October 22, 2009

Jamie Oliver’s Pizza Dough

Posted by shadowcook under Baking, Bread, Jamie Oliver, Main Dishes
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found here.

Everyone I know who makes or eats pizza swears by the Chris Bianco pizza dough recipe in the Gourmet Cookbook. Some people prefer Alice Water’s recipe in the Chez Panisse Pasta and Pizza cookbook. My friend Gary has developed his own dough recipe that involves a starter and days of preparation.

I’m a latecomer to this game. Over the past year or so, I’ve made pizza a few times, but never gave it the attention that it deserves. Now that the weather has cooled off, I’ve made pizza one of my fall cooking projects. I’ve made and liked the Bianco dough as well as several others. Just a few days ago, however, I happened upon Jamie Oliver’s recipe for pizza dough. Now that I’ve had three pizzas made with his dough, I think I’m about to call myself a convert.

The sticking point for many home pizzaioli will be the flours he uses. He calls for a kind of flour imported from Italy called tipo 00, which refers to the high gluten content and to how finely it is ground. Tipo 0 presumably has less gluten and is not as finely ground. So, to put it in American terms, I suppose the equivalent would be high-gluten cake flour, or in British terms, finely ground strong flour. To my shock, I can now find the Antimo Caputo brand of tipo 00 in two of the stores I most often shop in.

The dough is not as wet as Chris Bianco’s dough. Actually, I don’t think that matters. Or, at least I’m still trying to make up my mind about whether a wetter dough really makes a crisper pizza. The one I made last night (in the badly lit photo above) was firm, crisp, and had plenty of chew to it. The texture, as Jamie promises, is smoother (not cakier, though), lighter. For the first time, a pizza I made really did remind me of good ones I’ve eaten in Italy.

Anyway, here’s Jamie’s instruction with interpolations by me.

• 1kg strong white bread flour or Tipo ‘00’ flour
or 800g strong white bread flour or Tipo ‘00’ flour, plus 200g finely ground semolina flour

Shadowcook: I made a batch with 400g tipo 00 and 100g finely ground semolina. I’ll never make it without the semolina. Use a scale. It’s important. As Jamie notes, if you can use “strong” flour, which in American parlance means bread flour. It has a lot of gluten in it.

• 1 level tablespoon fine sea salt

Shadowcook: for my half batch, I used two teaspoons of kosher salt.

2 x 7g sachets of dried yeast

Shadowcook: Sachet is the paper packet kind. I used one 7g packet of dried yeast.

1 tablespoon golden caster sugar

Shadowcook: Caster sugar is what we call baker’s or superfine sugar. I used 1 1/2 teaspoons.

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

650ml lukewarm water

Shadowcook: For half batch, I used 11 ounces of lukewarm water.

Sieve the flour/s and salt on to a clean work surface and make a well in the middle. In a jug, mix the yeast, sugar and olive oil into the water and leave for a few minutes, then pour into the well. Using a fork, bring the flour in gradually from the sides and swirl it into the liquid. Keep mixing, drawing larger amounts of flour in, and when it all starts to come together, work the rest of the flour in with your clean, flour-dusted hands. Knead until you have a smooth, springy dough.

Shadowcook: I didn’t sieve the dry ingredients. Instead, I use a metal whisk to stir all the ingredients together. And furthermore I don’t make wells of anything on work surfaces because I invariably make a mess of things. I use a bowl. I set the timer for 8 minutes and kneaded the dough until it ran.

Place the ball of dough in a large flour-dusted bowl and flour the top of it. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and place in a warm room for about an hour until the dough has doubled in size.

Shadowcook: I let the dough rise for about an hour and a half.

Now remove the dough to a flour-dusted surface and knead it around a bit to push the air out with your hands – this is called knocking back the dough. You can either use it immediately, or keep it, wrapped in clingfilm, in the fridge (or freezer) until required. If using straight away, divide the dough up into as many little balls as you want to make pizzas – this amount of dough is enough to make about six to eight medium pizzas.

Shadowcook: No other pizza dough recipe I know of calls for knocking back the dough. I skipped that step and the pizza did not suffer from the lack of it. After twisting off a hunk of dough a bit larger than a tennis ball, I covered it loosely with plastic wrap and let it rest on the board that I eventually rolled it out on. The rest I put in a plastic bag and stuck in the fridge. Over the next couple of days, the dough acquired air holes as it soured. Every day I cut off a chunk for a pizza.

Timing-wise, it’s a good idea to roll the pizzas out about 15 to 20 minutes before you want to cook them. Don’t roll them out and leave them hanging around for a few hours, though – if you are working in advance like this it’s better to leave your dough, covered with clingfilm, in the fridge. However, if you want to get them rolled out so there’s one less thing to do when your guests are round, simply roll the dough out into rough circles, about 0.5cm thick, and place them on slightly larger pieces of olive-oil-rubbed and flour-dusted tinfoil. You can then stack the pizzas, cover them with clingfilm, and pop them into the fridge.

Shadowcook: Place a pizza stone on the bottom rack of the oven and preheat to 500. The Gourmet cookbook recommends placing the stone on the bottom of a gas oven and heating to 500 in order to get the temp even hotter. Although I did that once, I think it’s chancy. Better to preheat the stone on the bottom shelf to 500 and wait about half an hour after that before baking the pizza.

Using plenty of flour to keep the dough from sticking to the work surface, I rolled out the dough into an imperfect circle. Now that I’ve done it a few times, I see that it’s important to roll out the dough to a thickness (1/4 inch or so) that is even across the face of the circle. The thinner parts will get much darker than the thicker parts.

You’ll see in the photo that I use a pizza screen, sometimes called a pizza mesh. I think of it as training wheels in anticipation of the day when I learn how to slide a pizza off a wooden peel on to the baking stone in the oven. I’m not in a hurry. As this conversation on chowhounds suggests, the wire allows the underside to crisp up.

I rolled out the dough, picked it up and fit it onto the screen. Then, I put the screen on the peel and slipped it on to the baking stone. I baked it for 5 minutes, removed it, punctured the bubbles on top, and arranged the toppings on the pizza’s surface. I put it back into the oven for 7 minutes, looked at it and decided to leave it in for another 1-2 minutes. Watch it carefully. I waited until the edges were browned and the underside started to brown. Then I whipped it out of the oven. Cut it up and take it to the table.

Practice makes pizza perfect.

 

October 13, 2009

Anna Thomas’s Sopa de Poblanos

Posted by shadowcook under Anna Thomas, Soup, Vegetarian
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from Love Soup, pp. 70-71.

Oh, the weather is gloriously, snuggily foul. Rain descending in sheets, wind gusts between 40 and 50 miles per hour, and I’m nearly recovered from the flu but not so much that I can’t luxuriate under a thick throw on the couch. It’s the perfect weather for soup.

One of my dearest friends gave me a new cookbook of vegetarian soups whose title, I must admit, struck me as so saccharine that I didn’t look through it until the flu imposed on me time to read idly. Anna Thomas has collected 160 soup recipes, of which I counted over 20 that I intend to make. The recipes embody creative and bold combinations of flavors unusual, in my experience, in vegetarian cooking. Even the variety of vegetables broths seem feasibly flavorful. I admit I cheated, though. Instead of using a vegetable broth here, I pulled out of the freezer one of the bigger tubs of frozen chicken stock. It had the predictable effect of enriching the flavor at the expense of poultry’s lives. The only other change I made was to substitute fresh pasillas for the poblanos, since this week that was all I could find in the stores. More fiery than the poblanos but still edible for a capiscum-wimp like myself.

Serves 6

about 6 fresh poblano chiles (1 1/2 lbs; 700 g)

Shadowcook: As I wrote above, I used fresh pasillas, which are hotter than poblanos. I also saw fresh Anaheim chiles in the market, but regardless of the heat they would be a sacrifice in color.

1 1/2 tsp unsalted butter

1 tablespoon (15 ml) olive oil

2 yellow onions, coarsely chopped (1 lb; 450 g)

1 clove garlic, minced

sea salt

6 cups (1 1/2 liters) basic light vegetable broth

Shadowcook: Or chicken broth dare I say.

1/2 cup (20 g) chopped cilantro

5 or 6 fresh epazote leaves or 1 1/2 teaspoons dried crumbled epazote

Shadowcook: Not surprisingly, the only place I found this was in my local Latino mercado in the produce section. Wikipedia has a little article on it.

4 oz (120 g) creamy white goat cheese

3 tablespoons lightly toasted pine nuts

Roast the chiles under a broiler, in a dry skillet over high heat, or on a charcoal grill, turning them from time to time until the skin is charred and blistered all over. Place them in a paper bag for about 10 minutes to let them sweat and then peel off the skins and remove the stems and seeds. cut the peeled chiles into strips; you should have about 1 1/2 cups of peeled poblano strips.

In a medium nonstick skillet, heat the butter and olive oil and sauté the onions, stirring often, until they are translucent. Add the minced garlic and some salt and cook over low heat, stirring often, until the onions are golden, 20 to 25 minutes.

When the onions and garlic are very soft, combine them in a soup pot with the chile strips, broth, cilantro, and epazote. Cover the pot and simmer everything for about 20 minutes, then puree in a blender, in batches, or with an immersion blender until the soup is perfectly smoooth.

Shadowcook: Yes, well, my blender got a little excited, even though the container was less than halfway filled. As the soup finished up on the stove, I was wiping down my kitchen wals and counters. Lots of liquid. Be careful.

Add the goat cheese to the pureed soup, stirring over low heat until the cheese has melted into the soup. Taste, and correct the seasoning with a pinch more salt if needed.

Shadowcook: Oddly, I thought the soup needed a lot more salt. Add the salt slowly, but don’t be surprised if it absorbs quite a bit more than the recipe calls for.

Serve the soup hot, with lightly toasted pine nuts scattered over each bowl. Because of its deep, intense flavor and spicy edge, this soup is best served in smaller portions as a first course — although people may ask for more.

Shadowcook: And pass around the kleenex for mopping the brow… But absolutely worth it.

 

September 17, 2009

Fergus Henderson: Lamb’s Tongues, Turnips, and Bacon

Posted by shadowcook under Fergus Henderson, Lamb, Main Dishes, Organs
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from The Whole Beast, pp. 94-95.

The bite in the morning air gives me license to start cooking with autumn in mind. When my friends delivered another cut-and-wrapped whole lamb, they handed me two baggies holding eight lamb tongues — precious cargo. Fergus Henderson’s cookbook seemed the logical place to look for a recipe that would do justice to the freshness and succulence of the tongues. I wasn’t wrong. His directions are not as transparent as I had hoped. Still, I was enchanted by this lamb tongue version of pot-au-feu. The bitter flavor of the turnips, borrowing depth from the kale, blended softly with the sweetness of the meat and the roasted shallots. And the flavor of bacon formed a sturdy canopy over the whole ensemble. Delicious broth. It would be even more restorative if I had waited about two months more to make it.

To serve four:

6 lamb’s tongues (give them a rinse with cold water)

Shadowcook: For those cooks who live an metropolitan areas, lamb tongues are easier to find than you might think. Find a halal or Middle Eastern grocery and look in their freezer section.

7 cups chicken stock

1 head of garlic, separated and peeled

a bundle of fresh thyme and parsley tied together

6 young turnips with healthy greens chopped off but kept (if no greens, rocket [arugula] makes a good substitute, or if you want something with more body, curle kale is delicious in this dish)

Shadowcook: I don’t know what large or small turnips in the UK usually are, but here I see only really big ones. I used three, peeled and cut into chunks. And to replace the turnip greens I added lacinato (otherwise known as dino or Tuscan) kale, stems cut out and chopped coarsely.

2 dollops of duck fat or unsalted butter

Shadowcook: Yea! I finally get to use my duck fat! Worth it, too.

16 shallots, peeled and left whole

1 1/4 pound piece of smoked streaky bacon, skinned and cut into chunks

Shadowcook: If you can’t find unsliced bacon, consider pancetta, although the spices might not suit the dish. I bought sliced bacon and found a pound and a quarter almost too much. Next time, I intend to use bacon or pancetta (with the spices wiped off) in chunks.

sea salt and freshly ground pepper

sherry vinegar or red wine vinegar

Step one

In a pot cover the lamb’s tongues with the chicken stock. Add the garlic and herbs, bring to a boil, then reduce to a gentle simmer and cook for approximately 2 hours, until the tongues are giving. Remove the tongues and allow to cool, just to a handleable temperature as they are much easier to peel when warm. While doing this cook your turnips in the stock.

Shadowcook: If the turnips are large, cut them into chunks. And peel the tongues are soon as possible once they are out of the stock. It’s true they are easier to peel when warm.

When cooked remove the turnips from the stock, take it off the heat, and return the peeled tongues to the cooling stock.

Step two

In an ovenproof frying pan, melt the duck fat or butter and fry the shallots just enough to color them, not burn them. Then pop them into a medium to hot 375 degree oven to roast for 15 minutes, again watching that they do not burn. When soft, sweet, and giving, remove them from the oven.

Now remove the tongues from the stock and slice them in half lengthwise.

Shadowcook: At this point, even though Fergus doesn’t call for it, strain the stock. That’s the one step I wish I had done when I ate the dish at the end of the process.

Heat a deep frying pan that has a lid, or a shallow saucepan. Melt a spot of duck fat, fry the bacon in this so as to slightly color it, add the tongue and turnips, allow these to color it, add the tongue and turnips, all these to color, then add the shallots and a healthy splash of the stock to half-cover the pan’s contents.

Shadowcook: At this point, the recipe becomes a bit imprecise. First of all, I had to use my big Le Creuset pot. The ingredients amount to more than any deep drying pan or saucepan I own can hold. It’s just too much. Which explains why my version turns out more like pot-au-feu than Fergus perhaps intended. I recommend using as much of the stock as comes half way up the ingredients and saving the rest for the next day when you eat the leftovers. The stock is too tasty to toss out.

Let this start to boil, add the greens and season with salt and pepper, then cover the pan and turn the heat down to a simmer and cook for 2 minutes. With a slotted spoon remove the ingredients to a hot deep plate, then ladle some of the liquor in the pan over, making it as dry or as brothy as you wish. Just before eating sprinkle the dish with a little vinegar.

Just as delicious, if not more so, is to substitute fava beans for the turnips (these do not need to be cooked before the final stage). You still need the rocket or kale as the greens act as a structural weave in the dish.

 

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