Catchup

Good things I ate (or drank) in the second half of 2014:

From Vedge, Broccoli Rabe Philly Style (seriously bitter homegrown broccoli rabe [which I cut with gai lan to tone it down a bit], roasted red capsicum, porcini mayo)

 Pizza and roasted cauliflower at Pizza Domenica in New Orleans:

 Birthday/journal acceptance cake (Chocolate/root beer):

Asparagus pizza:

Enchiladas Especiales Tacuba style (wish I'd had poblanos; made do with green chillies and used rehydrated yuba sticks as chicken, and cashew cheese)

Pasta with a pureed caramelized onion / nutritional yeast sauce and cubed smoked tofu:

Pumpkin and pecan pie(s):

Home brewed saison:

Smoked dates

On pizza. Yes!

This is the dough from last time, defrosted. (Incidentally, I won't be doing this again. The dough was terrible: hard to handle and didn't have much oven spring. It might have overproofed.) It's topped with homemade tomato sauce, kalamatas, smoked dates, homemade melting mozz.

There will be more smoked dates on pizza in this house.

Zero zero

I have made lots of pizzas, but this is the first time I've used 00 flour. The verdict: totally worth it. Or maybe the pizza gods were smiling for some other reason. Clearly I will need to do more research, where research means pizza making.

I used this recipe. I replaced some of the flour with vital wheat gluten (12 grams?) because the 00 flour was only 9.5% protein. After 1 day rising in the fridge, half of the recipe made 2 pizzas, the rest sat for a couple more days in the fridge and then went in the freezer for next time.

The first pizza was olive, pesto and homemade melting mozzarella. (I ferment the mozz a lot longer than the book calls for, and add a little bit of nutritional yeast. I think the homemade yogurt I used this time was an 80/20 soy/coconut milk blend.) This was fantastic. The crust was great, and the cheese melted really well.

The second pizza was inspired by this one. I made a bechamel with olive oil and soy milk, and added nutritional yeast, miso and a tiny bit of soy sauce. We had kale from our garden, which I tore up and massaged with oil like you would for a raw kale salad. I added a bit of parsley and spring onion, but I don't think they added much. This was really nice. Here it is, pre- and post- baking.

Pizza

I've got a new favourite pizza dough: it's the New York Style Pizza dough from Serious Eats. It's easy to whip up in the food processor, and can sit in the fridge for a few days until you need it. I think it tastes best after at least 2 days in the fridge.

Last night's pizzas were delicious: caramelized onion, mushroom, cashew cheese, tomato (pictured); lemon, cashew cheese, tofu mizozuke, rosemary, rocket; and pear, cashew cheese, tofu misozuke, walnuts, rocket.

Pizza patate

As I've said once or twice, I love the pizza patate at Sullivan Street Bakery. A few years ago, I read about a recipe for it on Smitten Kitchen. But there was a lot of uncertainty -- Deb concluded that there must've been an error in the recipe because the dough would've been way too wet. Reading around about pizza bianca, though, I decided that I wanted to try the original version of the recipe -- it really is supposed to be a very wet dough.

I think the main problem is that the recipe doesn't talk you through the parts that go against your normal baking instincts. The dough really is more of a batter. (After about 10 minutes in the stand mixer, it did sort of pull away from the sides, but when the mixer stopped it slumped right back again.) And the 30 minute baking time just seems much too long for a pizza, but it turned out to be just right.

I let the dough rise for 2 hours. The directions call for you to split the dough in two, and spread it on two baking sheets, but I just used one large baking sheet, so it was slightly thicker than intended. To spread the dough out, I had to rub my hands with oil because it was incredibly sticky.

Overall, this was very very close to that delicious pizza bianca from Sullivan Street. The crust was excellent, like a thin, chewy foccacia.

Fig and leek pizza

We had pizza topped with slices of fresh fig, sauteed leek, and walnuts on top of a blue cheese-inspired cashew sauce. This was good. I also made another one with slices of preserved lemon, which made lemon-fiend R very happy.

The sauce was about 1/4 cup raw cashews, blended with water to a creamy consistency, plus nutritional yeast, lemon juice, salt, and two cubes of stinky tofu. It had a nice funk/pungency to taste, but in the context of the pizza it didn't stand out too much, just complemented the rest of the flavours.

Pizza with cashew cheese

There are some fake cheeses that I quite like on pizza (in the US, we liked Follow Your Heart mozzarella and Teese, and here in Australia we've had good results with Cheezly mozzarella). But now that we don't have a vegan friendly store close by, these days I have been experimenting with homemade cheeses for topping pizza.

I had some decent results combining pureed silken tofu and cashews, flavoured with miso and nutritional yeast, and sometimes some lemon juice or vinegar. But one day I had no tofu and just went with straight cashews with a little nutritional yeast and a lot of salt. I used this as the bottom layer on a potato pizza with rosemary, and it was fantastic. (I will probably keep experimenting when it comes to traditional tomato based pizzas, but for a white pizza this is perfect.)

Remember when

On this stinking hot day, I'm remembering way back to last week when we had one day that was cool enough to turn the oven on.

 Luckily I had the foresight to start the dough the day before. (Here begin the bread geek details, for future reference.) I used the whole grain pizza dough recipe from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. I think it was 70% whole wheat, and 30% plain white flour. (I used half the suggested sugar, and -- due to misreading the recipe -- omitted the oil. I added a small amount of oil during the shaping prior to refrigeration.) It had about 22 hours in the fridge. The dough was quite sticky before refrigeration, but ended up being surprisingly easy to shape. I used Reinhart's instructions for shaping the pizza, rather than my usual rolling pin technique.

This crust was very tasty. The crumb was good, but not as good as my usual recipe. It reminded me a bit of focaccia in that it was kind of springy -- not in a bad or unpizzalike way, mind you.

(The pizza toppings were: Reinhart's crushed tomato sauce, kalamatas, green capsicum, and Cheezly mozzarella.)

Hummus pizza

Without tomato sauce or cheese, it feels a bit weird to call this a pizza. Whatever you want to call it, it was good: hummus, topped with lemon slices, olives, pomegranate and sun-dried tomatoes. I wasn't sure that this combination would work, but it really did -- sweet, salty and tangy, with a nice hit of garlic from the hummus.

The tomatoes got a bit burnt, but still tasted pretty good. (The pomegranate bits had been frozen, which changed their colour but they held up pretty well.)

When I did some googling about hummus as a pizza topping, it seemed like quite a few people thought it better to reduce the amount of time the hummus is in the oven, by putting it on after par-baking the crust, or even putting it on after the pizza is done. However, I thought this worked out well, and don't think the long cooking time (12 min) hurt the hummus at all.

(Pizza specs: as usual, I used my favourite dough recipe from Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day. This time I used 2/3 wholemeal and 1/3 white flour and it was very nice. I got some nice bubbles in the crust, maybe because the toppings were lighter and drier than usual.)

Lemon pizza

Well, technically it was a lemon, thyme and olive pizza. The lemon was kind of overpowering, in a good way.

(The other pizza specs: olive oil pizza dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2/3 all purpose flour, 1/3 whole wheat, plus some vital wheat gluten) and mozzarella style Cheezly.)

Pomegranate pizza

 

This is pomegranate pizza, based on a recipe from Classic Vegetarian Cooking from the Middle East and North Africa by Habeeb Salloum. (Hey, you can look inside this book on Amazon and find the recipe by searching for -- you guessed it -- pomegranate pizza.)

I cheated by spreading the topping on pita breads and throwing them under the grill (=broiler) -- you would too if you were making this on a day that was close to 40 C in a house without air conditioning. Also I didn't have any green onions, and used grated Cheezly mozzarella rather than feta. I like the way that the cheese is mixed into the sauce in this recipe -- it kind of sneaks up on you.

Pomegranate seeds are still something of a 'what the hell do I do with these?' ingredient for me. That this recipe worked out so well was a pleasant surprise.

We do eat things other than pizza sometimes

Here you see two pizzas: the first is potato with rosemary and garlic infused oil, and the second is topped with sauteed mushrooms and onions cooked in oatly cream. These were terrific.

 

More pizza

Despite looking kind of scary, this pizza was really good: Brussels sprouts, smoked paprika, garlic, and mozzarella Cheezly. (Inspired by the Brussels sprouts pizza at Motorino.) I tore the sprouts' leaves off and briefly steamed them before putting them on the pizza. Although they look overdone, they tasted good (quite like kale chips).

And this abomination was especially for R: a Hawaiian pizza with caramelized onions. I wouldn't put pineapple on a pizza for anyone else.

Okra curry and pizza

Exhibit A: A Goan style okra curry from 660 Curries -- the okra is cooked in a cashew sauce with vinegar. This kind of tangy curry was new to me, and I liked it. (The cashews could have done with being ground a bit finer, but that was the best my stupid mini-food processor could do. Once I find a coffee grinder that costs less than $50, I'm making this again. And yes, about $50 is the going price for a bottom of the range coffee grinder in Australia, if you can believe it.) (Also shown here: chana masala.)

 

Exhibit B: Pizza topped with leftover okra curry, caramelized onions, and mozzarella style Cheezly. I hesitated briefly before putting the cheese on top of this pizza, but it worked.

 

Being vegetarian in Perth is like being vegan in New England

Frazzled

What can't a dinner of pizza and ice cream fix?

Three small clean-out-the-fridge pizzas (dough is whole wheat from the freezer at Whole Foods; cheese is Follow Your Heart mozzarella):

1. Sauerkraut, caramelized onions, ajvar. (This was my first time trying sauerkraut on a pizza and it won't be the last. This particular pizza could've done with a little something extra, though.)

2. Salsa, caramelized onions, cilantro.

3. Kalamatas, basil (from the freezer -- I threw in a bunch and it held up surprisingly well), caramelized onions.

Then almond and pecan ice cream (just so-so by itself, but much better with chocolate and peanut butter ganache and plantains).

Gluttony

I spent about 10 hours wandering all over Manhattan today. Sustaining me in my travels were many wonderful bread products:

• a sesame bagel from Absolute Bagels (So good! Crisp on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside -- light textured and substantial at the same time.)
• pizza patate from Sullivan Street Bakery (Imagine pizza and potato chips had a love child. Crisp, rich dough topped with thin sliced potato (crisp and brown at the edges), rosemary and lots of olive oil.)
• vanilla bomboloni from Sullivan Street Bakery (This prompted fond memories of my Polish grandmother's homemade doughnuts, but was many times more amazing than they were, and they were good!)
• pizza at Motorino East Village (I had the filetti: mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and thyme. It was excellent. I will never be a restaurant blogger, because taking photos of food is embarrassing, but here's a review with some nice photos.)

I also went food shopping at Zabar's and Fairway. I really liked Fairway. Here's what I bought there:

Summer pizza

I don't know what possessed me to make pizza on the hottest, muggiest day in recent memory, but I did, and it was good. Prepare yourself: this pizza had corn on it. (Weird for an American pizza, but apparently not so in Asia.)

The pizza was inspired by this one, which used a recipe originally from this book. The toppings were mozzarella, thinly sliced onion, zucchini, fresh corn, red pepper flakes, black pepper, almond feta, a little more mozzarella, and after it cooked: cilantro and some lemon juice. This combination tasted very fresh and light, perfect for the hot weather.
The crust was wonderful: a great combination of crispness and puffy chewiness. I used my old favourite olive oil dough, from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. I used AP flour, and added some vital wheat gluten. It was baked at 500 for about 8 minutes. These are roughly the measurements I used to make two pizzas: 168 ml water, 3/4 t yeast, 1 t salt, less than 1 t sugar, 1 T olive oil, 1.6 c AP flour (170 - 200g? I eyeballed it. Bad baker!), 1 T vital wheat gluten.

Artichoke pesto

Artichoke pesto is a very good idea. The recipe is from the New York Times' Bitten blog, but it's hidden in the middle of a long post, so here's the relevant quote:

artichoke pesto: a can of artichokes in water (drained), the juice and zest of half a lemon, three smallish garlic cloves, a handful of pine nuts, a handful of grated pecorino romano, a couple of drizzles of olive oil, puréed until smooth. Then, another can of drained artichokes is added and pulsed, to make it more substantial and create texture.

Veganized (with nutritional yeast and miso rather than cheese) it made a nice pizza topping. I made one pizza with just pesto and cheese, and the other had pepperoni too. The plain one was a little too plain for my taste, even though the pesto was very tasty, but a sprinkle of chile flakes fixed that problem.

So much joy for $2.99

Earlier this week, I had a craving for pho. It's been a while since I made it, because it's been a while since I had basil and mint growing on the fire escape. But this craving was pretty severe, so I bought a huge and unseasonal bunch of basil for $2.99, as well as some mint and some sprouts. The pho turned out pretty well (I based it on the recipe here, and no photo, sorry).

I love basil. It smells like summer. I made some pesto, and discovered what may be the perfect pesto delivery method: mashed potatoes. Yum! (My pesto recipe is eyeballed quantities of basil, olive oil, toasted pine nuts, garlic, nutritional yeast and a teaspoon or so of miso.)
One day for lunch I had leftover lentils and rice, and I decided to top it with the leftover pho accompaniments (so sprouts, mint, basil and lime juice). I was surprised how well the basil and mint complimented the lentils (which had Indian spices: cumin, turmeric and anardana (pomegranate) powder).
Finally, a pizza with pesto and fresh basil.
Great. Now not only am I eager for spring to finally get here for real, now I want summer (and its armloads of basil) too.