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It just sort of dropped into my lap.

Not quite manna from heaven, but still greatly appreciated.

This is a common situation in our backyard. Dinner (yet another pizza – I think I’m getting the hang of the dough now. Sort of…) accompanied by a liberal dusting of fruit from above.

Further to my previous posts about pie and, well, pie… Nah, I’m not cool enough to refer to a pizza as a ‘pie’. At any rate the pizza dough I made on Friday for Saturday’s dinner was pretty good. Better than before – after a couple dozen tries I think I’m getting the hang of it. I’ll write about my learning process on dough later.

Here’s what I like about this photo – the juxtaposition of the apple and the pizza. On the one hand a pizza that has taken so many tries to get the dough right. My goodness, I have brought out some pretty marginal doughs over the last couple of years. Still a work in progress. On the other hand you have the apples. The apples, that according to Wikipedia, “…very juicy and has a sharp, refreshing taste.” The apples that literally fall into your lap. Or, in this case on to the table and almost break your wineglass. The apples that make the most incredible pie. When I have made apple pie (only a couple of times) with these apples, I almost feel like I need to stand aside and do as little as possible in order to get the most amazing result. Even my ham-handed pie technique is no match for these apples. They save me in spite of my limited pastry abilities.

As opposed to the pizza dough that seems to want to thwart me at each and every turn. Sometimes I wish pizza dough would fall like the apples, but that might well get messy in a hurry. I’ll stay with the apples.

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Tomato sauce – Pizza sauce

Draining the sauce.

When I make pizza, or, for that matter, make anything that requires tomatoes, I reach for a jar of our passata – which is an Italian word for sauce, except that it isn’t really sauce.

Let me explain, if I can. Passata is a product you make by passing cooked roma tomatoes through a mill. The only ingredient is tomato. It isn’t sauce, per se. It’s crushed tomatoes. With a basil leaf or two and a touch of citric acid to make absolutely sure I don’t kill any of my family members, even though the acidity of tomatoes makes it pretty hard to grow anything in there. I wouldn’t dream of canning garlic or mushrooms but tomatoes are pretty safe – a low bar to clear.

In tandem with a bunch of other crazy neighbours, every year I get about 120 pounds of organic Roma tomatoes from a farm not too far from Vancouver. The tomatoes show up in boxes, all ripe and perfect, and we (myself and any other family members I can dragoon into helping) spend an afternoon boiling them up and running them through a food mill, making several dozen jars of passata. Or sauce. Or whatever the English word is for sieved tomatoes.

To take the sauce from passata to pizza sauce, I make it the way Joe Beddia tells me to do it in Pizza Camp. Fresh tomatoes, no cooking. Bit of garlic, oil and salt. Let stand for a few hours, or overnight.

I used to just use it straight from the jar, but there is a lot of moisture in with the tomato pulp and things were getting a bit gooey, so now I have taken to concentrating the pulp by running yet again through a sieve. I used to use a coffee filter as well but that was just too much trouble – messy and super time-consuming. The fine sieve works, uh, fine.

It tastes great. Takes a couple of hours to do, but only about 30 seconds of work – the rest is waiting for things to drain.

Simple, tasty. I do love having the jars of tomato in the basement. We use them for all kinds of things. Now if only I could convince a certain wife of mine to let me build a wood-fired pizza oven in the backyard. So far my attempts to articulate my rock-solid case for a new piece of backyard furniture have fallen on deaf ears.

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Failure. Even if my family didn’t see it that way.

Not my best effort, but the arugula hid the worst of it. Gotta like greens for that sort of thing.

Not dignifying this with a photo, either. Well, ok, here is a shot from above. 

I burned the pizza last night. Both pies. 

In my defence (not that it helped much at the time and the failure does still sting, a little) I was cooking them over a charcoal fire in a thin metal kettle barbecue. It’s all we have here at the lake. I do have a pizza stone, though. We aren’t savages.

My technique is pretty crude: light a bunch of coals in the kettle, get them going really well, drop in the pizza stone, wait half an hour or so and then cook the pizza. 

This time I used lump charcoal, rather than briquettes. Man, that stuff burns hot. Like really hot. Like hotter than I expected. Ergo, the first pizza, as I was trying to get some heat on top (which, in retrospect, was just not going to happen in a contraption like that) burned rather badly. It was still really tasty, just, as my mother would say, “Crispy”. 

The second pizza was better, but the same thing happened again – a moment of inattention and it was black. Talk about a testament to the triumph of hope over experience. That annoying “Fool me once, won’t get fooled again” quote would also suffice. 

There is only one solution; try again. I’m getting better with barbecue pizza, but there is work yet to be done. 

On a positive note the customers weren’t too fussed. They ate it and didn’t give me a hard time. It’s nice when family is like that. In fact, they told me to stop beating myself up – that they enjoyed it and I should move on.

My wife brought up this post I showed her a while back. Apt.

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Meh

Not going to dignify my pizza dough failure with a photo. Actually, it isn’t a failure… yet. But still no photo.

I thought it had this figured out. Appropriate amounts of water, flour yeast, sugar, oil, elbow grease…

Still flummoxed about yeast, though. This time I used instant yeast as opposed to traditional yeast, and I used about twice as much as was called for in the recipe.

I put it into the fridge overnight… And I took a look just before lunch. The dough has risen. A bit, but it still resembles a large mass of wet flour. I put it on the counter for a few hours to see if we can get some levity. Uh, rise…

Same thing, really.

I have made this dough at least a dozen times. Probably 20, really. And I think I have been really happy with the results once. Maybe twice. The other times haven’t been terrible (with the notable exception of that one time when it tasted like rock-hard pita bread. Yeah, that wasn’t good) The other times haven’t been terrible but damn, it’s hard to get right.

Shouldn’t say that. Throwing together some ingredients and having them rise isn’t too hard. It’s the rise-in-the-fridge-overnight trick that I seem to be struggling with.

But the problem is that the dough tastes WAY better if it has had a few hours to think.

Speaking of which, I better get cracking on my tomato sauce.

**edit** Couple of hours later and the dough is still not resembling what I was hoping but a couple of things have come up:

  • My daughter, who has a birthday today, told me that my worst pizza is miles better than everyone else’s (Her words. Her birthday. Who am I to argue)
  • I’m not entirely sure what pizza dough is supposed to look like. I know, like dough. But all light and fluffy? Sort of wet? Lots of bubbles in there? Not very many? Thankfully, there are as many people to make pizza and pontificate on it as there are pizzas, so I’m pretty sure I can find someone who will agree that this is the proper way to make dough.
  • So the dough stays. I expect it’ll be a challenge to roll out, but who knows? I did give it a good knead, so hopefully that helped. How it might help, I’m not exactly sure, but I expect it’ll help.

Talk about the blind leading the blind.

But I have buffalo mozzarella, regular mozza, and some killer tomato sauce that I make myself, I do. So all is not lost.

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Pizza. More pizza

It was suggested that we have pizza last night. Quick recap:

  • proofing the yeast seemed to work well, even though I wasn’t sure anything was happening. Why don’t I just use instant yeast? Is there a reason to use traditional yeast? Googling will follow
  • Pizza bianco was delightful. Boiled potatoes, taleggio cheese, bit of this, some of that. Tasty
  • Followed up by a margherita with some leftover salami. Not bad.
  • Kids ate it all, which is the acid test for any made-at-home meal.

We have had a few choice items hoisted at us over the last little while. It was great to get a decent meal on the table without too much trouble.

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