Making pizza

After weeks of digital silence on the cooking front, this metal object is really the best thing I have to re-enter the blogosphere with? Oh yes.

Having once enjoyed fresh, homemade pizza baked on a gorgeous jade green pizza stone, I vowed to own such a thing myself when I set up my own kitchen and various cooking gadgets. Well, it turns out they’re rather pricey, and more affordable ceramic stones tend to crack after a few uses. While I fully accept the advantage in taste and quality from baking pizza on a stone, I don’t want to have to live in fear of the thing splitting into pieces on my feet when I lift it out of the oven.

Enter: the pizza pan. This ingenious and very reasonably priced little creation has holes on the bottom so the dough cooks evenly, as it would on a stone, yet won’t unexpectedly break or require gym classes in order to lift. While certainly not a new idea, it’s meant that we can consistently make good pizza with a good crust when we feel like it. It may even be that pizza becomes something we’ll make for guests, adding to the range reliable casseroles, risottos and curries that are in rotation…

Top pizza-making tips: 

1. If the dough isn’t stretching well and keeps tearing, knead in a bit more flour.
2. If you’re making stuffed crust pizza, shape the dough so it hangs over the side of the pan, place the filling of cheese, pepperoni, etc. along the inside edge of the pan, then roll the extra dough around it.
3. Let the dough rise for about 20 minutes in the pan before its first bake.
4. You don’t have to put olive oil over the dough before its first bake – save a few calories and bake it plain.
5. You can store pre-baked dough (without a stuffed crust) for a few days in a cool, dry place.
6. A little pesto goes a long way – dot small spoonfuls around the top, or spread a very thin layer over the base before the tomato sauce. Too much pesto will make the pizza taste too salty.
7. The thinner/smaller you can cut the toppings, the better.
8. Pizza with all the toppings on should be fully cooked in 10-15 minutes at 200C/400F.
9. Gently lift the finished pizza out of the pan using a spatula, and cut it on a large wooden chopping board before serving.

What I learned about making English muffins

I have a very extensive wish list of things I’d like to make one day. However, crossing those off is kind-of like visiting all the places that I hear about or see on tv and think “I’d like to go there some day”. But, when the time is right and the stars align….or, when you have a depressingly rainy bank holiday weekend….something on that wish list starts to look achievable. (This applies to both baking and travel – I know a few people who have managed to escape the cold sogginess that is Britain for warmer Mediterranean lands this weekend.)

English muffins were one of the things on the list. I tried a recipe from Mary Berry’s Baking Bible – she’s one of my baking heroines, and I trust her recipes completely. It looked amazingly simple – just flour, warm milk, yeast, sugar and salt – and the instructions were pretty basic: make dough, cut into shapes, let rise, fry lightly in oil on a griddle. Wait…what was that last one?

No, I didn’t realise that English muffins are cooked on the stovetop rather than in an oven. And yes, that means I never really thought about why the tops and bottoms are always 50 shades darker than the sides. Albeit a long process with cooking each side for seven minutes, the end result wasn’t bad, and here’s what I learned:

1) Temperature control is vital. This is something where the water test to check the initial temperature really helps (flick a few drops on the griddle to see if they sizzle). And, because you’re picking up the griddle in between batches to re-coat it with oil, it’s important to check how each batch is browning before the time is up.

Sprinkle the dough rounds with semolina before rising.
It gets everywhere, but bakes nicely into the top 

when you flip it over....

2) Re-oil the griddle before adding a new batch. You don’t need loads because the muffins will soak it up, but just a bit so they’re not just sitting on a hot surface and burning.

Downside of a gas hob – the heat is concentrated right
in the middle. Checking periodically will avoid getting 

uneven colouring, as shown on the left one.

3) Make sure each side is dark brown. It may even get a little black, but that doesn’t mean it’s burned. The first batch I did was slightly undercooked as I thought they were getting too dark after six minutes, but when I allowed the subsequent muffins to brown up a bit bit more for the full seven minutes that I noticed as they cool down, they just looked like the kind you get in the store. English muffins need to stay on the griddle so long because they’re thick, and they rise as they cook.

4) The uncooked muffins are still rising. There’s not much to do about this, but it just means being strategic about which ones you choose to cook next. Don’t just work from one side of the tray to the other – try to choose muffins that are in between others so the ones left have space to rise, and don’t get stuck to their neighbours. This means they’ll pull a little as you separate them to put them on the griddle, causing them to sink again.

5) There’s no way to make these fresh for breakfast. Unless you really want to go the extra mile and wake up at 4am, you’ll be making these the day before. The cooking process along takes over an hour and a half so I’m not sure when I’ll be making these again, but the taste when they’ve just come off the griddle is definitley an incentive – well worth the wait.

If at first you don’t succeed…

What do you get from these ingredients (besides the name of where we usually shop)? Theoretically, it should be pasta.

Do you have a cookbook – or two – that you never use from but don’t want to get rid of because the recipes sound so fabulous? I have this kind of relationship with Mario Batali’s Simple Italian Food. Well, the other day I finally cracked it open with the intention of making one of the staples of most Italian food – pasta. I feel I owe it to my own Italian heritage – and my great-grandmother Assunta’s cooking skills – to master basics like this.

Scarily, you don’t have to use a bowl, because you keep the eggs and olive oil in the center of a mound of flour while you start to blend everything together. Something like this…

I had high hopes after seeing that this stuff stayed together long enough for me to take a picture. But then, I started to mix it. See, the problem with adding in flour with the beaten eggs and oil is that it takes away from the “well” walls. I was soon in a messy battle between falling flour and runny dough, but then gave up and just smooshed everything together so the dough would become firmer more quickly.

Once I actually had the dough, I thought that was the hard part done.  I rolled it out with my trusty wooden pin to the absolute thinnest I could go, cut it into uneven tagliatelle strips and put it in the fridge until dinner – a big mistake.

While in the fridge, the pasta meshed into a firm, cold mound that did not easily separate when dropped into a big pot of boiling water. The pasta was also very thick as I didn’t roll it out as thinly as I thought, so I added a little extra cooking time to compensate. Even so, the pile of tire-quality, congealed rubber was hardly the rustic homemade pasta I’d envisioned.

So, this is one to try again when I have done these two things: 

1. bought a pasta rolling machine
2. read about the proper techniques that are supposed to be followed when mixing and then storing pasta

There’s another portion left in the fridge for tonight’s dinner…can’t wait…

Five things I learned about making bread

The tendency to fall into habits applies to more than just what you do with your evenings, the music you listen to and the other little daily occurrences that suddenly become routine. Cooking can become a habitual process too – the same dishes coming into the weekly or monthly dinner rotation, the same cake made for guests and even the same groceries bought week after week.

Last week, I decided to come out of my own cooking habits a little and try something I’ve never really done before – make my own bread. I thought that even if it didn’t work out well on the first few tries, at least the house would smell nice.

But which bread to make? A key staple in human diet for tens of thousands of years, bread has an infinite number of variations that have come in from cultural, historical and experimental factors. I chose five kinds to sample different ways of working with flour, water and yeast. After a week filled with kneading, rising, shaping, timing and – of course – tasting, this is what I came away with…

1. Making bread is not as big a deal as it’s made out to be.

I’m not saying it’s as easy as a Betty Crocker mix, but making a basic white loaf of bread doesn’t really take much more effort than baking a cake, waiting for it to cool and frosting it afterwards.  The time comes in waiting for each stage to rise, but all that means is setting a bowl somewhere and coming back to it in an hour or so.

A basic white bread is easy to make, and tastes amazing!

2. It rounds out even the simplest meal into a special dinner.

Bread is like a meal’s accessory – just like the right shoes or handbag can turn jeans and a T-shirt into a fashion statement, the right bread can complement even something basic like spaghetti and a jar of sauce. Instead of making dinner from scratch, it can definitely be worth it to spend your time on a sun-dried tomato and olive bread to go with it.

This sun-dried tomatoes and black olives goes really well with pasta and a tomato- based sauce.

3. Kneading dough is a good workout.

So perhaps not everyone would devote a week to trying out different kinds of bread, but know this – I certainly felt the effects of spending 10 minutes a day kneading dough by hand. At the very least, it takes the guilt off not going to the gym.

White bread comes in all shapes and sizes – instead of being made in a pan, this "rustic style" loaf did its
last rise on a baking tray, but needed a lot of moisture in the oven to keep the crust from getting too hard.

4. Making bread on a cold day is difficult.

Dough needs a warm place to rise, and there is a particular spot in my house that’s perfect. Or it was, until one cloudy, rainy, miserable day when even The Warm Spot wasn’t living up to its name. As it happens, I was on the fussiest recipe of the five I chose – French bread. It took ages for it to rise, and because French bread dough needs to be refrigerated for a few hours, it was barely done in time for dinner. Props given to the person who invented bread machines.

French bread was my least favourite to make, but it tasted so
wonderful that I can't say I'll never do it again…

5. Don’t leave fresh bread hanging around.

Homemade bread – even when it’s made in a machine – will go stale much more quickly than store-bought. I noticed particularly with the French bread and focaccia that even after a couple of days, they were noticeably drier. The good thing is that bread freezes well, so even if you make more than you need at the time (the recipe makes two loaves and you only need one), you can freeze the extra and bring it out later.

There isn't much that focaccia doesn't go with, and there are lots of different versions to make.
This one was made with rosemary and parmesan cheese, and was pretty quick to do.