The Omnivorous Fish - baking

La Crosta

JoeFish — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:14:51 -0400

Crust is a tough thing to pin down because different people want different things from it. Some want a splintering black crust, some want a chewy morsel. Some want to taste the crust prominently; some want it to hide in the background while they relish the sauce, cheese and toppings. I’ll tell you what I want from it: I want it to be pliable, not splintery, but I still want some break-through when I bite into it, something to chew. I want it to have a very light salt and yeast flavor, maybe not as sour as a baguette, but noticeable. The edges may be blackened slightly, but the whole bottom of the pie should be a deep golden brown, mottled here and there with chestnut. Likewise, the top of the pie should take on a little golden edge.

What goes into pizza dough? Well, if your pizza dough is good, you don’t need anything in it other than flour, water, salt and yeast. Someone recently told me that “what you should do in cooking is to take the original and improve upon it.” What a load of bullshit that is. If you’re cooking really well, you won’t be able to improve on it.

The dough for a pizza is a little drier than what you might be used to for bread. I start making pizza at about 32% water by weight. That means 3-1/2 cups of flour to a cup of water. For that much flour, I would use a teaspoon of yeast, either active dry or a scant teaspoon instant (this just means a little less than a teaspoon, I leave a visible ring of metal in my measuring spoon when I want to do this). I don’t recommend using fresh cake yeast unless you make it yourself or you buy it in a place that you know has very high turnover. This may come as a shock to you, but I don’t believe that the kind of yeast you use has an appreciable affect on flavor if you are using commercial yeast. If you’re harvesting grapes and dusting them with flour to grow your starter, that’s obviously a whole other ballgame.

The flavor of yeast doughs comes mainly from time, especially in a small batch like this. With 50 lbs of flour, 20 oz of yeast will have a much bigger impact on flavor, but even then, premium instant yeast is not only usually a better performer as a leavener, but it has a clean flavor that never goes sour. I use SAF-instant yeast for everything I bake. Red for most things, and gold for high-sugar doughs (you can use Red, but use somewhat less, instant yeast is like a pot-smoking teenager: if there’s food around, it’ll go nuts).

Of course, like any dough, the amount of water and flour will vary with your water, flour, area of the country, temperature, humidity and mood. You have to get a feel for it.

So let’s write out a recipe, for those of you who must have it:

Pizza Dough
15 oz (3 cups) (plus more) AP Flour (unbleached king arthur, gold medal or heckers, in descending order of preference)

1-1/2 teaspoons salt

1 scant teaspoon SAF-instant RED dry yeast (or one teaspoon active dry, preferably Red Star or Fleischman’s)

8 oz (1 cup) water (room temperature if using instant yeast, 115 degrees if using active dry)

If using active dry yeast
Stir a teaspoon of flour into the water and sprinkle the yeast over the top, cover loosely with plastic and allow it to proof, or soften and get a little foamy. It will get to be a kind of sludge in ten minutes or so. Proceed as below. DO NOT DO THIS WITH INSTANT YEAST

If using an electric mixer
Stir together the flour and salt until well combined. Stir in the yeast. You don’t want the yeast and salt to come into direct contact because salt will inhibit its growth. Make a little well in the center. Set the bowl on the stand, pour all the water into the well and mix with the dough hook until the dough just comes together. It will not be a cohesive mass, that’s ok.

Dough just coming together

Take the shaggy mass out of the mixer bowl and knead it on a floured surface enough to make it into a coherent dough, adding flour to keep the surface of the dough dry, perhaps another ½ cup. When the dough is mixed, put it back in the mixer and knead it at low speed for another 5-10 minutes, until it’s homogenous and fairly smooth. If the dough doesn’t seem to be mixing properly, or if it’s “scarring”, let it rest for 5 minutes, then knead it by hand until it seems it’s in the mood. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes, covered with plastic, before dividing.

Scarring dough

If mixing by hand
Stir together the flour and salt until well combined. Stir in the yeast. You don’t want the yeast and salt to come into direct contact because salt will inhibit its growth.

Pour the water into a mixing bowl. Stir the flour mixture into it slowly with a wooden spoon or your fingers, a little at a time, until a dough forms and it’s too thick to stir. Scrape it out of the bowl and knead it on a floured surface enough to make it into a coherent dough, adding flour to keep the surface of the dough dry, perhaps another ½ cup. Continue to knead for another 5-10 minutes, until it’s homogenous and fairly smooth. If the dough doesn’t seem to be mixing properly, or if it’s “scarring”, let it rest for 5 minutes, then continue to knead until it seems it’s in the mood. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes, covered with plastic, before dividing.

Divide the dough
This dough will weigh about 26 ounces. A 16” pie- a large in an American Pizzeria- is made with 24 ounces of dough. A 14”- a medium- is made with a pound. A calzone is made with half a pound (8 ounces). If you have a little home-cook pizza stone, you’ll want to make a 10-12” pie, with about 6-7 ounces of dough. For sicilian pizza, just divide the dough in half for an 8 or 9 inch pie.

The best thing to do, if you have a decent scale, is to weigh your whole dough, then divide that number by four and cut your dough to that size. If you don’t, eyeball it as best you can.

Let the cut pieces rest, covered with plastic, for about 10 minutes, then roll them into balls by pinching the corners continuously towards the center. When it’s become a sort of mushroom of dough, pinch the stem of the mushroom into a point while twisting its cap. Does that make any sense? It doesn’t to me, exactly, but I know how to do it… here’s a photo.

Dough balls for neapolitan pizza

Retard the dough
Retarding the dough simply means- most of the time- to refrigerate it. You’re retarding the growth of yeast, or slowing the rise. You’re also developing flavor.

Space the pieces out in something you can seal up, like a big tupperware lunchmeat keeper or a roasting pan you can tightly cover with plastic wrap. In a pizzeria they have plastic or fiberglass dough boxes which interlock, keeping the air out and keeping the dough moist all over. However you package it, put it in the refrigerator for about 24 hours.

For a sicilian pizza, put the balls into well-oiled 8 or 9 inch square or round pans of cast iron, thick aluminum, or even a cast iron skillet. They should rise for about 20 hours before being pressed into the whole width of the pan, then let to rise for another four hours or so, again in the refrigerator.

Listening: Tortoise TNT “The Suspension Bridge at San Iguazu Falls”

Della Fattoria

JoeFish — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:47:01 -0400

I spent one of the more interesting nights I’ve had in a long time getting in everyone’s way at Della Fattoria, a stellar bakery in Petaluma, California, up in Sonoma County. It means “from the farm,” or even more accurately, “from the family farm” or at least “small farm.” And let me tell you, it is ON the farm. To get to the bakery, you drive down a long dirt path through rows of vines and past the throng of sheep and dogs to the barn where the bakery is housed.

I met Kathleen Weber, one of the owners and founders, at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market (in San Francisco) a few months back and she told me about her oven, a huge wood-fired number custom made for them. As many of you know, I have been toying with the idea of opening a pizzeria for about 20 years now, and have yet to work with a wood-fired oven, so when I heard about Kathleen’s, I had to see it.

I met Kathleen at the farm in the afternoon, much better than the 8PM or so start time I was expecting, and I jumped right in, setting up boards, shaping, racking, but mainly just trying to stay out of the way.

After a few hours of dough work, Aaron, Kathleen’s son/Oven Guy Extraordinaire, began to get the oven ready. Interestingly, this mainly involves cooling the floor of the oven using such high-tech methods as sheet pans with wet towels on them, a wet mop and spraying water into the oven’s crown. He does, however, monitor the temperature with an infrared thermometer, the only real gadget in the place.

I will say right now that pictures on this site look best in Safari. I’m working on that.

Steaming the oven

Loading the oven

I just liked this

Unloading the oven

Loading the corners

More unloading

The belly of the beast

Slashing the loaves

Onto the cooling racks

More loading

The bread

As you’ve noticed, most of the images are blurred. This is either because everyone is moving so fast, or because I am moving so fast to stay out of their way. This is what a bakery is all about, constant, economic motion. After 10 years or so working in bakeries, I have to say it was a great priveliege to work with this crew.

Special thanks to Dave who mixed all the doughs; Scotty- training but kicking butt on the oven unloading; Kashaya who kept him running (and kept me from hanging myself while chopping 20 pounds of figs); Lucas, who after cutting and shaping all afternoon spent the evening nipple-deep in olives; Peter, backing up the oven loading; Aaron, who is a master oven guy; and Kathleen, who forced them all to put up with me for the evening. Bravi fornai!

Don't Touch the Cake

JoeFish — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 17:53:03 -0400

Don’t touch the cake
Cake? I thought you said ravioli? I’ve got a pound of flour in front of me and squash in the oven, when the hell did you decide to make a cake?

Well, I was always going to make a cake, and since yesterday got eaten up at the greenmarket and working on my apartment (I own a place the Agent is not involved in), today became about the cake. If, yesterday, I would have cooked the squash, so it could have drained, I might have been up for ravioli tonight, but now I must find a way to spend the evening not up to my elbows in flour. Oh well.

In case I didn’t mention it, my parents are coming for my mother’s birthday. I’m going to cook dinner tomorrow, then they’re going home Saturday afternoon. My mother loooooves cake, and we have a long history of birthday cake in my family. That said, I hate most cake. That’s not a typo, I didn’t mean moist cake, I meant what I wrote. Most of the birthday cake my family eats comes from one of two bakeries, both of which have slipped in recent years, or worse, from the supermarket. My father and I like rum cake, a traditional Italian cake whose Italian-American rendition increasingly includes mix-cake, prefab pastry cream and “rum flavoring,” the sides encrusted with cake crumbs. The real deal is sponge cake (which is DRY, like a SPONGE) soaked silly with white rum, then filled with alternating layers of vanilla and chocolate pastry cream, and frosted with whipped cream. The sides should be lightly adorned with almonds.

Anyway, my point is, with as many calories as it has, cake has to be damned good for me to eat it. The second-rate bakery cake doesn’t cut it. So, giving my mother- who will eat anything- no less than what I would want for myself, I set out this morning to bake her a cake. When I got home from Fairway, I was set to make a cake out of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s (icing goddess) The Cake Bible, but then, as I checked the blogs, I saw this article at Eggbeater, so naturally I had to make that instead.

I made the recipe as written, with the following mods: I used a whole vanilla bean (seeds into the milk, pod stuffed in the sugar while everything came to room temp) instead of the phenomenal tablespoon of vanilla extract listed (that quantity gave me the courage to experiment) and I used table salt in a slightly smaller quantity¹. The photo shows the beautiful seeds dispersed in the batter. The icing used was RLB’s “Neoclassic Buttercream,” also from The Cake Bible, but I added about ½ teaspoon vanilla and a pinch of salt to it. Let’s face it, salt improves everything.

Vanilla Bean Cake Batter

Cake decorating is one of those things I have always wanted to be good at. Even when I baked professionally, and iced hundreds of cakes in a day, I was never any good at decorating them. I can fake something with a star tip, and I can make nice patterns in the icing with a spatula, but in the deco-department, I am weak. That, however, won’t prevent me from doing it, and pride won’t prevent me from showing you the 3-year-old-finger-painting-esque flower basket I put on this cake.

Happy Birthday Mom

Since I’m not making ravioli, I’m meeting the Agent for dinner.

Listening: NPR, always when I’m baking.

¹For whatever reason, I never seem to have kosher salt around anymore, and the coarse sea salt I buy has crystals that are much bigger. I really should put it on the shopping list.

We Survived

JoeFish — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:17:02 -0400

We survived. We’ve eaten more since Friday than we have in the last year, but we survived. Every pan, every bowl, every dish¹ and every appliance except the ice cream maker- all of which has been in boxes for over a year- has been used. Looking at the overflowing dish drainer last night, and the nut bowls littering the butcher block with little bits of this and that, it was like a battlefield; silent after the carnage.

I’ll start with the last meal first. I tried to balance my love of Autumn with the schizophrenic weather we’ve been having, and, therefore, came up with- climactically speaking- a more or less schizophrenic menu. Here it is:

Toasted Almonds, Pomegranates
Autumn Sorrel Soup (Vegetarian)
Gemelli with Pesto
Poached Chicken with Vegetables
Mixed Salad with Boucheron and Frostberries
Apple Raisin Pie

The toasted almonds came out of an article from Food and Wine from 1997. In the same article, there were other great do-ahead hors d’oeuvres like garlic shrimp and green olive tapenade; it was actually a fantastic piece. Anyway, I hadn’t made them for a long time, and they’re kind of a tradition with one of the guests we had, so they made the list, and it’s the time of year for pomegranates, and The Agent loves them. I only had one fruit, so I seeded it completely, but a cool way to get people involved in their aperitif is to put out wedges of pomegranates with glasses of ice-cold dry vermouth. They pick them apart and sip the aromatic vermouth; it’s a fun way to kill time until the soup is hot.

The sorrel soup was kind of an experiment. The Agent lives for sorrel, and most nights in the spring we have it either by itself or with arugula in a salad. I had never seen Autumn sorrel before but they had it at Gorzynski’s stand on Saturday, and Mrs G explained that it grows again when the weather gets milder. I imagine they might have it again next Saturday, since it’s hardly been cold. Regardless, we were left with several cups of sorrel on the brink of being less than perfect (it goes quickly) but since I have been trying to accommodate The Agent’s vegetarian brother as much as possible, my standard recipe was out. This led to a vegetarian “broth” being made with an onion pique² and a thick slice of ginger, then adding the sorrel (which wilts and browns instantly) and pureeing. While hot it had a bizarre taste, almost reminiscent of saffron, but with cream and chilling it mellowed to a sorrel-esque soup. I have to say, in retrospect, I feel that the vegetable, when cooked, benefits enormously from the richness of stock. Not a triumph, but it was fine, and we drank it out of cups which I feel is the ultimate whimsy in potagerie.

Sorrel, in case you live in a cave, is a wonderful green available in the spring and fall that is bright green, shaped like a cross between arugula and spinach and it tastes of lemon and sour strawberries. It’s very perishable and turns brown when heated, although the green comes back with a white background, like milk or cream. It is fantastic in salads, especially with arugula where they work together with a sort of lemon-pepper counterpoint.

I’ve been eating a lot of pasta lately, and last night was no exception. We had gemelli, twins, interlocking corkscrews of hollow pasta, dressed with old-school pesto, from Lidia Bastianich’s Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen, an excellent book that both notes the difference of and celebrates the food that evolved in this country from the traditional foods of Italians in Italy. And by the way, don’t let me hear any of that shit about pesto only being made in a mortar and pestle. If you rough-cut your basil to a uniform size, you avoid the telltale came-from-a-cuisinart look of big leaves floating in your pesto. Next thing you’ll tell me is that fish mousseline can only be made with a drum sifter.

The poached chicken I’ve been through already, and we served it with traditional appointments, that is to say freshly grated horseradish, mustard, coarse salt, cornichons and the good-tasting but untraditional peperoncini in vinegar. In addition to what’s in the recipe linked above, we had turnips, since Bob is allergic to onions. Sounds boring until you have it with a chicken from Dine’s Farms.

The salad was just mixed fancy lettuces from Fairway with crumbled boucheron, a lightly aged goat cheese, a strong mustard vinaigrette and frostberries. Frostberries? What the hell is a frostberry, you ask? It’s also called an Autumn Olive, Elaeagnus umbellate, a plant native to East Asia and Japan, which produced tiny red berries with an edible seed. They’re very astringent, but- according to Greg Swartz from Gorzynski’s Ornery Farm- don’t have as much flavor until after the first frost, thus the name. I use them almost like capers, except sour instead of salty. They’re great sprinkled on a salad, cheese platter or rich pasta dishes like gnocchi, and we haven’t gotten to it yet, but there’s a fantastic cocktail in there somewhere, maybe with pisco.

Dessert was basic, apple pie with raisins. The only distinctive things about it were my secret ingredient with apples (orange-blossom water, BUT JUST A DROP) and Shuna’s fantastic pie dough recipe, which can be rolled right away. I will leave you to follow the link to get the recipe and excellently detailed instruction (with photos), but I will say that I use fine salt in pie dough where Shuna uses kosher, because I find the stray crystal that survives in the dough to be unpleasant to bite into. Also, I bake by weight, because I have an electronic scale with a tare that allows me to measure everything into the same bowl. I don’t recommend that for novice bakers, but when you can make an educated guess on volumes³, it is infinitely faster, easier and cleaner to weigh. All of my cookbooks have weights written in the margin. The reason I don’t recommend it at first is because if you put too much in, it is mixed with whatever is already in the bowl, so until you’re comfortable with your ingredients, weigh or measure separately. When I want to convert a recipe to weights, I follow the chart in Rose Levy Beranbaum’s seminal volume, The Cake Bible.
These are the dry weights for the recipe in the above link:

10 oz flour
1-3/4 oz sugar

Shuna also doesn’t list the quantity of water, because that is a dangerous thing to do, but in the three pies I made this week, about ¼ cup was used, however, I cannot warn you enough: YOU SHOULD NEVER ADD ALL THE WATER IN A PIE DOUGH RECIPE AT ONCE. It should be sprinkled in as the dough comes together. It can vary depending on the flour and the time of the year by as much as 200%.

The filling was a mixture of Empire and Macoun apples, both hybrids grown locally, the Empire has big apple flavor and doesn’t give up much water, and the Macoun has what I call “built in spice,” giving a little aromatic hint without the obviousness of adding cinnamon. I added only a tiny amount of sugar- which helps to “juice” the pie- but too much sugar masks the fruit you went all the way to the farmers’ market to get, some flour (maybe 2 or 3 tablespoons, judge by which apples you’re using and how wet they are when you take a bite), a handful of golden raisins plumped in hot water and- literally- a DROP of orange-blossom water. Rosewater is nice, also, and slightly more mellow. I also add a pinch of salt to my apples, since I put salt in everything.

We drank several excellent wines that night, not all of which made it onto the menu. Among them were a Carneros Creek pinot noir and with dessert we had Doc’s Draft Hard Apple Cider, which is made by Warwick Winery, and in addition to being the perfect accompaniment to the pie, is a steal at $5.99 for 650mL (at Vintage, those scumbags at Whole Foods get another dollar). Go out and get some to drink with your local apples today!

Listening: NPR, sorry I’m boring.

¹ An exaggeration. We have a lot of dishes.
² An onion, peeled, studded with cloves and a bay leaf. I make mine look like this.
Onion Pique

³ For example, I don’t measure or weigh anymore when making pasta, because so much is variable, like the humidity and the age of the eggs. It’s a