I had a hankering fro some chewy bread like substance tonight so I whipped up some of my 5-minute bread dough using 2 cups whole wheat flour and 4.5 cups of all purpose flour. I was thinking of the Roman pizza bianca which is typically a simple flatbread made with a high hydration dough topped with olive oil, salt and rosemary. I added a few other ingredients to this no-cheese pizza. The dough rose for about 3 hours before I took a hunk of it and stretched it out into a square. I doused the dough liberally with olive oil and topped it with sliced garlic, fresh rosemary, fresh tomatoes and arugula leaves. The whole shebang was sprinkled with kosher salt and baked in a hot hot oven until crisp and bubbly. It really hit the spot.
Kicked up pizza bianca
June 29, 2009 by 8 Comments
Friday Pizza
March 7, 2009 by 3 Comments
Friday’s are Pizza Night in our house. My son has been a just cheese please pizza guy until just recently. He’s now branched out to eating pepperoni. Small steps. Some day I hope he will eat my more robust pies. I’ve been making a lot lately due to having my 5 minute bread dough constantly in the fridge. Like last night’s pizza shown above. This one has a tomato sauce topped with leftover ground beef from tacos, chopped green olives, fresh mushrooms, roasted red peppers and finally sliced cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes were SO sweet when cooked on top of the cheese.
Let me share some of my other recent pizza creations. I have a bit of summer stored in my freezer in the form of delicious homemade pesto. Perfect for pizza! No tomato sauce on this one.
A bit of ham, kalamata lives and roasted red peppers make for toppings that are nice and flavorful.
Look at how nice it cooks up on my oven tiles!
The pizza that follows had a combination of pesto and tomato sauce. A bit of roasted red peppers and topped with pepperoni, this Friday night feast really pleased.
Bread Oven
February 15, 2009 by Leave a Comment
My wife knows I always love to get cooking related gifts. And with all the bread making we’ve been doing lately she went out and got a great gift for my birthday a couple weeks ago. This is something I have been wanting for a long time but haven’t taken the time to go out and get. I’m talking about unglazed quarry tiles to make a bread oven!
These tiles came from a local flooring store in town. It is important to use unglazed tiles to avoid any offgassing of various chemicals used in the glaze during heating. The store even looked up the MSDS (material safety data sheet) on these tiles to make sure there was nothing toxic in them.
Of course I tried out some of our 5 minute bread dough as soon as I could. The tiles worked perfectly!
One of the reasons I wanted the tiles to replace my standard pizza stone was the size. The tile lined oven has enough room to bake more than one loaf at a time. And the pizza stone was too small to bake a large pizza like the one shown here.
Believe it or not, the
Roasted red peppers and kalamata olives were great together.
See how nicely it fits int he oven?
The 5 minute dough makes great pizza crust!
My forray into 5-minute bread
February 15, 2009 by 1 Comment
I’m sure you’ve heard about the book ‘Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day‘ by Zöe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg. There methods have some similarity to the no-knead bread method – like no kneading – but there are some significant difference. A high hydration dough is made simply by mixing the ingredients and storing the dough in the fridge for up to two weeks. Actually waiting a few days before baking improves the flavor immensely and it makes for quick work to make all kinds of bread creations. I’ve been playing around with the basic recipe (1.5 T yeast, 1.5 T salt, 3 C water, 6.5 C all purpose flour) and having some fun making breads and more.
The dough you see on the peel below was made with the basic recipe but I used 1.5 C whole wheat flour and only 5 C of all purpose flour. I cut off a pound or so of the dough and pulled it into a ball forming a skin on top by stretching the dough underneath.
After raising for a couple of hours, the boule was dusted with flour and scored in a scallop shape.
Here’s the result after about 25 minutes in a 500 °F oven on my pizza stone.
I was very pleased with the texture. The crust was chewy and not too hard and the inside was moist and tender. There was a distinct flavor of the whole wheat flour but it was not tough at all when used in this small proportion.
Here’s another one in a batard shape. This dough had 2.5 C of whole wheat flour and 4 C of all purpose flour.
It baked up nice. It still maintained a pretty tender texture inside but it was more wheaty than the prior batch of dough.
You can do all kinds of things with this dough. Here is a flatbread I made with the whole wheat dough. I just stretched it out, brushed it with extra virgin olive oil and topped it with some good Bulgarian feta cheese and kalamata olives.
It didn’t last long!
Please stay tuned for more bread escapades.