Quick Crusty Chewy Pizza

There are sundry ways of making something resembling real pizza without spending that much time. Lightly grilling a split English muffin first, then topping it with ingredients you love, and putting it back under the grill does result in a familiar enough goodie. But if you want a fresh, chewy dough coupled with a charred crust along with that favourite topping, shallow fry an easy-to-make flatbread dough in a skillet slicked with olive oil. Partially folding it over not only allows hassle-free removal but also slices which can be held in your hands via the folded edge. Pizza after all is a supreme finger food.

This lovely slab of goodness eventually got cut into hefty strips

Makes enough dough for about 10 individual pizzas: mix 600 gms/21 dry oz of plain, white flour, 325 ml/11 fluid oz of milk, and 1/2 tsp salt together. Knead until smooth which takes about five to eight minutes by hand. The ingredients can be halved to get a smaller amount, but keep in mind it does freeze well. A piece of dough the size of a golf ball is what you want for an 8 inch/20 cm to 9 inch/23 cm skillet. Roll it out as thinly as possible. Put at least a tablespoon of olive oil—more if you, as I do, want rivulets oozing onto the flatbread—in a heavy-bottomed skillet over high heat. Test for appropriate temperature by placing the tip of a wooden spoon's handle in the oil; a steady stream of tiny bubbles will appear if the oil is ready for the flatbread.

Carefully place a flatbread in the oil and then flip it over after thirty seconds or until slightly golden. Lower the heat and add your topping. Mine consisted of sliced tomatoes, freshly grated Parmesan, capers, dried basil, salt, and freshly ground black pepper. Cook for about five minutes or until everything is nice and warm, crusty but still chewy. Partially fold, serve on a platter, and slice into portions.

The large air bubbles simulate a yeast dough

Making pizza from dough that did a slow-rise in the fridge overnight is worth the effort, but there is no way to get the fabled charring that only commercial ovens can achieve. But it does happen when tossing a super-thin flatbread circle into a sizzling frying pan! 

A charred pizza crust is the way to my native New Yorker's heart...and stomach

The last big batch of our potager's tomatoes has been processed into stewed deliciousness. Happily there are still a few fresh toms here and there which are ideal for making some quick, crusty, chewy pizza.

Recent days have been warm and rainy of which our fig tree shows its appreciation by being full of ripening fruit. Store-bought figs are expensive simply because they bruise easily which makes transportation a challenge. If all possible, plant a fig tree chez vous as they are tough and productive, almost embarrassingly so. Fully ripe figs—partially ripe ones taste like chalk—are gorgeous.

A ripe fig feels like a little water balloon and needs just a slight pressure to harvest

Harvesting bay leaves is done best in spring as their aromatic sap rises then, but if one's stash is getting low don't hesitate to do it now.

Pick the largest leaves, wash, dry & cure on a dish/rack for about two weeks

Though honeysuckle is known for both early summer and autumn blooming, it's the first time our bushes have graced this season with their fragrant flowers.

One bush in the back of the garden has been allowed to drape itself over a pile of pruned branches. Because of wanting to be near its perfume, I use any excuse for adding to the compost piles situated just behind their trailing branches.

Dirac the Young Cat knows how many hedgehogs and lizards reside in this honeysuckle-covered mound but he isn't telling!

Reluctant to romp in the rain, once coming inside he enjoys kneading and cuddling my old fleece jacket.

À la prochaine!

RELATED POST

How to make pizza (photos from this old post got corrupted somehow, but the instructions remain correct)

Roasted Sweet Red Pepper & White Bean Soup With Grilled Cheese Croutons

A simple soup of few ingredients becomes outstanding if grilling is used as a preparatory technique, garnishing is done with a flourish, and the flavour is brightened with a dash of sherry vinegar.

Pureed white beans gives body and creaminess to the soup

Sunny, hot weather in the last week has brought our potager's remaining green bell and Landes peppers into the gloriously mellow realm of red.

INGREDIENTS
makes enough for a meal for two or four smaller servings
Peppers, red, sweet, large, 4
Onion, yellow, medium, peeled, diced
Garlic cloves, large, 3, smashed and skin removed
Beans, white, canned or cooked dried, 12 fluid ounces
Stock, chicken, 32 fluid ounces
Olive oil, 3 T
Vinegar, sherry, 1/2 tsp or to taste
Bay leaf, large, 1
Salt and freshly ground black peppercorns to taste
Pepper, green, a few strips for garnishing

CROUTONS
for each grilled cheese sandwich (I made four)
Cheese, grated (I used a mix of cheddar and Parmesan), 2 heaping T
Bread, slices, 2 (I used sour dough rye)
Butter, room temperature, 1 heaping T

Preheat the oven grill. Rinse and dry the peppers. Place about six inches under the hot grill, turning them on all sides until blackened which takes about from ten to fifteen minutes depending on size and type.

Peppers while being grilled ooze goo so lining the pan with foil makes cleaning a cinch

Wrinkling of the skin is a good tell that they will be easily skinned.

Pop them into a sturdy ziploc bag suitable for freezing hot food where they will steam on the counter or table for about ten minutes. If they are a bit recalcitrant than put them back in the bag until they behave.

The skin should easily be pulled off the meaty flesh.

The peeled peppers may look unappetising, but once simmered and pureed, they will impart to the soup a velvety depth of flavour. Chop them coarsely.

Saute the onions and garlic in the hot olive oil for several minutes. Add the red peppers and the rinsed beans. Cook for another minute or so while stirring.

Stir in chicken stock and bay leaf.

I used two small leaves instead of a large one

Cover and simmer for about a half hour. Meanwhile make the grilled cheese croutons. Spread butter on one side of a slice and place buttered side down in a skillet. Cover with cheese. Butter one side of another slice and place it plain side down. Over medium heat, cook til browned and crusty which should take several minutes. Flip it over.

While the other side is getting grilled, press the sandwich with a potato masher, a small plate, or a flexible metal spatula. Pressing only on the grilled sides will prevent the spatula sticking to butter and pulling out bread chunks. 

Cut into small squares.

Grilled cheese croutons are darling.

Remove the bay leaf. Puree the soup with a stick mixer or in a blender. Reheat if necessary and season to taste with sherry vinegar, salt, and freshly ground black pepper. Garnished with  julienne of green pepper, this soup is a lovely bowl of warm deliciousness. 

Along with mums, dahlias rule in the flower garden.

When fully opened, this variety has a diameter the size of a luncheon plate

Early fall is a good time to harvest bay leaves when they are at their most flavourful and mature. The foot-high seedling of five years ago is now nearly six feet. Prunings serves two purposes: leaves for culinary use and shoots for rooting to get more of these hardy, beautiful, evergreen, fragrant bushes.

Letting a few leaves remain on top of the cutting, remove the rest. The bush-to-be can be trimmed to a length of about four to five inches, dipped in rooting hormone, and tucked into a pot filled with a light, non-soil mix. Water it thoroughly and cover with a plastic bag which will act as a moisture-retaining tent. Keep it outside sheltered from winds and direct sunlight throughout the winter to encourage root growth and for it to be ready for spring transplanting.

The Calm One in his quest to use our oven more efficiently bought a four-tiered stand that was supposed to cook that many pizzas at the same time. The soggy results became the mother of invention as I now use it to dry herbs, and at present, specifically bay leaves which need to be crackly dry in order to eliminate any trace of toxicity. Rinse and dry them, spreading a single layer in a wicker basket or a plate and leaving them be for about two weeks until they are completely dessicated. Store in a lidded jar.

Dirac the kitten when concerned that I may be developing eyestrain, lovingly sits on the book I am reading to give me a break.

À la prochaine!

Whooosh...It's Glorious Spring!

Spring has exploded in the southwest of France. Though all the rushing around is exhilarating, I try not to get overwhelmed as various windows of opportunities get ready to slam shut right on my soil-encrusted fingers.  Therefore from time to time, I walk through the garden while pretending I am a visitor who appreciates the whole garden and nothing but the whole garden with its freshness, colour, fragrance, inspiration, and companionship.

Maple & box elder in background; lilacs, bearded irises, roses & violets in foreground.

So invigorating to see pastel lilacs etched against the vivid blue sky.

How lilac panicles flower: lovely contrast between darker buds and opened blossoms.

Briefly I can forget the nagging evidence of pressing tasks:  What weeds which will become almost impossible to remove once the soil dries as hard a rock? What block bed needing spading this instant to allow sowing spinach so in one and half months I can transplant the tomatoes into the same bed?  What transplants bursting out of their small pots?  What fresh growth on established plants that will get too big for cuttings if I don't get my secateurs out this second? I don't see any!  I see just exuberant life.

The larger of the two apple trees is casting its shadow on the lawn.

If that fails, I go and munch some digestive biscuits which The Calm One keeps in a cupboard near my potting room in the sous sol and of which he thinks I am unaware.  Or I should say, he once thought I was unaware as the stack of cookies' rapid loss of height, that is, a reverse Pinocchio's nose, reveals my behaviour. Increased caloric output coupled with no spare time necessitates snacking, quick meals, and even better, food cooked by someone else. Knowing my last and long-awaited nursery order has finally arrived and that my presence in the kitchen will be sparse if not completely non-existent, The Calm One has made his family's classic, Kitchen Sink Potato Salad.  It will feed us for about four days. Yay!

Please pile it on! And then some.

It goes well with Saucisses de Strasbourg.  OK, hotdogs!

Walking around the quartier is also a way to relax and provides the opportunity to see others' front gardens.

Bluebells in the centre background, flanked by peonies and fronted with overhanging aubrieta.

In the potager, the garlic planted last autumn was recently fertilised. Dayo helpfully reminds me however that I still need to weed and mulch the bed.

Temporary feline mulch

I tell him that I am waiting for the fresh grass clippings to dry out.

I managed to spade around the small peach tree in the background, but still have to weed & fertilize it, like yesterday!

In between planting the onion sets and the early potatoes, I remembered to put spinach seeds in water for an overnight soaking which encourages faster germination.  Fresh seed is crucial to get a good yield from spinach.  Since I plant two crops, one in early spring and another in late summer, I go through a packet in one year.

I love my new & oh so soft gardening gloves:  chocolate/chartreuse suede & leather sensuality!

Spaded, one-inch-deep furrowed bed waiting for spinach to be sown

After draining the soaking water--I use an old, small kitchen sieve--dry the seeds on a paper towel so they can be more easily placed in the furrows (made with the pole end of the rake) and put about twelve of the large seeds, each spaced several inches apart, in short rows for a four-foot-wide block bed.  Using a rake, cover with soil, tamp down with the back of the rake, water and keep surface moist until they sprout.

Dayo himself gets overwhelmed at times:  should he sip from one of his preferred drinking vessels or should he inspect the newly arrived blueberry plants?

White flake in the watering can is an apple blossom petal; sometimes their determined flurries resemble snow.

Being conscientious, his thirst can wait a bit longer until he finishes the more pressing task of ensuring the blueberries are in a good state.

The bay leaf harvest starts in spring as their pungency lessens as late summer/autumn approaches, though I have been known to pick their evergreen leaves when there is snow on the ground.  Harvest alternately up and down the stems so as not to leave bare patches.  Wash, dry, and place on a rack or a plate for about two weeks until you can crack a leaf in half and the bracing and uplifting fragrance is noticeable.  Put in lidded bottles--I reserve the small jars which capers come in for storing dried herbs.

À la prochaine!

RELATED POSTS

Planting garlic cloves
Sowing Onion sets
Planting potatoes

Pizza with Tomatoes, Parmesan, Mozzarella, Mushrooms, and Sausage

Pizza here in France can be good though being made and presented differently than to what I was accustomed in New York City, as in having crème fraîche sometimes substituting for tomatoes and of course containing various French cheeses like Gruyère.   Excellent pizza is usually sold from a specially dedicated truck or a kiosk often kept in permanent locations.  However, some restaurant chains, whose names I will not mention, should be ashamed of themselves, or at least the people who pay to eat the kept-hot-under-lamps sawdust crusts/canned fillings should be.

I miss seeing industrious NYC pizzaiolos adorned with their colourful neck bandanas as they energetically flip large circles of pliable dough while dewdrops of artisanale sweat moisten their earnest faces all the while smiling at their sidewalk admirers through the gleaming, plate-glass shop windows.  You just have to go in and get some of what they are making.

My pizza though inspired by the NYC style, that is, it boasts of a very thin and tasty crust and abundant cheese, is of course, not baked in a professional oven.  My home oven will only fit 8 inch pizzas, so the slices are not the typical over-sized triangles of NYC pizza.  Many people aspire to be NYC natives, but unless you can walk gracefully down a busy city while delicately folding a huge triangle in half and eating it without pausing in your stride or dribbling any of its molten ingredients down the front of you, then this jury of one will hold her verdict.

Ingredients
Makes two 20 cm pizzas plus extra dough to be frozen for two more 20 cm pizzas.

• Flour, white, 425 grams
• Olive oil, extra virgin, 1 T
• Salt, preferably coarse, 1 tsp
• Yeast, active dry, 2 tsp
• sugar, 1.5 tsp 
• Water, warm, about 250 ml
• Tomatoes, plum, fresh or canned, about 6
• Mozarella, sliced thinly, approx 300 grams, about 22 slices,
• Parmesan, grated, 1/2 cup*
• Sausages, sweet Italian or Toulouse, removed from casings, sauteed, two
• Mushrooms, fresh or frozen, lightly sauteed in olive oil, 1 cup* (canned may be used, but they will taste less appetising;  frozen mushrooms can release a lot of liquid, so drain them and use their juices for broth)

* based on the American measure of 8 oz 

Equipment

• Pastry board or glass chopping board which will also be used as a peel to place safely the pizzas into a hot oven
• Silicon or very thick cloth oven mitts/potholder
• Resistant-to-high-temperature shallow oven pans or a pizza stone
• Oven-proof parchment paper
• Mixer with dough hook, though dough can be kneaded by hand
  

Making dough

The night before make the dough which will be left overnight in the fridge for a slow, cold rise to develop irresistibly tasty, naturally forming chemical compounds.  Put flour in the bowl of a bread mixer and make two wells, one for the yeast, sugar, and warm water and the other for salt and olive oil.

Mix for about 12 minutes until it is smooth and elastic.  Remove from hook and place in a lightly oiled bowl.  Flip the dough ball over so the oiled surface is on top.  Cover and keep it overnight in the fridge twelve hours as a minimum and twenty-four hours as the maximum.

Assembly

The next day, preheat oven and pans to 475 to 500 (as hot as you can bear working with such heat) degrees F.  Remove dough from the fridge and let warm to room temperature.

Lay out all the toppings.  Break up the cooked and cooled sausage meat into tiny pieces, using your fingers and separating the amount into two equal portions.  Put the sauteed mushrooms on a plate and separate into two equal portions.  Keep the sliced mozzarella and grated Parmesan close by, dividing them into two equal portions.  If tomatoes are fresh, remove skins by dipping briefly in boiling water and chop coarsely.  If canned, just chop them.  Divide the tomatoes into two equal portions.

Preparation of crusts

Weigh out into two equal balls.  Wrap one for the freezer for future pizzas and halve the remaining one.

Place the two smaller balls on their floured oven paper and flatten with your hands a bit.  Then with a finger depress all around the perimeter an inch in from the edge to allow for the crust.

As dough warms to room temperature, it will be easier to pull and press the balls into two round circles.

Finish stretching and pressing the two crusts till their diameters are roughly 20 cm, and the circle is about 1/8 to 1/4 thick.  I love this part of the process.  Perhaps it was my years of working with pottery clay and throwing pots that enables me to enjoy working with dough--my fingers became very sensitive to the thickness of clay walls as I would raise rotating cylinders on the wheel.  Pizza dough's stretchiness is pretty accommodating.  Your finger tips have loads of nerve endings, so let them tell you if the crust has been evenly stretched; just work out the thicker parts and fatten up the thinner parts as the dough is very elastic.  You could just press the dough into a round pan, but making a pizza circle free form is a lovely skill to have.

All the toppings are set out

Spread the tomatoes on both circles.  Lay the sliced mozzarella and sprinkle with the Parmesan.

These Mozzarella slice are too thick, so try to keep them much thinner

Distribute the sausage pieces and end with a layer of mushrooms.  Using a glass/wooden pastry board as a peel, slide the pie with its paper into the HOT pan/on the stone in the HOT oven.  Take great care in doing so, using adequate protection for your hands.

Bake for 6-7 minutes and then rotate the pans and bake for a further 6-7.  Remove the pans, sliding the pie and its paper on a cutting surface.  Since home ovens are way less hot than professional ones, the bottom will not have the characteristic spots of charring, but it should be a nice golden brown.  Using a pizza cutter or a sharp knife, make four slices.  The too thickly sliced Mozarella caused a cheese-lava spill--certainly a delicious and appetizing one--but still, causing a diminishing of its finger-food status.  And yes, I still fold these smaller triangles in half as a nostalgic gesture.

Any uneaten pizza can be frozen and be reheated either in a covered casserole in a 350 degrees F oven for about 30 to 45 minutes or in the microwave.  If still frozen, the pizza will take longer to get fully hot. And please, if you are one of those oddballs who enjoy congealed, tepid pizzas, I don't want to know about it!

With plentiful rain, the grass has grown tall and is too much a treat to be passed up by Dayo.

Autumn is the best time to plant garlic, though an early spring planting would work also.  I grew enough this season to be able to use my own stock. I am using the largest bulbs from the late July harvest.

The biggest heads are on the left

Per Margaret Roach at A Way to Garden,  if only the biggest garlic cloves are selected, then eventually all that will be harvested are jumbo heads of large cloves--artificial selection at work.  The cloves are separated and only the larger outer ones are planted.  The rest of course are happily eaten.  If in a pinch, it is possible as long as the garlic has not been treated to suppress sprouting, to use supermarket/farmer's market garlic for your planting.  If you are interested in growing your own or improving what you are already growing, make sure to check out the various relevant posts written by Margaret--she knows her stuff!

Loosen soil with a spade or fork, remove weeds, add compost, and rake level.  With the rake's end make furrows about 2 inches deep and 4-6 inches apart in a block bed.  Put cloves about 4-6 inches apart in each short row.  Cover the furrow with earth and tamp down.  Normally, I would thoroughly moisten the bed with a light spray, but the soil is still quite soppy from almost constant rain.  The rain is doing a good job preparing the garden for the winter as it is terribly stressful for plants to endure winter if their roots are dry.

Note the the few back rows are already tamped down

As the temperatures continue to fall, I am on the guard to protect any vulnerable plants and have potted up the chives.  They will spend the short winter on a sunny sous sol window.

There are several young sweet bay leaf (Laurus nobilis) shrubs in my garden.  Bay leaves are one of the ingredients comprising bouquet garni, an indispensable feature in French cuisine. The leaves are harvested from all around the plant as to prevent bare spots and set out to dry for about two-three days.  They are then stored in recycled spice bottles.  As their invigorating fragrance is one of my favourites, I often toss a nice handful into my hot bath.

There usually is one head of broccoli that bolts into flowering because of a surprise bout of warm weather.  Their soft-yellow is a welcomed addition to the typically sombre autumnal palette.

This Abelia with its lovely arching branches is about thirteen years old and spent most of its life in a small pot on the balcony of our Grenoble apartment.  It is very happy to be in real soil and to be near bees that love its honey fragrance and nectar, hence its name. It is a wonderful, semi-evergreen bush for the garden as it holds visual interest all year round.  It sparkly white flowers are mostly gone and in their place are red sepals.

À la prochaine!

RELATED POSTS

Improvements on my basic pizza recipe