What are you cooking?

[Marx]

I continue to experiment with/against pizza doughs. This time went back to the Ur-Pizza… the Flattened Dough Ne Pizza from which my original attempts all spawned.

That’s right. Matt’s Skull and Roses Review.

500g flour,
20ml warm water with 1/2 tsp sugar and 2 tsp yeast “until foamy” (“It should be way foamier than that don’t use powdered sugar”)
4 tbsp olive oil (“or just a glug, just eyeball it, really”)
1 tsp salt (“or however much you want… look I wrote that down, and I may have made a mistake!”)
100 ml of warm water (“Maybe add a bit more if you need… but you shouldn’t if you didn’t use the wrong sugar… it shouldn’t be this goopy”)
Mix by hand, let rise for 1.5 hours.

I replaced 100g of flour with whole wheat (out of laziness, since I only had 400g of plain flour upstairs and didn’t want to go downstairs to refill the flour container… jokes on me, since I had to do it anyway to flour my work surface to roll out the dough).

End result was fine. I’d go so far as to say “good”, although I don’t think I added enough water (have I mentioned that I’m really bad with “just do this until it’s right” recipes?). But still content with the results. Just moz, tomato, and pepperoni for toppings this time around (and tomato sauce from a tin, since I have never seen tomato sauce in a box or tube).

Forgot to take pictures. But it looked and tasted like pizza, even if it was only a 7.5/10 on the yummy scale.

[dscheidt]

That’s a very dry dough. I make it out as 24% hydration (mass of water to mss of flour). The dough that I used for my recent pictures, which is of the Chicago Tavern lineage, which uses dry dough (and lots of bench flour when rolling it out), is as dry as I’ll ever go, at 47%. (so you’d use 235 g of water for 500 g flour).

“Just do this until it’s right” isn’t a recipe; it’s just an instruction. That’s okay for cooking, not so much for baking.

so, for completness, here is the forumla I used.
100% AP flour
47% water
5% oil (I use corn oil; you can use olive, but you’ll taste it)
1% salt
1% sugar
0.5% instant dry yeast (whatever dry yeast you have is fine; wet yeast will work, you’d have to figure out the conversion yourself)

Put water in oil in mixer bowl. Add dry ingredients. mix for five minutes. Refrigerate dough, covered, for 24 hours to 48 hours. Divide into ~200 g balls, roll out, with plenty of bench flour to about 1/16" thick. Dress, cook on stone at 550F for 7 to 8 minutes.

[RogerBW]

@dscheidt

47%. (so you’d use 235 g of water for 500 g flour).

That is a strange and innovative use of percentages that I have not previously encountered. I would call that 32% water (235g of water out of the total of (235+500)g).

[Griffster77]

Its more about ratio than a true percentage. They measure the percentage of hydration against the total amount of flour. So if you’ve got 1000g of flour, 70% hydration would be 700ml of liquid.

[yashima]

@RogerBW

That is a strange and innovative use of percentages

over here they call it baker’s percentage afaik

[dscheidt]

@RogerBW

@dscheidt

47%. (so you’d use 235 g of water for 500 g flour).

That is a strange and innovative use of percentages that I have not previously encountered. I would call that 32% water (235g of water out of the total of (235+500)g).

It’s all relative to the mass of flour. The system is called ‘baker’s percentages’ or ‘baker’s percents’. there are two big advantages with it.

Zeroth, it confuses people who aren’t bakers. But it also allows the modification of a recipe without changing other numbers. Decide that 5% oil is too much? change it to 3%, and it doesn’t change the percentage of water.

First, it lets someone with some experience look at a formula, and know from experience what it is going to behave like, or what other formula they already use that they could use instead.

Second, it makes scaling a recipe from a couple hundred grams of flour (a single loaf) to a couple hundred kilograms easy. This is a thing that small bakers do pretty much every day. Some days they know they need 10 loaves of something, some days 100, or anything in between, and scaling a conventional recipe from two loaves to 47 is easy to screw up.

Formulas are sometimes given as everything adding up 100%, but not often. The ones that I have seen like that have been from industrial settings. The recipe isn’t going to change, it’s proven for the equipment and materials used, it’s just going to be scaled to match required production.

The one thing that’s harder with baker percentages are getting a particular target mass. For example, I have some Pullman loaf pans (pans with cover, that make loaves that are rectangular prisms.) which I use for some breads. I know they work best with 947 g of a particular formula. Less than that, they don’t fill the volume, more than that, they overfill it and density goes up. you need to convert to second form to do that. (It’s the future. I use a spreadsheet that does the conversion internally. When I adjust to the furture, I will put all my formulas on their own sheets, and not have to mess with it. I should also add a loaf size parameter, and make the user input number of loaves, shouldn’t I?)

[RogerBW]

Thanks all. All right, I was being snarky about it, but I assumed it was deliberate and I can see it having virtues – particularly if you basically never use “proper” percentages and therefore never have to worry about which system should be used in a particular context.

[Griffster77]

I just dont worry about being that accurate with my tins!!

[dscheidt]

Heh. I don’t either, except for the Pullman pans. I don’t use them a whole lot, but I have a few things that I use them for. if you’re using them, you want square loaves.

[dscheidt]

Some bread:

This is a rich dough, with a cinnamon sugar filling rolled up in it.
Not allowed to stay bread for long, though.

A few eggs, a quart of cream, an ounce of vanilla, little salt.

After a soak, and some vacuuming, they’re ready for the trip in the (not just) meat jacuuzi.

After an hour in Jacuzzi, everyone like a good ice bath.

Ready for the freezer. (one bag of these are reserved for tomorrow’s breakfast.)

[Agemegos]

My sister’s friend Nicole and her husband Mark were here for a couple of days because they were planning to go to Mark & Nicole’s farm in Illinois for Nicole’s birthday, but can’t get there.

Thursday night I made pizzas — 450 g strong flour, 320 g lukewarm water, 2 tablespoons of light olive oil, 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoons of ground oregano, making two 12" pizzas. It’s a wet dough that I knead a lot and cook on steel trays, on a pizza stone in my patio heater. The first was my “pizza-flavoured pizza”, with tomato sauce, cheddar, onions, red capsicum (bell pepper), Portobello mushrooms, olives, pepperoni, and bacon. The second was a Margherita with mozarella from a buffalo dairy near here and masses of basil from my herb patch. I had trouble with excessive water and bad texture in the mozarella (though the flavour was excellent). No more frozen mozarella for me, and in future I will take Mark’s suggestion and drain it on paper towels after slicing. This was the first time I tried cooking the base with the tomato sauce on it first, then adding the cheese for a shorter cook, and then dressing the cooked pizza with basil and olive oil. That works much better.

Last night we kicked off with goat’s cheese soufflé tarts accompanied by a pear and walnut salad. Then one of the slowly-roasted dry-aged beef rib roasts I have described before, with garlic beans, potatoes baked in duck fat, and thick lashings of reduced beef stock. Then a bite of cheese (the buffalo blue cheese was disappointing, I thought). And finally a lemon-myrtle bavarois with lime and ginger syrup.

This time I cooked the beef very low (90–100 C until the end, when the [charcoal remains of the] wood blocks broke up and started burning a bit hotter), to an internal temperature of 55 C and then rested it 20 minutes. I really think I nailed it this time, and the response was ecstatic.

Mark had been appraised of the menu and brought matched wines, starting with a pinot blanc (not something I was familiar with before). I think I disappointed (but obviously did not surprise) him by thinking the 2005 Barossa Valley Mouvédre was a better match to the beef than the 2018 Margaux. Australians!

[yashima]

If pinot blanc is the same as our Weissburgunder, it’s the best wine to have with some beautiful spring vegetables especially white asparagus. I love it.

We had a completely different kind of wine last night. it’s the season for new wine and everything with onions… so we made the promised Flammkuchen with Münster cheese.

Also seen at the bakery onion pie:

[dscheidt]

few minutes on the griddle,

Ready to eat.

[Seryn]

Trying a suggestion to work through a cook book from front to back. The one I chose is themed around the seasons and individual ingredients. Starting at fall, the first ingredient is Apples. So here we have apple mostarda, apple butter, stewed apple and cabbage. Oh and I guess there’s some pork chop in there somewhere.

I also spent all of today on dessert for my Cascadia feast from last week. I’m pretty new to buttercream, but pretty happy with how this turned out.

[Whistle_Pig]

@Seryn

Trying a suggestion to work through a cook book from front to back

That’s an interesting suggestion. Might be a good way to get out of my habit of only cooking stir-fry, curry, and beans on toast

[RogerBW]

But then you get really good at stir-fry, curry, and beans on toast…

[Fodder256]

I’d have thought the next step would be curried stir-fried beans on toast?

[Whistle_Pig]

The beans on toast already have curry powder in them!

[yashima]

@Whistle_Pig

Might be a good way to get out of my habit of only cooking stir-fry, curry, and beans on toast

Except for putting the beans on the toast we put them on the side, the rest looks like a good plan for about half a week over here Lots of Thai curry this year and also lots of fried rice. We vary the beans with lentils sometimes.

[superjaz]

For a second before I zoomed closer on the picture I thought those were poached eggs on top and I gagged. (But I have been nauseated for couple days).

I make my oldest french toast that he can have (food issue wise) by mixing corn starch and coconut milk and a bit of vanilla and touch of sugar and cinnamon, and gluten free break which really doesn’t soak well.
The corn starch gives it a close to pudding texture inside.