Pizza.

Lewisburg.

We had pizza for dinner last night. It's been an evolutionary process to get here:



Let me note that getting a pizzeria-like crust from a home oven is far more difficult than you'd expect, for one reason: professional pizza ovens (and wood-fired brick ovens) hang out in the neighborhood of 700° to 800°F. Sometimes up near 900°F. Mine only threatens to get near that range during the self-clean cycle, during which the door latch safety mechanism makes it really tough to get the pizzas in and out. So even cranked up to full blast, a home oven can't get a traditional pizza crust, well, crusty.

At least not beneath the sauce, cheese, and other various toppings. It'll still taste good, of course, but it's just not quite right. It's frustrating.

I stumbled across a key bit of information on Baking Bites, in a post for the Perfect Pizza Crust. Higher-protein flours absorb more water, which helps keep the crust from drying out in the professional oven... but results in a soft crust at home. Switching to all-purpose flour is an improvement, but still not quite perfect. The Baking Bites solution - from a recipe in Cook's Illustrated - uses a combination of all-purpose and cake flours to achieve crispiness.

Problem: I don't like cake flour. Yes, I do have some in the pantry, but I avoid it whenever I can. It's undergone some serious bleaching and other treatments, which I'd just as soon not rely on for situations that don't demand it. I'll even make cakes with all-purpose flour, which still makes for a delicious dessert, though with a slightly denser and drier texture.

Solution: pastry flour. It's low-protein flour, with great flavor if you've got a whole wheat version, like most organic brands.

In brief, here's how I'm making pizzas these days:

1. Make the dough for the crust with a mix of all-purpose and pastry flours. I like 225g total for a 12-inch pizza, and, though it may need some tweaking, I think 175g all-purpose and 50g pastry flour works well. Add 5g salt, an appropriate amount of yeast¹, and 157g water (70% hydration). Mix together, knead briefly, and set aside to rise.
   
   
2. Make the sauce, with whatever tastes good. Cook it down until the tomatoes have completely lost their structure and a lot of moisture. Puree and set aside.
   
   
3. For toppings, I keep it very simple. A small amount of thinly sliced or shredded cheese when we're not feeding vegans. Perhaps some mushrooms sauteed until crispy, or a few caramelized onions. Fresh herbs, in season, can wait until the pizza comes out of the oven.
   
   
4. Stretch the dough into a 12-inch round. If necessary, set it down during the stretching process to let the gluten relax. You'll want it thin, but avoid tearing it; fold over holes and pinch together to patch them. I like to grab about an inch in from the edge to create a rim of crust and pull apart gently while rotating the dough. It's not nearly as impressive as spinning and tossing, but a lot safer. I also think it's even easier than laying the dough flat and stretching, because you're letting gravity do a lot of the work.
   
   
5. When the oven's as hot as it'll get - 550°F here, with the pizza stone well preheated² - lay the crust on a peel dusted with cornmeal. Make sure it's not sticking. Brush on a light layer of olive oil, then spread with just enough sauce to almost cover. Top with cheese or whatever, and slide into the oven. Bake until it's brown and crispy. I find that seven to eight minutes works. Allow to cool on a rack for a few minutes, which'll help keep the underside from getting soggy after all that work.

Years of fighting with pizzas and home ovens, and it's that simple. The most difficult part, I think, is stepping back enough to treat the entire process with a light touch. Don't work the dough too much; a minimum of effort gives maximum rewards. Resist the temptation to embellish with too many toppings. A good crust just can't handle it, and gets lost underneath.

Enjoy the fact that it's good, simple food. But no less impressive for it.

EDIT: Mis-typed the quantity of salt for the pizza dough. It's a lot less over-salted now.

* * * * *

¹Half a teaspoon works for a one- or two- hour rise; scale it back to a quarter or an eighth for overnight, depending on how long it'll go. Or use the fridge to retard the rising. I pretty much never do, though it's mostly a function of lack of space.

²The oven beeps (or whatever) to say it's preheated? It's lying. They all do. Give it at least another half an hour, especially to ensure that the pizza stone is up to temperature, too.

Garden planning: the "good parts" version.

Lewisburg.

'Tis the season for very little gardening, but lots of planning. The first package of seeds (along with some other useful odds and ends) is due to arrive from Johnny's today, and the bulk of the rest from Seed Savers not long after. This step, of course, comes after the spreadsheet-based mania that I use as the main planning process. Steve, you asked for it; here's how I'm planning the 2009 gardening season.

I'm amazed that I find it as interesting as I do. After all, I haven't often (ever?) though of playing with spreadsheets to be especially fun. At the moment, I'm wrestling with how I can put the gist of it up here without making my eyes glaze over with boredom, let alone anyone else's. At this point, I'm going to take a cue from William Goldman¹ and just run with the "good parts" version. In brief, it goes something like this:

1) The days grow short in November and December, and the ground starts freezing over. With any luck, I take this as a sign to let the garden rest, and I've had the foresight to harvest everything that's harvestable.² Exciting discovery from 2008: the Brussels sprouts can nearly freeze solid and still cook up beautifully. Also: when the planters on the deck freeze solid, the cold-hardy plants in them will wilt. Bring them inside, though, and they come back to life.

2) In mid-December, the new catalogs arrive. They're all possibility and no effort; with pretty pictures and enticing descriptions, they make the argument that there isn't a bad choice among them. Examples that I've selected for my garden:

• Listada de Gandia (Eggplant): Beautiful purple striped eggplant. After selecting for over 5 years, this is the best strain out of 10 for consistent deep color and earliness. We can say with certainty that this is the best strain available on the market. Reliable, heavy yields of excellent quality, 6-8" thin skinned fruits.
  
  
• Noir des Carmes (Melon): One of the easiest to grow and most luxurious of all melons. Extremely dark green skin, almost black when immature, ripening to mostly orange mottled with green. Sweet, aromatic, orange flesh. Very productive. Sure to be a new family favorite.
  
  
• Hon Tsai Tai (Brassica rapa): Purple flower stems and buds. A Chinese specialty. The young plants soon branch and produce quantities of long, pencil-thin, red-purple, budded flower stems. Pleasing, mild mustard taste for use raw in salads or lightly cooked in stir-fries or soups. For multiple harvesting of tender stems and leaves. Can be spring sown, but yields best when sown June through October for harvest from midsummer through winter (in mild areas).
  
  
• Sun Gold (Tomato): Intense fruity flavor. Exceptionally sweet, bright tangerine-orange cherry tomatoes leave customers begging for more. Vigorous plants start yielding early and bear right through the season. Tendency to split precludes shipping, making these an exclusively fresh-market treat. The taste can’t be beat. Indeterminate.

And so on. I spend a few weeks looking through everything, marking the interesting ones with a red pen. The Listada de Gandia and Sun Golds were successes in 2008, but the others are new experiments. This year brings the new experience of being able to check off vegetables that we're thrilled to be able to grow (and eat) again.

3) Inevitably, there are far too many little red dots. This year, I've limited myself to about forty-five different types of vegetables and herbs; the total number of varieties is a little over one hundred. (Nine types of tomatoes and fifteen kinds of peppers'll do that.)

Figuring out what to grow becomes a back-and-forth process between individual garden bed layouts and the catalogs. There are thirteen beds - fourteen including the planters on the deck³ - in a particular rotation schedule to (in theory) minimize pest and fertility problems. Each is approximately nine by twenty-five feet, separated by bands of untilled lawn and smaller patches with flowers and herbs. Most of these large plots will be devoted to vegetables, except for a few with cover crops. I go through them, one by one, filling in the available space with the varieties that look most interesting, or that worked out last year, and set aside a few pockets for scattering flowers and herbs.



This is the 2009 arrangement of garden beds. It's oddly-shaped because of the edge of the property and the various trees already growing around. The little two-letter markings are a shorthand for coordinating placement in spreadsheet columns; writing "br" instead of "brassicas" means I don't have to scroll left and right as often when typing the details in.

4) The next, deeply exciting step is to try to coordinate multiple plantings to make the most effective use of space. Also to avoid having one massive harvest of, say, lettuce, that we can't possibly eat and can't preserve for later. I'm not especially good at this, though I'm getting better. Fortunately, the garden's productive enough that it can easily feed two people with regular dinner guests for the bulk of the season.

It's also time to make sure that I have enough space at any given time to start seedlings. Since long-season crops are a little hard-pressed to produce in the window between frosts in Pennsylvania, the seeds need a head start beneath a row of fluorescent tubes for a few weeks. Without a greenhouse handy, I'm limited by the size of my table and number of fixtures. (It's plenty.) Any spare space will be used for flowers, so we can have some colorful blooms early in the season.

5) Final step: order seeds. After using the spreadsheet to figure out how many I need - length of row times seed spacing, plus extras for starting transplants; accounting for any seed I have saved from last year - I spend the better part of an afternoon clicking the "add 1 packet" button on the seed company websites.

In brief, that's it. Later I'll probably post something to highlight a few of the interesting varieties I'm trying out this year. After all, for the price of a cup or two of coffee, I can get enough heirloom tomato seeds to make pizza sauce regularly throughout the winter. Or a year's worth of basil for pesto. Or, if all goes well, more watermelon than I know what to do with.

* * * * *

¹Author of The Princess Bride.

²This might change next winter, if I get around to constructing a few cold frames to extend the season.

³For both convenience and deer- and rabbit-proofing. Salad greens, baby carrots, radishes, turnips, peas, and plenty of herbs are all planned for the deck. So are a few small pepper plants that are both ornamental and edible.

Walnut brandy.

Lewisburg.

I have a backyard full of edible things. Some of those I've planted, like the multitude of vegetables in the annual - and slowly expanding to year-round - garden.¹ Then there are the existing fruit bushes and trees, like the blueberries and pears that were so productive that we weren't prepared for it all.

Then we have the apples and walnuts. The apple trees, it seems, have never been pruned², which means we won't have a chance at harvesting anything halfway decent until I'm able to bring them back under control. And the walnuts? Well, I never did find any ripe ones. My hunch is that the squirrels managed to swipe them all well before I could.

It's okay, though. I have a backup plan: walnut brandy. In addition to making use of the nuts months before the squirrels are even paying attention, it handily solves the issue of preservation. Plus, it's potent mojo.

In short, the process goes like this: harvest unripe walnuts; steep in vodka or brandy with spices for several months; add sugar to take the edge off; drink when the weather's turned cold and damp. I have English walnuts handy, but I don't see any reason it wouldn't work with the black walnuts that grow like weeds around here. There's no doubt that the flavor will be different - black walnuts being especially strong-flavored - but probably worth the (minimal) effort.

The recipe comes from Elisabeth Luard's European Peasant Cookery, a real gem of a find from the library. I've tweaked it slightly, reducing the quantity of sugar³, but it worked so well that I fully intend to work up multiple batches next year.

Walnut Brandy (Broux de noix)
Makes 2 liters
Time: Start 6 months ahead

Ingredients

• 10 fresh green walnuts
  
• 2 liters eau de vie or vodka
  
• 2 sticks of cinnamon
  
• Zest of 2 lemons
  
• Scrap of mace
  
• 2 cloves
  
• 500g sugar

Directions

1. Pick the walnuts in early July, when tender enough to pierce with a needle. Cut them in half and remove the outer husks; wear gloves, as the flesh will stain fingers for days. Chop the nutmeats as finely as possible, using a food processor if possible.
   
   
2. Place the walnut paste, cinnamon sticks, and alcohol in a large jar. Seal tightly and set in a warm place to infuse.
   
   
3. At the beginning of September, strain the liquor through a cheesecloth and discard the walnuts and cinnamon. Return to the jar and add the lemon zest, mace, cloves, and sugar. Set aside to infuse for another month. Strain again, bottle, and set aside until late December. Serve in small glasses, preferably in front of a burning Yule log.

* * * * *

¹I intend to post some significant chunks of the garden planning information this year, but I'm still hammering out the details. I hope to be ordering seeds very shortly.

²Our neighbors can pretty much confirm this.

³Maybe. There's a typo in the recipe, such that it calls for either 500g or 1kg of sugar, depending on where it's noted. I opted for the smaller amount, which is still undeniably sweet.

Bread Upon The Brain!

Lewisburg.

I've been on a bread-baking kick of late. The primary reason, I suppose, is that finding decent bread¹ around here is nigh impossible. So it's either this:



Or nothing.

Funny thing about bread: it's very easy to make your own, but it's maddeningly difficult to master. It seems, in fact, that the more time spent attempting to master it, the more I realize the immense complexity and depth of the whole endeavor. Even choosing to restrict the ingredients to the basic four² - flour, water, yeast, salt - leaves the budding baker with a wide range of options. Personal example: bread was one of the first things I taught myself to make, about ten years ago. I haven't struggled with anything else for near that length of time.³

What I have learned about breadmaking is as follows:

1. Measuring by volume will drive you mad. Get a good scale and use it for everything. (Exceptions for small quantities, such as fractional teaspoons and tablespoons of yeast, salt, herbs, etc.) Varying the weight of the added liquid - as a percentage of the flour's weight - produces a wide range of results. Try 50% for bagels; 85% for an open texture full of irregular holes; 65-70% for everyday loaves. Corollary: Work in metric; it makes the arithmetic far less headache-inducing. Second corollary: Generally speaking, you'll want to learn the approximate weight of flour that best fits your chosen baking container(s). There's some flexibility here, influenced in part by the specific ingredients you choose, but it helps a) produce well-shaped loaves, and b) reduces the number of times you'll need mentally calculate 65% of 450g.
   
   
2. Novice breadmakers use too much flour. Always.⁴ You'll almost have to be teetering across the dough/batter divide before kneading becomes impossible. Caveat: Kneading takes longer than you'd think to get the knack for. Fortunately, it's not as critical a step as most cookbooks seem to suggest.
   
   
3. Bake at higher temperatures. 350°F may be essential for especially rich or sweet breads - brioche, cinnamon rolls - to prevent scorching, but it makes for an unimpressive crust on most loaves. I'm currently baking most breads in the 425° - 450°F range, though pizza crusts get as much fire⁵ as the oven'll give me.
   
   
4. Don't use sugar. Unless you want the sweetness (sweet breads) or flavor (bagels and pretzels), of course. There's plenty of food for the yeast in the flour, and giving them refined sugars only reduces the fermented flavors in the finished bread. Some people seem surprised by this, which itself surprises me. After all, refined sugar's pretty new on the culinary scene; leavened bread's leaning to the ancient side.
   
   
5. Less yeast, more time. Makes it taste better. Plus, the timing's more forgiving. The refrigerator can be a fine tool.
   
   
6. Use enough salt. It improves both flavor and texture. I use a scant tablespoon - 15g or so - of kosher salt for 450g of flour, which suits me.
   
   
7. For a lovely, shattery crust, an enclosable baking container works wonders. A cast-iron dutch oven (preheated, of course) is the best I've found, though I bake sandwich loaves with a pair of loaf pans. One sits upside-down atop the other, held in place with binder clips. A tent of aluminum foil, tightly crimped around the edges, works well, but you need to be careful to leave enough space for the oven spring.
   
   
8. Make bread frequently. I don't often repeat the same precise recipe, but each time is a variation on a few different themes, and the experimentation makes for a fine teacher.
   
   
9. Finally: those who don't bake bread are inevitably impressed with all but the most spectacular failures. (That would be the great majority of everyone you know.)

There's probably something I've neglected to mention, and even more that I'll continue to learn through trial and (edible) error. But until then:

Walnut bread
This loaf's becoming a favorite treat around here, fueling the need to buy walnuts in bulk. (The squirrels get every single nut off of the trees in the backyard.) It makes a fine loaf bread, though I made a wreath-like epi version for a holiday gift. Rich and tender, it's lovely stuff.

The following quantities suit my 9-¼" x 5-¼" loaf pan, which is how I'm most inclined to make it. To grind the walnuts, I give them a quick trip through the food processor. The result is fairly fine without becoming oily.

Ingredients:

• 600g bread flour
  
• 100g ground walnuts
  
• 20g salt
  
• 3/8 teaspoon yeast
  
• 420g water

Directions:

1. Mix together the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Stir in the water, and turn out onto a lightly floured board. Knead briefly, until it is all incorporated together. A shaggy dough is just fine. Shape into a ball and return to the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to rest 18-24 hours.
   
   
2. Punch down the dough and shape into a loaf; allow to proof, covered, in a lightly greased loaf pan for at least an hour. Bake in a 425°F oven for about an hour; if possible, keep the loaf tightly covered for the first half hour. Allow to cool on a rack.

* * * * *

¹As in "good enough", not "especially good" or "great".

²Which I'm certainly not doing.

³Even something like roasting a Thanksgiving turkey, that once-a-year-and-only-once process, is coming along at a better clip.

⁴Note: This will not happen if you adhere to two simple rules.

1. Weigh your ingredients. Do not use volume measures.
   
   
2. Use a minimum of flour on your board when kneading. Using a dough scraper helps, particularly for doughs with 70% hydration and up.

Also: Kneading the dough will help even out wet/dry patches, as will rising time.

⁵550°F. Getting the right crust at that temperature, about two hundred degrees below a professional oven, is really tough. Really tough. I'm not quite ready to build a wood-fired brick oven, but it's really tempting to hunt for the right excuse.

... did you?

Did you?

Halloween horror.

Lewisburg.

We're expecting trick-or-treating munchkins this year, which poses a few problems that we hadn't thought out particularly well before. After all, when you've lived for years inside a locked apartment building with few, if any, small children, these things don't become issues at the forefront of your mind. Halloween focuses more on cobbling together a costume from the nearest thrift store, then stopping to pick up some beer on the way to the party.¹ Last year, Sharon picked up some candy at CVS, sort of last-minute, to give out to the handful of kids who stopped by, but that was as far as we got.

(Apparently - even though I missed it - the 3- or 4-year-old in a lion costume who stopped by was the event of the evening. He didn't remember to say "trick or treat" and wasn't sure what to do after receiving his candy. So he just sat down on the porch, looking up at Sharon, until his mother coaxed him down. Our neighbors thought he was adorably hilarious, too.)

This year, we've expanded a bit. Sharon went to the little candy shop downtown to pick up some treats that aren't HFCS-based. Sure, they're still loaded with sugar - they look like un-crooked candy canes to me, so they've got to be 98% sugar, minimum - but at least it's supporting a local business. And we brought home a pumpkin from the market for the first jack o'lantern either of us has made for years. It was tough, actually, trying to figure out what to carve, when we hadn't done this for so long. So, after a lot of scribbling on little pieces of paper:



Unilluminated, it's not the most exciting of pumpkins. Having hacked away with the paring knife, though, it isn't as though I could go back and erase, so we dropped in a candle, dimmed the lights, and were pleasantly surprised. Seriously. I neglected to take a candle-less photo, but you'll have to trust me that it was about as unimpressive as it could be.

Even better, though, is when we turned out all of the kitchen lights:



Good enough for government work, as my dad might say. Which, of course, reminds me that the scariest day of the coming week isn't Friday. It's Tuesday.²

I recommend a regular dose of FiveThirtyEight to take the edge off. Polls, of course, are inherently limited, but aside from knowing my polling place - and a little volunteer time for the GOTV effort - there's little I can effectively do. It's frightening to see the massive, clanging, somewhat-irrational-and-unpredictable behemoth that is the presidential election screeching and howling into election day.

Maybe I should dress up as the electoral college.

* * * * *

¹There aren't as many parties to attend, now that we're in central PA, playing the "responsible adult" game, so costumes aren't happening for 2008.^a But Fiend Without A Face should be arriving before Friday, so at least we have something horror-related to watch. That's safe to have on when a 4-year-old comes to the door.

My initial thoughts were to watch something more like Dead Ringers or The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, but neither of those is remotely appropriate for a television that can be seen from the porch.

^aBesides that, what am I going to dress up as? The current Republican ticket's the scariest thing I can think of. Aside from some sort of terrible, world destroying Cheney-zilla. (Maybe next year.)

²Why Tuesday? Indeed.