally, the unbelievably great:

-I made the breakfast pizza -- mozzarella and Parmesan, bacon, egg, chewy white crust -- from the Big Sur Bakery Cookbook a month or so ago, right after I got back from Big Sur, and I had a post half-written that I never finished. I made the pizza again this week and it was as good as the first time. I will make this again and again and again. You mix the dough the night before and while assembling the pizza the next morning is definitely harder than pouring cereal, it's not all that hard. The other day I ate a little piece for breakfast, a little piece for lunch, then a little piece for snack. It tastes even better cold than hot. I can't get the dough to stretch quite as wide as the recipe says, so my pizzas are smaller and I only use 2 eggs per pie. This is nice because you can eat the parts with egg for breakfast and the non-egg parts later in the day. (Cold eggs: yucky.) You can omit the chives, scallions, or shallots, or all three. You could even leave off the eggs, which my husband would prefer. While all the dishes I described in the post were delicious, I think this is hands down the most delicious.
love, love, love
I got the recipe out of The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook, but it also appears in The Essential New York Times Cookbook. Or you can find it right here.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

The famous pizza


 a miracle of rare device
Finally, I got around to making Nancy Silverton's legendary Mozza pizza. The crust, as promised, was a crispy, delicious miracle. A bit fussy -- you have to come back and check on the dough and do things to it at intervals -- but not at all hard. Contains yeast, water, salt, a little rye flour, mostly bread flour (though I didn't have any so I used all-purpose), barley malt (or honey), and wheat germ. I think this will become, to use cooking-speak, my "go-to" pizza crust recipe. Try it. You can find it here.

Two additional tips from Silverton: Sprinkle salt on the dough before you add the toppings, and heat the oven (with a pizza stone inside) to 500 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour.  The long heating helps despoil the planet, but the pizza cooked faster and crispier than others I've made. If you're going to do it, do it right.

The dough recipe makes six pizzas, which is more than four people could eat. We consumed three margherita pizzas, the most popular, basic, and best. (Silverton calls for 1/4 cup tomato sauce per pie, and 3 ounces of mozzarella.)

I put arugula and prosciutto on a fourth margherita pizza after it came out of the oven, per another Silverton recipe, but this was too hard to eat. You can't really cut it with a knife and when you pick it up the arugula falls off as you try to tear the prosciutto with your teeth.

Silverton's austere clam pizza was not a hit, nor was her potato-gorgonzola-rosemary pizza.

Isabel: What's on this pizza?

Tipsy: Potatoes, mozzarella . . . .

Isabel: What else?

Tipsy: Gorgonzola

Isabel: I knew there was a catch.

Here's my problem with making pizza at home, which I remember every time I make it: You can't relax. Every time one pizza comes out, you're putting another one in. Not restful. But we had such a good time last night, restfulness seems irrelevant. I like to say that living with our kids right now is like living with a young Gelsey Kirkland* and one of the Three Stooges. It's very weird! But for pizza, everyone was totally present and enthusiastic and harmonious and we all went to bed happy.

On another subject, my father, Isabel, and I are leaving for Hong Kong in a couple of hours. Owen doesn't have a winter break this year so he can't come, and my husband can't really bear to be parted from the goats. So it's just the three of us. I'm looking forward shopping with my girl and eating xiao long bao with my Dad. And egg custard tarts.

*minus the anorexia and substance abuse, at least so far

Friday, July 22, 2011

Travels, part 1

Pilgrimage
The photo is of Di Fara Pizzeria in Brooklyn, New York, but this wireless connection is brought to you by the Dunkin' Donuts in Marion, Massachusetts. That's how far I've traveled and fallen behind.

 I don't know exactly when or why the idea was first planted in my head, but I have wanted to go to Di Fara for years. (And years.) On Saturday I collected Isabel from camp in NYC and she agreed to make an expedition to Di Fara. It took us an hour on the subway and when we got there at about 1 in the afternoon, the place was packed.  I ordered two cheese slices to go and assumed it would take 20 minutes. We waited an hour and a half.  An elderly man was making all the pizzas himself, very methodically, and people were taking pictures of him. I felt shy about doing that, but I did photograph his handiwork.  


I wouldn't wait 90 minutes for it again, but it was outstanding pizza. Thin crust. Lots of basil flavor. Oily. Delicious.

After our late lunch, Isabel wanted to go to Baked, the owners of which wrote two of her favorite cookbooks (Baked and Baked Explorations.) The bakery is also in Brooklyn, but very far away from Di Fara and there was no subway line in operation so we rode several crowded buses to get there. This ended up taking another hour and a half.
Baked
I'm so glad she's my daughter and enjoys riding public transportation in sweltering heat for many hours to visit farflung eating spots. I can't imagine a better vacation day or a better companion.

Sweet and salty is their thing.

At Baked, we ordered, clockwise from left, a peanut butter crunch bar, a sweet and salty brownie, and a sweet and salty cupcake. All was tasty, but we liked the peanut butter crunch bar best. In the end, we agreed that we wouldn't ride the bus for these treats again. Baked is a good neighborhood bakery, but you can bake like this at home, especially if you have the Baked cookbook.

On the other hand. . .

Midtown location
Sunday, we went to Momofuku Milk Bar and you can't really bake like this at home, unless you are a demented genius. Milk Bar was a 5 minute walk from where we were staying and there was no line, no wait, no bus ride. But I would ride buses and wait in line 1 1/2 hours to get treats from Milk Bar.
Cereal milk soft-serve
This stuff was not just delicious, it was crazy. We got crack pie, candy bar pie, cereal milk soft-serve, and a compost cookie which contained crushed potato chips and coffee grounds, among other weird ingredients, and was diabolical in its deliciousness. I wanted to go back the next morning and buy a black sesame croissant, but didn't have time.

Pizza people should go to Di Fara, lovers of the Baked cookbook should go to Baked, but everyone should go to Milk Bar.

On Monday morning, we rode the train to New England and are now staying at the beach house of my in laws, which is lovely and peaceful.

It's wicked humid here, but the views are pretty.
This morning my mother-in-law's sister, Meg, made johnnycake with special stone-ground white cornmeal. It's just this very wonderful cornmeal plus liquid, stirred into a paste and fried in butter. When she described it to me, I thought, okay, whatever, doesn't sound that great.
For the terrible picture hall of fame
But it is the best thing I've eaten since the compost cookie. Next week I'm going to the mill to buy some of this magic cornmeal and learn to make johnnycake myself.

On another subject, I have a story in Slate on the subject of food TV shows.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Chicken fanciers take a field trip

There's a visible, if not dramatic, difference between the fresh eggs from our hens and supermarket eggs. The fresh yolk (at the bottom) is brighter orange. It's also firmer. Is it technically a better egg? Probably! How could it not be?

But I'm not a food scientist, and I can't taste a difference because I don't eat eggs. What I can say with complete authority is that it's thrilling to go into the yard and collect eggs. Like Easter for grownups. Like magic. Which is, I suppose, how another generation felt about supermarkets.

I don't want to become one of those people who burbles on about animals, so I won't burble on, I will just burble briefly. It gives me immense satisfaction, every day, to watch the chickens pecking around, taking dust baths, chasing the squirrels. They are beautiful, funny, inquisitive birds, and they run to see me whenever I emerge from my castle. I  feel like Ozma of Oz. They adore me and bring me tribute. 

And I adore them back, bringing them choice scraps from our table, the soggy leftovers at the bottom of Owen's cereal bowl and sandwich crusts and scraps of salami from his lunchbox. I feel sad for all the chickens that do not get to live the happy lives of our hens.

I have become a chicken fancier. Owen is also a chicken fancier. The others in our family, not so much. Owen and I talk about chickens constantly -- about breeds, behavior, the composition of an ideal flock --  and if this sounds pathetic, it's so much better than me pretending to listen to stories about Transformers.

Last night, the others in our family had plans, so Owen and I drove to Oakland to have dinner at Pizzaiolo, a restaurant that has recently garnered much publicity on account of the chicken coop out back. From the Los Angeles Times: "Diners will be able to wander over, Barolo in hand, to commune with the creatures that might contribute to their dinner." 

They're talking about EGGS. Not tenders. Just to be clear.

We got to sit on the patio near the chickens, with whom we communed, Barolo not in hand. Sorry for the lame picture.
There were only four chickens, and the Polish hens alluded to in the newspaper story were not in evidence, which was disappointing, since we are fans of the Polish. We thought these chickens seemed a little blue about their tight quarters, unable being able to run around quite as freely as our lucky hens. And they didn't adore me. Hmph. 

But we found their proximity delightful. We decided we prefer chickens with feathered legs and that we would someday like to acquire a naked neck to freak everyone out, and a white silkie, because they are cute. Like I say, chicken fanciers.

Now the food. What is wrong with this pizza?

I get that a full, leathery coating of cheese is inauthentic, aesthetically unappealing, and one reason Americans are fat while Italians are skinny. But there was not enough cheese on this pizza. There were several slices that contained no "hand-pulled" mozzarella whatsoever. Two more chunks would have been perfect. Even just one.
 
Otherwise, it was a stellar pizza and we deemed this an altogether excellent field trip.

Tomorrow, Owen and I are going to buy his birthday present: a frizzle hen. 

Friday, May 01, 2009

Make it or buy it: Crummy pizza, part 2

It's hard to make a nastier pizza than an American suburban pizzeria, and that's a problem for the home cook whose main goal is to satisfy a group of 6th grade girls. You know the way you can soak a napkin in the dark orange grease that pools atop one of those salty, awful/delicious pizzeria pizzas? Well, you couldn't soak a napkin in the grease on top of my pizzas. In that, I failed.
 
Lessons learned:

-Crust. The dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day was easy and great, but I didn't realize quite how buoyant it was until I'd baked the first pizza, which ended up with a very thick, bready crust.  You need the dough almost membrane thin before it goes in the oven.

-Sauce. I sauteed chopped garlic in olive oil, then poured in a can of crushed tomatoes to make a sauce. Because it seemed tart, added sugar. Sauce was then perfect.

-Cheese. The brand -- Lucerne pre-shredded -- also perfect. Weird, that buying your mozzarella pre-shredded is cheaper. My advice here is to use a mountain of cheese, really mound it on until you think there's too much, then add a few fistfuls more. The first pizza was wimpy in that regard; the pie pictured above was slightly under-cheesed, but moving in the right direction. As it cools, you want there to be a dense, chewy hide of mozzarella covering the crust.

-Pepperoni. When it comes to fatty pepperoni, Hormel rocks. (Speaking of Hormel, this was an excellent movie.)

Was homemade better? By the end, the pies were getting really, really nasty, albeit not quite nasty enough. I've watched these kids scarf down pizza, but they were shockingly moderate last night. My theory: even my worst effort tasted enough like real food that they were able to regulate their appetites which is a. good! b. sorely disappointing. 

Was it cheaper? Dramatically so. I would have ordered four extra large pizzas (2 cheese, two pepperoni) from Domino's to feed nine of us, and given the delivery person a $5 tip. Price: $75.83.*

However, given that Domino's is heinous, I probably would have ordered the same quantity for pick-up at our local place, Stefano's: $82.60.

Made from scratch, last night's pizza dinner cost $14.53, which includes a leftover baked pie and dough to freeze. I didn't use all the topping ingredients, so those aren't reflected in the price. Even if they were, it wouldn't add much to the sum.

Hassle factor: Not bad. Less than an hour total to make the pizzas and wash up. But let's call it an hour. Everyone values their time differently, but for me, $61 ($68 if we'd gone with Stefano's) easily justified making crummy pizza at home.

Make or Buy? Absolutely, make.

*Three would probably have been ample, but I would have ordered four. Husband says he would have ordered "three or four." Just to be fair, the price for three Domino's pizzas (two cheese, one pepperoni) would have been $61.39, including tip.  Still cheaper -- by $47 -- to make.

Make it or buy it: crummy pizza

Isabel's pack of friends is coming over tonight for a sleepover and while I'm okay with the pounds and pounds of Starbursts, multiple screenings of Made of Honor and high-pitched shrieks, the ritual pizza part was bumming me out. With the money we spend on even the lousiest delivered pizzas we could buy. . . lobsters, a beef tenderloin, a truffle. I'm estimating it would be $80 including tip to order Domino's, and slightly more if we upgraded to Dario's. And for what, I ask? 
 
Do I want to cook for a bunch of 12-year-old girls jacked up on Gummi Worms? F*** no. But I'm curious to compare the cost of making versus ordering truly pedestrian pizza.

I made a double recipe of the crust from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day -- a no-knead dough -- and, as you can see above, splurged on the toppings. 

Ok, Hormel is gross. But I doubt Domino's is using Fra'Mani. It's not that I don't think kids deserve high-quality food -- I do! -- but if the girlies want greasy pepperoni pizza at their quarterly slumber party, Mom's not gonna stand in their way. 

I'll price it out after assessing hassle factor, tastiness, and and popularity.