kay-exploring

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Mexican night:

Spiced ground turkey

Mexican refried black beans

My own chunky guacamole

Brown rice cooked in chicken broth & ancho chili

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Squash, Potato and Bean Ragout

This dish, like many recipes I cook, was inspired by ingredients I already had on hand and wanted to use up. I googled ideas for butternut squash, beans and herbs and came across this recipe from Viking Range for white bean and butternut squash ragout.

I kept the recipe mostly the same, but instead used:

Anchovies to build the base of the flavor instead of pancetta which I did not have on hand.

Potatoes in addition to squash to use up 3 that I had hanging around from Thanksgiving.

Fresh herbs instead of dry.

1 can of cannellini and 1 can of roman beans as I was out of cannellini.

Everything else I did the same as stated in the recipe. At the end I found that the recipe was missing a little something, and think it was something bitter or acidic. I added some...pickle juice...yes, but not enough and didn’t want to push adding too much and skewing the flavor. Some cayenne also gave the ragout a spicy warmness.

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Homemade mascarpone cheese is REALLY easy to make!

For this year’s Thanksgiving, I changed-up my recipe for mashed potatoes to one which has mascarpone in it.  I went with a roasted garlic potatoes recipe again, but this time the potatoes were whipped instead of mashed.  In the recipe comments, someone remarked that they made their own mascarpone cheese and I was inspired to do the same. 

They mentioned they also saved dough in the process over buying premade, but I didn’t save ANY dough in the process.  In fact it would have been cheaper to buy mascarpone, but the additional money was well spent anyhow for an education. In this post, I will share how I made out making my own mascarpone cheese.  I followed the steps in this food.com recipe and doubled it.

The first step is to bring heavy cream to a near boil at 190 degrees.  For my setup, I used a whisk, saucier pan (this or this or any other brand’s round-bottomed saucier), with a lipped Pyrex glass bowl and a leave-in thermometer. 

I filled the pan with enough water to reach the bowl, but not so much that the water would spill over into the bowl.  The lipped Pyrex bowl proved even more handy as it blocked any boiled over water from reaching the cream inside the bowl.  

I was able to relatively quickly bring the heavy cream to 160 degrees, but every degree up to 170 was painstakingly slow.  I also constantly whisked to ensure no cream was burning or sticking to the pan.  To bring the cream from 170 to 190 degrees, I microwaved the it for 2 minutes, and stopped it after 1.5 minutes to check on the temp.  I’m glad I did because it was already boiling.  I let it cool down before adding the lemon juice.

Next, I added the fresh lemon juice and stirred.  I watched the mixture thicken to the point of being able to coat the back of a spoon.

After simmering on the heat for 10-15 minutes, I removed it and let it cool.  After an hour or so, I poured the mixture into a nut-milk bag and placed it in a stainless steel mesh colander over the same Pyrex bowl to allow the liquid to drain.

I let the mixture sit in the fridge for 24 hours to firm-up and had a very nice result.  The picture below shows my draining set up, the nut-milk bag, and of course the finished mascarpone.  The cheese tasted very delicate and firm...reminiscent of buttercream.

So!  Would I make it again in the future?  Yeah, whynot...it was easy and tasty and only had two ingredients.  Would I do it for financial reasons?  Nope!  Unless I could somehow find inexpensive heavy cream.  I did use organic cream and I bought it in the ~2 cup sized cartons.  Maybe using non-organic heavy cream would result in more competitive result in the pricing.

[kay-exploring]

Since I first discovered this recipe, I have shared it with many family and friends, experimented with it a lot and would like to share my observations with the different approaches in case others have crossed these platitudes.

Do I deviate from the NYT recipe that Mark Bittman published?

Yes, I do not put the bread in a tea towel.  The one time I did, I lost some dough to the towel since the dough couldn’t be scraped out.  Instead, after mixing the dough, I just cover the bowl in plastic wrap while rising and put it somewhere warm like over the dishwasher while it's running or near the oven. All other steps I follow the same.

Have I ever fermented more than 24 hours?

I once fermented to bread closer to the 24 hour mark and it started to get liquidy. I have found that anywhere between 8-20-or-so hours is enough.  Any amount of time in between that generous range yields a great bread.

Have I experimented with multiple risings?

Yes, I've also tried stirring it every 2-3 hours for several rises and that was good, but I did not notice any blatant superior difference in taste.  

Can the dough be prepared in advance?

I have found the recipe to also works if it is mixed and placed in the refrigerator to retard the yeast.  The dough can be taken out 10-20 hour before baking to allow to rise.  Monitor the dough to ensure it’s rising properly.  This approach for the dough is good if you want to prep it in advance -- though the prep is so minimal anyhow -- and don't intend to bake within 24 hours.  

Does all purpose flour or bread flour work better?

This recipe works well with all purpose flour or bread flour without exceptionally different results.  I hate to keep saying neither yields in a noticeably better product. But, using either yields a good product.  One time, I will make the bread with each flour side by side and see if one turns out tastier than another.

What does this all mean ?!?

This bread is fool-proof and no matter what you do to it, it will still come out great!

Easy, fancy, no-knead bread recipe using a Dutch oven

If you’re a novice bread baker with high aspirations of crafting beautiful loaves that are crusty on the outside, and are spongy and nonuniform on the inside, and who has tried attaining this goal the hard way, and failed, only creating bricks or dead loaves, read on! 

All you need is a Dutch cast iron oven, also sometimes called a French oven, four ingredients, and a lot of hands-off time. 

This recipe seems to be originally from a New York Times recipe. There are many variations of it across the web from various bloggers who have taken it and made it their own. I’ve baked a variation of the NYT recipe twice using the proportions below, and found that the recipe tasty and repeatable.

Here are the ingredients and the steps.

3 cups all purpose flour

½ tsp active dry yeast

2 tsp course kosher salt

1 ½ cup room temperature water

Extra flour for rolling the dough in, about 1/3 cup

Combine and stir together the dry ingredients in a bowl that lends itself to being covered with plastic wrap. 

Slowly pour the water and mix with a wooden spoon so it absorbs all of the dry mixture. Dough will be moist and shaggy. 

Cover your bowl tightly with plastic wrap or a lid, and allow to sit at room temperature for 12-18 hours. Do not disturb. Note: The first loaf I made, I was in a rush and hungry and baked it after 12 hours. The second loaf, I baked after 18 hours. I noticed a very minor difference in the texture of the bread between the two times. It wasn’t big enough to warrant extra waiting if you’d rather have it sooner.

Thirty minutes before you reach your 12-18 hour waiting time, heat up your Dutch oven in the oven at 450 degrees. 

Once your dough is ready, take your extra flour and spread evenly on a clean surface.�� Note: both of the times, I left my dough undisturbed and it rose double in size and was very sticky and bubbly.

Pour your dough onto the surface. Use a spatula to scrape out any dough that’s stuck to the bowl. 

Gingerly roll the very wet dough into a ball and cover the surface with a thin layer of flour.

Very carefully, move your ball of dough into the Dutch oven. Remember it will be very hot!

Bake with the lid on for 30 minutes. 

Carefully remove the hot lid and bake for another 30 minutes. 

When finished, let the bread cool for 10 minutes and then enjoy!

I used a Lodge-brand enamel cast iron oven, but there’s other brands like Le Creuset or Staub, that will also do the trick. I used a larger oven that’s 7.8 quarts, but a 4 or 6 quart would probably work even better since it would help the loaf maintain circular shape without the dough spreading out. Another lesson learned is to make sure the knob on the Dutch oven is a stainless steel one, or else it will implode and crack when at the high temperature, like mine did.

[kay-exploring]

Thanksgiving 2015 Meal

I think this Thanksgiving meal was the most successful of all Thanksgiving meals I’ve ever hosted. The turkey came out great, and all of the sides were so delicious. Each side came out “proper” and really held it’s own.  I wouldn’t hesitate to make this menu again in future Thanksgivings.

The menu:

Main: Brined & spatch-cocked 18-lb turkey from Bolton Farms in Bucks County, PA. The hardest part was removing the spine -- which is all that spatch-cocking is -- and removing the wishbone. The spine and wishbone on an 18-pounder was very thick and took a lot of doing with regular kitchen sheers. The turkey was removed from the oven when the breast meat hit 145 degrees.  The turkey came out beautifully. It was tender and tasty.

Rolls: Pull apart potato rolls from Bon Appetit, served with homemade, canned orange cranberry butter which is literally homemade butter with cranberries mixed in.  This was tart and sweet and buttery and complemented the rich & fluffy rolls well.

Cranberry sauce: Homecanned cranberry jelly.

Dressing: Classic, herbed dressing from Bon Appetit. I used two breads from Panera. One a soft bread, the other a crusty one.

Mac ‘n’ cheese: Kay’s mac ‘n’ cheese recipe. My recipe is based on Emeril’s proportions. I do not top with “essence”. I use whatever cheese I feel like and include slices of stewed tomatoes in between poured layers. This time I used a shredded blend of parmesan, asiago, fontina, provolone from Trader Joe’s, and a yellow Sargento cheddar and the sauce came out rich and gooey with stretchy globs.

Potatoes: Roasted-garlic, whipped Idaho potatoes with home-made mascarpone. These were based on a recipe from Bobby Flay. I made my own mascarpone cheese (follow the link for my musings on this process). The cheese was surprisingly easy to make, but due to the extra steps, in the future, I will probably just buy the cheese.

Green beans: I used Alton Brown’s recipe for green bean casserole.  It was pretty much everything one would want in this sort of casserole. Creamy and gooey!  In the future, I will seek out already cleaned and trimmed green beans as this part of the prep took some time.

Sweet potatoes: I used a recipe from a vintage, Craig Claibone New York Times recipe book. It was whipped sweet potatoes with butter, mixed with peeled tangerine (clementines in my case) and dark rum, with buttered brown sugar and pecan topping.  Peeling the clementines was a huge pain and in the future, I would consider draining canned and peeled tangerines.

Gravy: Homemade gravy from scratch ad-libbed with turkey drippings and vegetables.

[kay-exploring]

French (green) Lentil Soup with Coconut Milk and Indian Spices

This is based on a recipe I found using a google search for ingredients I have in my fridge that I did not want to waste. I followed the recipe exactly, only omitting 3/4 of the minuscule amount ground clove as I know I dislike the flavor. Oh. And I used home-dried thyme, that was once fresh (no fresh in the house).

I was happy to find this recipe to use up my remaining 1 cup of coconut milk and an onion that’s been hanging around in my pantry. As you can tell from my pictures, I used my Dutch/French oven to make the soup. I actually used it earlier to fry my chicken, so I figured it could go for another spin.

One interesting step in this recipe was infusing ghee and using it to flavor the soup. I’m used to toasting spices after sauteing onions, but I never saw cooking spices in ghee (clarified butter) and then adding the mixture to the soup. I’m not even sure I cooked the spices long enough since I was wanting to prevent burning them.

If you’re watching your kcals, I suppose be careful, but otherwise, enjoy the indulgence. I tasted the soup after it was finished and it was quite tasty. I can’t wait to eat it for lunch tomorrow after the flavors meld even further.

That step about the ghee infusion also led me to investigate if this sort of ghee preparation is a thing, and it is! The best factual article I found is about the Indian cooking technique called tadka which translates into tempering. A tadka is the result of cooking spices in very hot heat in order to cook and bring out the spice’s flavor.

“Tadka translates as "tempering." It is a method widely used in Indian cuisine, in which whole or ground spices are heated in hot oil or ghee and the mixture is added to a dish. Hot fat has an amazing ability to extract and retain the essence, aroma and flavor of spices and herbs and then carry this essence with it when it is added to a dish. American cooks are familiar with tempering as a way of heating and cooling chocolate. No relation.

Indian tempering is done either at the beginning of the cooking process or as a final flavoring at the end.”

Excerpt from NPR article, The Crackling Spices Of Indian Tempering by Monica Bhide

Check out these additional links to recipes and products: Indian spiced ghee, garlic infused ghee and product. 

This was a really great find as it led to led me to new knowledge, and ideas about products and techniques.

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Italian seasoning ground cornmeal breaded t-rex chicken breast over egg pappardelle and Trader Joe's bolognese sauce with shaved Parmesan. 

In cornmeal mix: ground lemon pepper, Spice House Little Italy blend, kosher salt, oregano. 

Used standard breading technique: AP flour, beated eggs, cornmeal mix. Fried in 350° vegetable oil. One breast finished to 160° in the oil, the other needed touch up in the oven.

My recipe based off of a food network recipe.

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When it’s right, you know

Have you ever agonized over a decision or a plan and put so much effort in but saw no desirable result?

This recently happened to me while planning a vacation. The original vacation was supposed to happen in May, but did not. Life just got so hectic that we settled on an easier trip to a destination I’ve previously been, which required no air travel and would cost 1/3 the amount of Hawaii. 

So since Hawaii did not happen in May, it became the destination that we would visit later in the year for a birthday. And so the year went on, and we didn’t plan, and then we invested an entire weekend researching activities, accommodations, transportation, food, parks, etc. 

And at the end of the weekend, we still had a trip in the works that did not feel right and didn’t seem to have any value despite the cost we would spend visiting HI. And so here is November, with a trip pending for January where nothing has been decided or booked.

I am sure you can feel the agony, defeat and impatience at this point.

Finally, my partner came up with the idea of a trip centered around a common hobby that we both love - cooking. Immediately - like a switch - the idea felt exactly right and purposeful. And so this trip was born and booked within 6 hours of being presented.

We will be visiting Napa Valley, CA to attend a boot camp training at Culinary Institute of America St. Helena campus. We’re staying in a B&B that is heralded for its customer service. And we’ll be celebrating my birthday in style. 

The moral of this story is that when it’s right, it just feels right and it’s effortless and the pieces fall together. When it’s wrong, no amount of deliberation (as I found out) will make it right and you’ll still feel bad after you’ve spent your time. Next time you’re booking a trip, reflect on your needs and go from there…spend time only when you’ve gotten the concept right.

[kay-exploring]

French-esque, One Pot, Hearty - Lentil & Chicken Stew

Ok, so....I’m blown away. It looks like vomit, from many angles, but don’t let appearance fool you!  This creation is based on a recipe published on BBC, with a little bit of customization. It comes out tasting so fabulous, rich, sharp, flavorful, exacting and perfect for a cool day or a weeknight date-night.

Ingredients:

2-3 TB olive oil

2 slices of ~1/4″ pancetta from the deli, finely cubed (bacon is ok, too)

2 chicken breasts, cubed in 1-1.5″ pieces, salted & peppered

1 yellow onion, diced

1 ~2′ shallot, diced

2 medium-sized garlic cloves, finely diced

4 tsp AP flour

4 tsp tomato paste

pinch of white sugar

1.25 cup (dry) white wine

2-3 cups vegetable stock

100g green (French) lentils

1 tsp dried thyme

85g brown cremini mushrooms, rinsed and sliced

Steps:

Pour 1-2TB of olive oil in a 6 quart Dutch oven over low heat. Stir the pancetta in to draw the oil, approximately 10 minutes. 

Once the pancetta is mostly drawn, stir in the chicken cubes, in batches if needed, to lightly brown them, being careful not to burn the pancetta.

Once the chicken is lightly browned, remove the chicken and pancetta bit from the pot, and set aside. Deglaze the pot on high heat with wine. Reduce the wine out of the mixture.

Stir in the onions, shallots and coat in the oil. Add olive oil if remaining oil is sparse. Mix and cook until the onions are semi-translucent and add in the garlic. Stir in the tomato paste, thyme and sugar and let cook over low heat for 5 minutes.

Mix in the flour over low heat, being very careful not to burn it. Add 1/2-2 TB olive oil if your mixture if very dry. Mix over low heat for 3-5 minutes until flour is fully mixed in, not clumpy and looks a little doughy.

Pour in the stock, wine and lentils. Bring to a boil, then cover and let simmer for 5 minutes. Stir constantly to avoid the lentils sticking to bottom of pot.

Stir in the mushrooms and chicken, cover, and let simmer for 40 minutes or until the lentils are ready. Stir every 5-10 minutes to ensure lentils do not stick to bottom of pot.

Bon appetit!!!!!

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Chunky Butternut Squash & Sage Soup

Over the weekend, I took a hike in the fall weather. In the end, I was in the mood for some seasonal soup. Some minutes later at the store realized I left my wallet. 

Fast forward to today when I decided to finally make the soup. The recipe is adapted from the ingredients list from Gimme Some Oven’s slow cooker butternut squash soup. 

The ingredients are left unchanged, but since I used the stove top and a dutch oven, my steps were largely different. 

The soup came out excellently and I would make it again. My criticism is I used 1 extra-sized garlic clove and should’ve used a more moderate sized one so the garlic flavor wasn’t so pronounced.

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups vegetable stock

2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

1 carrot, peeled and diced

1 Granny Smith apple, cored and diced

1 medium butternut squash, halved, seeded and seasoned and rubbed in olive oil

1 sprig fresh sage

1 white onion, diced

1/2 teaspoon salt, or more to taste

1/4 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper, or more to taste

1/8 teaspoon cayenne, or more to taste

pinch of ground cinnamon and nutmeg

1/2 can canned coconut milk

STEPS:

Heat oven to 375 degrees and roast the squash for 40 or so minutes or until the flesh is soft. Let cool until comfortable to touch, scrape out the pulp and set aside.

Saute the onions, carrots and garlic in olive oil or ghee until onions are browned and translucent. Before the onions turn translucent, season with salt, and stir in spices. 

Stir in the squash pulp, apple and sage. Let simmer for at least 30 minutes on lowest heat possible. Add the coconut milk and stir in. 

If using a blender, allow the soup to cool before blenderizing. If you have a stick blender available, blenderize the soup until it’s to the consistency of your liking.

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Pictures of the intense leaves changing at Valley Forge National Historical Park.

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Enhanced CCoMS 

Tonight was a bit of a hassle when I left my wallet at home and realized I couldn't buy the ingredients for butternut squash soup while I was out. I thought I could substitute some of the ingredients and make a pumpkin soup with frozen, homemade puree, but I was still missing coconut milk. 

While I was digging through my pantry, I found a can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup (CCoMS). You can see where this is going and what my dinner was going to be. While it wasn't fancy, hard or time-consuming (scoff!! lol), I did want to dress up my CCoMS. And I did. I busted out milk, fancy dried forest mushrooms and fresh parmesan cheese. 

I used milk so the soup would be richer; dried mushrooms so the mushroom flavor was more intense and there was additional texture; and parm cheese to add more umami and salt. And...drumroll, please...it was tasty!..and inexpensive..and easy -- everything I wanted my warm-me-up meal to be.

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8/30/2015 experimentation dinner

On the menu:

Mix cheese plate.

Homemade white hearth bread, with cultured butter.

Whole duck, brined in OJ and herbs, steamed and roasted.

Creamy polenta with fresh corn, herbed tomatoes, pecorino romano cheese.

Nectarine clafoutis.

The cheeses:

Central Coast Creamery - Seascape, cow and goat, cheddar-like

Wegmans cave-ripened triple creme brie.

Cypress Grove - Humboldt Fog, goat, with vegetable ash, layer of gooey and grainy, nutty.

Carr Valley - Canaria, cow/goat/sheep, cured in olive oil, tastes like very aged cheddar.

The bread:

I have been making my bread for a while now and modifying it a bit. Today I decided to go back to the basics to follow NYT’s recipe to the letter. Make sure to watch the video as it’s slightly different than the written recipe.

I obtained a better result using NYT’s exact recipe, so I will be doing it this way moving forward. The biggest difference between the recipe I published and NYT’s is less yeast, no sugar, and an additional 2-hour rest. The additional 2-hour rest is not too much additional effort to achieve a superior tasting bread. 

I did find that wrapping my wet loaf in the tea towel did not work out well. Most of the dough stuck to the towel and created a mess, not to mention wasted a bit of dough since it was impossible to scrape off the towel.

The duck:

I purchased the duck whole and frozen. I thawed it in the fridge and then left it out on the counter overnight. At first I was going to roast the duck whole, but since all of the dishes I was making needed oven space, I broke down the duck so it could be better controlled.

I read various recipes, but ended up using Alton Brown’s technique and recipe. I did not create the swiss chard bed. Instead of brining in pineapple juice, I brined in orange juice, with herbs, peppercorns, and garlic for nearly 4 hours, versus the 2 1/2 suggested. I figured in my house, we’d be more likely to finish the OJ than pineapple J. 

Using the brining technique, the duck was flavored perfectly and I would not brine it any longer without over-seasoning the skin and meat.

This was my first time cooking duck and though the legs final internal temp was 180*, and the breasts 170*. Some places online suggest 160* and the duck producer suggested 180*. The duck was very tender and light brown, not red or pink how it is sometimes served in restaurants. I actually quite liked it this way.

The polenta:

I always thought that polenta was a dish that is hard to make and after making it today, I learned that it’s really not hard to make at all. I used 1-cup of Bob’s Red Mill polenta corn grits, a 3-cup liquid mix (2 cups boiling water, 1 cup 1% milk, 1 ts of jarred chicken broth), salt, the corn of 2 ears, 2 TB unsalted butter.

Boil the liquids, whisk in the polenta, and then add in everything else. It’s important to whisk in the polenta so all of granules are covered in the liquid and do not clump. Keep whisking gently so the corn grits do not get stuck to the bottom. Once the polenta thickens, stir in 1-2 cups of parmesan or locatelli pecorino romano cheese. You could easily use cheddar.

The herbed tomatoes were an extra to break up the richness of the polenta. I used a pint of cherry tomatoes, olive oil, garlic clove, some red pepper flakes, and a 1/4 cups of mixed chopped fresh herbs. Heat up a non-stick pan on high heat, add olive oil to coat, then drop in the tomatoes and cook them until they crack. Mix in the garlic, pepper flakes, and fresh herbs about half way through. Since the mixture is on high heat, I definitely recommend a splatter guard.

The clafoutis:

I really love this simple and decadent dessert. It’s super versatile and seems to be able to take any fruit that sticks together. I’ve made it so far with cherry, apple and nectarine. It’s fresh fruit with a crepe-like batter filled in the crevices which puffs after baking and then collapses after cooling. My recipe is from the Joy of Cooking book.

The best part of this dinner was that everyone walked away saying how excellent everything was and how much they enjoyed it...several times. This is a dinner worth repeating!

[kay-exploring]

The great German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (b. August 27, 1770) on knowledge, impatience, the peril of fixed opinions, and the true task of the human mind. 

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A weekend can't be a weekend without some kind of cooking; in my case a lazy Sunday brunch. My twist on typical breakfast food includes a little bit of greens instead of starch (sometimes). Clockwise: two cage-free eggs over medium; sauteed organic creminis, Vidalia onions with fresh herbs; organic spring mix blend in lemon/walnut oil vinaigrette topped with roasted red pepper hummus and sunflower seeds; thick-cut bacon with wildflower honey and sesame seeds.

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My first from scratch pizza. It’s topped with slices of a mozzarella ball, pizza sauce from Trader Joe’s, thin-sliced high-lycopene tomatoes from Holland also from Trader Joe’s, Vidalia onions, organic cremini mushrooms, and basil chiffonade from my backyard garden pot. 

The pizza dough is a no-knead recipe from "Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Cooks, and Good Food" by Jeff Potter. Similar to my variation on the no-knead crusty bread recipe, it avoids the hassle of toiling with the dough before baking it in. Instead, let the dough sit for at least 4 hours, more is desirable, to allow the glutenin and gliadin proteins to combine on their own without manual intervention.

The recipe is simple.

My toppings:

3 TB Trader Joe’s pasta sauce (from plastic container near refrigerated pizza dough, not from jar near pasta sauces)

2/3 of a Trader Joe’s 8 oz. mozz ball, sliced thin

1/2 cup Vidalia onions, chopped and sauteed

1/2 cup cremini mushrooms, chopped and sauteed

4 high-lycopene tomatoes from Trader Joe’s, sliced thin (these tomatoes are slightly larger than cherry tomatoes!)

3-5 fresh basil leaves, chiffonade

1 TB clarified butter (ghee) for oiling the crust (any oil with a high smoke point will do)

Other ad-hoc ingredients to help with cooking:

1 TB or so spare AP flour

Cornmeal

For the dough, thoroughly mix with a whisk or a fork:

1 1/3 cups AP flour (170g)

1 teaspoon salt (5g)

1 tablespoon instant yeast (10g)

and then mix in with a spoon:

1/2 cup room temperature water (120g)

Now, the waiting game. A four hour or more waiting game. In my case it was 24 hours. I made the dough a night in advance, letting it rest one full day. I also let it rest on the counter-top over my dishwasher. Whenever I run a high-heat cycle, it heats up the counter and releases steam which I’ve found very conducive atmosphere for yeast in doughs.

I watched the dough rise over the next few hours. It doubled in size, and ultimately didn’t physically change significantly after the first four or so hours. My dough came out desirably; it did not need much more water or flour to make it more wet or less dry. It did need a little flour on my epicurean board while I rolled it out so it didn’t stick. The book said this recipe would be enough for a thinly-rolled medium pizza. I unfortunately am still scared of dough and its secret ways, so I was satisfied will rolling it to a small without tearing or collapsing. Having experienced this dough and its end result, I now know it’s a friendly dough that doesn’t want anyone to be scared of it. 

I par-baked my dough at 450 degrees in gas oven on a pizza stone for a few minutes to set the pie. 

Then I took it out, smeared it with sauce and my toppings, (clarified) buttered up the crust, and pushed it back in until the cheese melted and crust was golden. 

Since my pizza was a generous personal-sized pie, I could move it around with a regular-sized spatula. Obviously, a pizza peel would be better, but in lieu of this, my oxo spatula sounded better than the MacGyver-esque piece of cardboard suggested in the book.

One issue I did run into is burning the bottom of my pizza. I forgot that in professional pizzerias, cornmeal is used to help grease roll the pizza off and so that it does’t stick. I made the mistake of flouring my pizza stone and of course that burned really badly in my oven, set off my smoke alarm (”EEERK EEERK there is a fire EEERK EEERK there is a fire”), and near ruined my weekday dinner pizza experiment. Don’t do that. Use cornmeal.

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Ugly strawberry pie. Used bon appetit’s recipe from the June 2015 issue. I am proud I got the pie past making the dough and rolling it out. Everyone shows their beautiful food on social media, but no one shows the food that’s in between being praise-worthy. Pies are hard!