Pizza Margherita

Pesto and Mozzarella Pizza

A Chance Encounter

Sometime about two summers ago I had a chance encounter that changed my life. I can't remember how exactly it happened, but like most contemporary romances I am sure it began on the internet. I know that some people still meet the old-fashioned way, at church, or through friends, or at work, or volunteering at the soup kitchen, or in a bar or a coffee shop, but these days if a couple didn't meet online, they should just tell everyone that they did anyway. For the sake of common decency, and to avoid public scandal.

I've been making pizza since I was a teenager, excluding the eight years I lived in New Haven walking distance from Modern Apizza, one of the better relationships so far in my life and certainly among the few that ended amicably albeit a little teary-eyed. I've never missed New Haven. I don't know how anyone could. But I do recall the pizza with great affection. Once we separated I didn't think about it, didn't grieve it. But also for several years I steered clear of any new relationship. I'd lived with a great pizza and was content for a while to go it alone.

(The dough just stirred until it forms a ball.)

Admittedly I was gun shy. Probably I feared the inevitable comparisons. It didn't help that Chicago traditionally is a deep dish pizza town. Ask me how I really feel about deep dish pizza and I will tell you:  it is an abomination. Good pizza, indeed a couple of outstanding pizzas, are definitely out there. But they demand a certain kind of attention, are surrounded with a certain degree of pretension that puts me off. Also they are mostly on the other side of town so never available when I need them. I am not opposed in principle to a long distance relationship. Just not with my pizza.

I don't think I was consciously looking, but I must have been ready to move on, must have been browsing the online equivalent of the baking personals without even realizing what I was doing. And then it happened. A casual meeting. A wordless attraction. A furtive second and third look. A flurry of excited questions. A bookmark in my browser. An exchange of confidential information.

(After rising a couple of hours at room temperature.)

From the moment my first bag of Antimo Caputo Tipo 00 flour arrived, I was bewitched by its silky touch and its relaxed self-confidence and undemanding performance. A date with my pizza dough is never a quickie. It usually takes three days before we reach a plateau, and then we often take it to the freezer and keep it going for weeks longer.

Here's how we get started.


500 grams Tipo 00 flour
1 tsp active dry yeast
2 tsps kosher salt
325 grams water

Stir with a spatula just until dough forms a shaggy ball, then let rise covered at room temperature a couple of hours. Fold down and turn a few times and refrigerate overnight. Fold and turn a few times the next day and then leave to ripen in refrigerator a couple of days more, folding and turning at least once each day. (This formula is from the website at Forno Bravo.)

(Turned and folded a few times the next afternoon.)

Here's a picture of the new light box. Whether it will frame effectively a whole pizza, time will soon tell.

Colder Comforts

Here's a homely treat that delivers a double dose of pleasure in peanut butter and chocolate. The cookies I made a couple of nights ago. The ice cream I thought about making, but then I was thinking about how much better one of these ice cream sandwiches would taste now and not tomorrow, so I just walked to the corner store and bought a pint of Häagen-Dazs. And for anyone who turns up their noses at butter flavored Crisco -- don't knock it till you've tried it!

Perfectly Chewy Peanut Butter Cookies

2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp kosher salt
1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar
1 1/4 cups white sugar
8 tbs (4 oz) unsalted butter
8 tbs (4 oz) butter flavor Crisco
3 large eggs
1 cup creamy peanut butter
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup honey roasted peanuts, chopped extra fine

Preheat oven to 300. Whisk together flour soda and salt. Mix butter, shortening, and sugars. Add eggs, peanut butter, vanilla. Add flour mixture and nuts and stir just to combine. Drop by tablespoons (I use a #50 scoop) and bake in the center of the oven for 17-20 minutes. Centers of the cookies should still be puffed and very soft.

Cold Comfort

In the complex world of desserts, as in the complex world of human relationships, looking good and feeling good are often not related, and often inversely related. Decades of research have shown definitively that the best lovers are not necessarily the best looking lovers. Some persons are exceedingly pleasing to look upon. Get them in bed, however, and like royal icing, fondant, and gum paste, the erotic flavor is mostly disappointment.  

Other persons by contrast may not be much to look at – may not draw much attention to themselves, may not stand out in a crowd or a bakery case – but draw them close, touch them, draw them under the covers, turn down the lights and start to nibble, and the flavor is all sweet melting pleasure.

One can only hypothesize at the cause of the difference. Perhaps too much beauty, like too much wealth, leaves those it graces with a weakened will to strive harder. Perhaps ordinary appearances are disinhibiting and leave room for the imagination to expand its horizons. Perhaps good looks, like great expectations, can’t help but disappoint. Perhaps common features are an index of common appetites and a capacity for common pleasures, all the more satisfying because within one’s grasp. Or perhaps it is the universe quietly teaching that life isn’t totally unfair after all.
 

Whatever the cause – and some mysteries are best left unsolved -- here’s a brownie that isn’t much to look at, but boy does it put out. It is undeniably plain and unassuming and overcompensates joyously in taste for what it lacks visually speaking.

This is a summer brownie. It thrives in the freezer, where it never fully hardens, paradoxically enhancing its capacity to provide pleasure. Direct from the freezer on a hot muggy day, it is all cool satisfaction. Sort of like a hot fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream and walnuts in a bar. It has almost no crumb and leaves only a trace of itself on one’s fingertips. If Gabriel Porras were a brownie, this is the one I would wish him to be.

From Nancy Baggett’s All American Cookie Book.

1 stick plus 2 tbs unsalted butter
5 ounces semisweet or bittersweet chocolate
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1½ tbs American style cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup light brown sugar
3 large eggs
2½ tbs vanilla extract
1 cup finely chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 and line an 8 x 8 pan with easy-release foil or parchment paper.

Heat butter and chocolate in microwave until about 80 percent melted, then stir until fully melted. Stir the sugars into the melted butter and chocolate. Add eggs and vanilla and stir vigorously for a couple of minutes until batters ceases to appear grainy. Add salt and walnuts, sift flour and cocoa over top and stir just until incorporated.  Bake on middle rack of oven for 33 minutes.

Let cool about 20 minutes in pan, then lift out brownies by edges of foil or parchment and cool another hour or so at room temperature. Freeze overnight or longer and slice into 1 by 1½ inch bars.

An Early Harvest

It’s only the middle of June but already the waffle crop is coming in strong. Normally the harvest doesn’t start until sometime in July, but the plants are unpredictable and the long cool spring and abundance of rain this year apparently set them early into overdrive.

I like to go once a year and pick my own. Not many growers plant waffles, and they hardly ever show up in the farmer’s markets – even ramps have a longer season -- but there’s a guy only an hour’s drive south of the city, out in Will County, who opens his fields a couple of weeks every year to persons who know to ask. These are a hybrid crop that he breeds himself. He assures me otherwise that he grows them to organic standards, though he does admit that he brushes the undersides of the leaves with clarified butter to help prevent sticking. Most of his waffles he sells directly to local chefs, so I consider myself in very good company!

Picking waffles is hot work, and backbreaking too, but totally worth it. Really there is nothing to compare to the taste of a fresh waffle, lightly warmed and drizzled with some maple syrup, except perhaps a French toast made with free range brioche.

If you aren’t able to locate a grower of waffles in your area, you can always use the following recipe. They may not taste quite as much of the soil and the sun, but then you won’t have to worry about washing them either. Be sure to use instant yeast – one teaspoon to be exact. And do not under any circumstances refrigerate the batter. Instead just use all the batter at once and then freeze the waffles you don’t eat. Waffles are a lot like peas and blueberries. They freeze remarkably well.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Raised-Waffles-40050

All that Remains Are

 

I've been thinking all weekend about ways I can milk my chicken thighs for blogging purposes (how's that for an ugly mix of metaphor) but mostly I've been working on a bigger light box, one with a field of view wide enough to showcase a whole pie or cake or pizza. I am moving slowly but aim to debut the new box later this week.

In the meantime, the bones are all that remains from the last two thighs. One met its end in the sandwich. The other in the salad. Both were delicious.

Thigh Expectations

By traditional teaching of psychoanalysis, the human body is everywhere an erogenous zone. No part of the body, no detail of the body, is inherently less worthy an object of erotic focus than any other. Such at least taught Sigmund Freud, but that was before the days of Telemundo, Univision, and Telefutura. 

Granted, a woman's knee caps are as much her body as a woman's bosom. But on Spanish-language television at least, the camera rarely lingers on the former while it focuses relentlessly on the latter. In the parallel universe of the telenovela the bra was never invented. As for the men, the chest also merits special attention. Sometimes a tie obstructs the view, but mostly shirts are unbuttoned a third of the way, exposing bronzed throats and pectoral muscles waxed smoother than the calves of a Brazilian swimsuit model.

On a woman I admire cleavage. On a man I admire a strong neck and shoulders. But when it comes to a chicken, it’s all about the thigh.

Don’t get me wrong. Whole chickens are definitely pretty. I like to touch them at the market. Sometimes I fantasize about roasting them. And I wouldn’t hesitate to cut one into eight pieces and bake it in a tagine. I am even liable to wonder how they would look splatch-cocked and dressed in some lemon and rosemary and a lot of salt. Chicken wings also I adore. With some good beer and a bit of encouragement I can eat fifteen easily in a sitting. But it’s the thigh that sets my heart racing. That sets my mouth watering. That turns my head. That keeps me up at night.

Compared to a chicken breast, a chicken thigh has flavor. It has color. It has a properly balanced ratio of surface area to dark-meaty interior. It has streaks of cartilage at the ends that roast to a blissfully crunchy chewy texture, a total delight to bite through. And the whole package, unlike the bastard drumstick, is distributed evenly around its good looking bone, a bone that looks like a bone should look.

Here’s a dish I prepare when I want to please myself in a crowd. The recipe is right out of Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. Chop a whole head of peeled garlic and a big chunk of peeled ginger in the food processor, add to a cup or so each of honey and soy sauce, heat until combined, cool, then use to marinate chicken for sixteen to twenty-four hours.

I roast my thighs at 350 for about 35 minutes, draining the excess fat several times, and finish them at 475 for a few minutes, turning them once or twice to darken them up evenly.

The meat is moist, the skin crisp and a touch smoky. These are irresistible at room temperature but lose none of their appeal after a day or two or three in the refrigerator. The bone pops out with a quick twist and the thigh splits open to just the right size for a sandwich. Shredded or diced this chicken never meets a chopped salad it doesn’t like.

Now if I could just figure out a way to get the writers of my current Telemundo obsession to plot a scene of Gabriel Porras eating a chicken thigh…

Twilight of the Caramels

Like a research account that doesn't carry over to the new fiscal year, I've been spending down my stock of caramel. I used to have a real research account. At least that's what it was called. In fact the only research involved in my spending concerned the rules for my spending.

My bookshelves are crowded with volumes purchased the first week of June, right before receipts were due, and that I would gladly have traded for a Green Star Elite twin screw juicer, a Falk twelve inch copper oval gratin, a case of Brachetto Villa Giada. I used to subscribe to the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics, but I would rather have subscribed to a community supported agriculture share, with an added share of fruit, poultry, and eggs.

Among the volumes of philosophy and theology and the gothic novels I did sometimes slip through a cookbook, but only after checking how the title appeared on the receipt. My Bombay Kitchen looked just ambiguous enough that I dared it. A Perfect Scoop also. The Professional Pastry Chef unfortunately printed two words too many, so it stayed on the shelf.

My iPhone is another legacy of my research account. I had wanted to spend two weeks in Mexico at language school, but when I asked for approval I was peremptorily rejected. In a fit of pique I wrote back and asked permission to buy an iPhone. (They were new on the market at the time.) To my surprise a few minutes later I got the green light. So I took the bus downtown and picked out the most expensive one available. We have been living together uncomfortably ever since.

I can't  show a lot of results for my so-called research. But along the way I have discovered a nifty five word synonym for ultimate sweet and savory deliciousness:  peanut butter caramel pretzel chocolate.

So now my caramel account is empty. But unlike my old research account, I didn't have to search to find ways to use it up. And I even learned something.

You don’t forget to eat, do you?

By nature, at least by circulation, I have cold hands. Sometime in October the tips of my fingers begin to lose their heat, then my knuckles and the second joints and my palms down to the wrist, and they all stay cold until the middle of May. Not that they are ever hot in summer, so much as less cold than they are in winter. On a really frigid day it is not uncommon, if I am riding in a friend’s car, to find that the windows on his side are fogged over with condensation but the windows on my side remain perfectly clear. Apparently I don’t give off much heat. 

I am used to the cold. It is comforting even, but occasionally my hands wander somewhere unexpected and cause a shock. At least two persons I have dated – each with no direct knowledge of the other I am pretty sure – have called me cold like an icicle. I don’t think either meant the phrase as a compliment, and the charge used to sting. But not long ago, as I was cradling my flush cheeks in my cool palms, reviewing my dating history, the old adage about good bakers and cold hands came to mind. I remembered an oncologist I met a few years ago, a specialist in pancreatic cancer, a mild-mannered man with a pleasing face and voice that were especially suited to delivering bad news. How I made some pecan brioche rolls for him to take on a plane trip after only knowing him three days. How pleasing his voice sounded on the phone a couple of weeks later when he called to say he wasn’t going to see me again. 


I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. Why I’d never wondered that butter pinched into flour between my fingers doesn’t feel more greasy. That milk chocolate doesn’t take my fingerprints. That puff pastry at least seems always so glad at my touch. That I am still mourning the loss of winter a bit. 

The middle of May is now gone and my hands are reaching their peak temperature, and to make matters worse earlier this week summer arrived full force. The humidity over twenty-four hours became so intense that everything paper in my apartment began to soften and expand at the same time. Not an attractive conjunction. The once stiff pages of the book in my hand I found bloated and melting stuck to each other.  


Restless I sought refuge in my kitchen. Standing in front of my open freezer, looking to catch a breeze, I recognized a Ziploc bag full of lemon turnovers. They were calling out to me, teasing me, daring me to fire up the oven. Torture! A long weekend and too hot and humid to bake. 


Yesterday the temperature dropped and the humidity passed, and sitting on my hands on the bus in the afternoon I knew what I had to do. As soon as I got home I brushed the turnovers with some half and half, sprinkled them with sugar, and into the oven they went. They’d been asleep in my freezer for seven or eight months at least, but thirty minutes at 375 degrees Fahrenheit and they tasted as sprightly awake as when I first made them.  


The magic of the puff pastry I find is in the creaminess of the layers. The outer few layers are flaky, but the pastry below the surface is surprisingly custardy. The sensation in the mouth is a bit like an éclair. Really I should make puff pastry more often, especially considering how much it loves my freezer, almost as much I think as I do.  


The lemon curd tends to bubble out during baking, so I just spoon it back into place.  

I am experimenting a bit with backdrops in the light box. Orange is my favorite color, so I gave it the first try. It isn’t as flattering of the lemon turnovers as I hoped, but not unpleasing either I think. Also I’ve been trying to figure out what season is Gabriel Porras, and so far have only ruled out fall, though I bet he could pull off an orange sweater if he wanted, and I would gladly help him.