More pizza :)

I know I post a lot of pizza photos. I'm like a proud dad.

Ricotta, home-grown tomatoes, home grown basil, jimmy dean sausage.

What's your "Go-To" meal?

Better, but not perfect!

Not that there is a "perfect" when it comes to my pizza, but I'm getting better.

It's definitely better on the grill than in the oven. I can get the stone a lot hotter, which makes for a better crust underneath. I might have to get another stone above the pizza to keep the air temperature as hot as I'd like. This is the beginning of craziness though.

Yes, my stone is cracked. No, I don't give a crap.

Pizza nerds call this the "upskirt" shot. 

I'm pretty happy with the amount that the bottom is getting cooked. I just need to get the temp above the pizza hotter to match.

The crust is nice and moist and fluffy. Not bad.

Pizza FAIL

No, I'm not perfect, as some of my loyal readers might believe. Sometimes it takes me a couple tries to get things the way I want them. (ok, sometimes more than a couple.)

Tonight was one of those nights. I needed to prepare for the summer, for when it's too warm to run the oven at full blast in the house. But I obviously couldn't go the entire summer without making pizza, so it was time to practice pizza on the grill. This can get a little tricky, because I am just not a pizza master yet. A regular oven has its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it's highly controllable and convenient. On the negative side, it can only get up to about 500 degrees maximum, and then the kitchen gets really hot. The grill has its own pluses and minuses. It is able to get much hotter, which is a plus, but it's not very well insulated, so once you open the lid, all the heat escapes pretty quickly.

Tonight I decided to build my pizza on this new aluminum screen, which I figured would allow me to get the pizza deployed much quicker. I turned on the grill on full blast with my baking stone in the center, and let it get as hot as possible. (my main issue with the oven is that I can't get the stone as hot as I'd like, so the bottom of the pizza doesn't get fully cooked.)

I took the pizza outside, ready to be cooked.

This pizza has thinly sliced roma tomatoes, ground sausage, mushrooms, shallots, and ricotta cheese.

When I put it on the grill, I made sure to only open the lid a little bit, so the heat wouldn't escape. I was pretty successful in this, but I soon saw a problem. There was tons of smoke that started coming out from the grill. I didn't get any photos, because I was freaking out a little trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Turns out that I forgot to clean the drip tray under the burners, and the crap that was in there ignited from the high heat. 

It started covering my beautiful pizza with black smoke (not the good kind of smokiness that bbq-ers covet). I took the pizza out as soon as I could, and turned off the grill.

I was hungry though, so I didn't want to start over, so I turned on the oven and figured What the hell, I'll try to salvage it. It came out ok, it was nice and crispy, but the color left something to be desired. Grey pizza crust is not an attractive trait.

The grill experiment did confirm one thing that I was wondering about though. It was able to retain a high enough air temperature to produce decent spring in the dough. (This is caused by the rapid heating of the dough, which causes the small bubbles from the yeast to expand, leaving bubbles in the fluffy risen crust.)

I was also pretty happy with the crispiness of the crust, but that doesn't have anything to do with the grill or the oven. I think it just dried out too much because of the fact that I cooked it twice. Oh well. Next time will be better. At least it tasted ok! (I'll probably die sooner though, because of the carcinogens in the smoke)

What meals have you fucked up? Were the results edible?

More Man Food

Fending for myself again, I decided to go a little crazy. I had bought some ground beef the other day (wife doesn't eat red meat all that often), so I figured I'd make a burger.

The asparagus is there to be healthy. The beer is for carbs.

But a regular burger isn't interesting enough, of course. First, I made my own bread for the bun. I also decided to mix in a little ground sausage for flavor. About 20% ground sausage, all mixed up with the 80/20 ground beef. YUM.

But wait, there's more.

I also stuffed it with blue cheese. When it cooked, it got all melty and awesome. Then I threw a slice of cheddar on top (but really, it didn't need it). The bun was delicious right out of the oven, but a little too crusty. The burger was pretty soft, so it fell apart when I bit into it. In a delicious way.

Here are some bonus pictures from the past few nights:

chicken wings with hot sauce and blue cheese

I made the hot wings the day after the corn dogs. This was another "fend for yourself" meal. Hence the beer. And the spicy. And the no-vegetables. Does the green/blue stuff in the blue cheese count as a vegetable? It grows! And yes, I know the placemat is dirty. Must be crumbs from the corndog. Yeah, definitely not crumbs from a week ago.

Anchovy pizza

We had never had anchovy pizza before, so I decided to give it a try. I did overcook it a little, but overall it wasn't horrible. The anchovies were a lot saltier and fishier tasting than we expected though, and Angie pulled them off her slice. If we do this again, I will try rinsing the anchovies a little to remove some of the salt.

I also made some awesome French Vanilla Ice cream. 1 cup heavy cream, 2 cups half & half, some sugar, and 3 egg yolks. Oh, and the most important part, 1 whole vanilla bean, split and scraped. I think this may be the best ice cream I've made yet. Maybe next time I'll let it churn a little longer though, to get a tiny bit more air into it.

YUM!

Laziness.... Playing Catchup

Yeah, so I haven't been a very good blogger lately. If only I didn't have to work. Who am I kidding? I'd probably still slack off.

Anyway, here are some pics from recent meals.

chicken and olive pizza. This pie was made in honor of Pi day (3/14)

Chocochip cookies for my lovely wife. And some without chips for me.

Beer and buffalo wings. This is the type of thing I eat when I am left to fend for myself.

The wing aftermath

What do you eat when you eat alone?

Step-by-step: Pizza Pizza!

In the first of what I hope to be many of its kind, here is a step-by-step (mostly) process of how I make pizza.

Pizza, and a puzzle!

I recently purchased the book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I tried out the first basic recipe, and it really couldn't be simpler. I bought a large plastic container (around 5 qt., or 1.25 gallons), and took about 3 minutes to add the four ingredients and mix them all up. I let it rest on the counter, then threw it in the fridge.

I've been using this batch all week for dinner bread, and even made some rolls for lunch, baked the same morning! But that's for a different post. Today we're going to talk about pizza!

I started out making pizza several months ago, and like everything else, there was a learning curve.

a tough, dense crust.

It took a while to figure out how to get the crust (or "cornicione") to puff up the way I wanted. Turns out, you want to keep the air bubbles produced by the yeast inside the dough, instead of obliterating them with a rolling pin. Who knew? Once I figured that out, they started turning out a little better. I pressed out my dough from the center, leaving the edges alone.

Now, with the dough from the book above, my pizza dough is coming out great. I made some last night, from the same batch that I used for the roll for today's lunch. First, I stretched the dough thinly (maybe a little too thinly this time, because there are a few holes that I had to patch up).

I put it on my awesome new Superpeel, and topped it with tomato sauce, shredded mozzarella cheese, scoops of Ricotta cheese, ground sausage, and some pepperoni slices.

I put a baking stone at the lowest point in my oven,  and heated it to 500 degrees (that's about as high as it will go). Slide the pizza onto the stone, cook for about 10 minutes, and voila!

The crust was crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, but not so tough that it was difficult to chew. I was quite happy with the outcome.

Angie came home later, and said that she wanted one too, so I quickly whipped up another one, this time with fake-eroni. 

And now, a culinary puzzle: I made this after dinner. This is step one of the process. Can you guess what it is?