Pizza of our home

Who doesn't like pizza? It's a highly adaptable dish. It's simple, comforting and deeply savory. I guess that's why it's loved almost all over the world. I started to play with yeast last year. I now have a stand-up mixer and the machine can muscle out pizza dough in no time. Strangely, I still prefer the taste from a no-knead recipe. And that's what I have been using, a no-knead pizza dough recipe. No machine nor  muscles required.

Pizza dough (adapted from Jim Lahey's no knead pizza dough)

- 500 g bread/strong flour (I use 350 g white + 150 g wholemeal)
- 1 teaspoon instant yeast
- 1 teaspoon honey
- 1/4 teaspoon diastatic malt flour/powder (optional)
- 2 teaspoons sea salt (less if using table salt)
- 350 g lukewarm water (around body temperature)
- 1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil

Mix everything thoroughly except oil in a big bowl  until the dough looks like a rugged mass. Pour 1 tablespoon of oil into the dough and dip your fingers into the oil. Lift the dough out of the bowl and shape into a boule. It takes a few rounds of folding and tucking underneath. If the dough sticks to your fingers, pour in another tablespoon of oil. The aim here is not to reach a smooth, shiny and non-sticky stage but just to form a ball. A couple of minutes would suffice.

Rest the dough in a bowl. Cover with the plastic wrap. I like to ferment the dough in a microwave to have a constant temperature which is not too cold or warm.

The dough needs to rise for about 5 hours where I live during winter, or until the volume has doubled. You can speed up the fermentation process by increasing the amount of yeast, or slowing it down as in the original recipe. I usually start the dough at noon and go about my business in the afternoon. When I come back in the evening, the dough will be ready for me. That's why I use 1tsp of yeast here. Feel free to adjust the amount of yeast to suit your life style. That's the fun of making yeasted bread.

Flour a work surface and scrape the dough out of the bowl. Divide it into smaller parts as intended to use. Perform the gluten cloak shaping technique. It's a great trick I learned from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes. Shape each portion into a ball. Then for each ball, gently stretch the surface of the dough from top to the bottom on all sides, rotating the ball as you go along (see the video). Rest the dough for another 30 minutes before rolling out. Refrigerate or freeze the unused portions.

Before rolling out the dough, heat the oven at 230C (or as high as you can). Well oil a baking sheet and scatter semolina on top of the oiled baking sheet. This is to prevent pizza sticking to the surface. I like the slightly added crunch and contrasting texture that semolina brings. You can leave it out completely of course. Roll out or stretch a pizza dough to fit the pan. First cover the bare dough surface with tomato sauce (recipe to follow) leaving a border of 1/2 inch outside. Scatter mozzarella cheese all around. Dot Mascarpone cheese on top. You don't need much, 4-6 teaspoons of them for a medium or large pizza would do. It's optional but please try at least once. It changed my pizza world. And finish with your favorite toppings (pepperoni/ham, artichokes and mushrooms are our favorite combo). Straight into the oven for 20-30 minutes depending on your oven temperature.

Tomato sauce for pizza

- 1 tablespoon of olive oil

- 2 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped

- 400 g tinned tomatoes, roughly chopped 

- 2 tablespoons of tomato paste

- 1 teaspoon sugar

- pinch of chilli flakes

- 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

- 1/4 teaspoon dried basil

- salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a soup pot and fry the garlic until slightly golden on the outer edges. Throw in all remaining ingredients. Cook the sauce, uncovered, for 30 minutes.

What money can't buy

Not just Professor's Sandel's clarity and precision on the topic, I think that public discourse indeed should take a more prominent place in our society, in order to remind us the kind of society we want to live in and the future we are heading. Please enjoy the debate about The Role of Money.

I like - Yumprint

It's hard to imagine how and what I was doing before internet came along. How on earth did I search hotels on the other end of the earth, information on anything under the sun without going to a library or knowing somebody who already knew about it?

WORLD WIDE WEB, allow me to pay you my uttermost respect again.

The easy access to information has all the advantages imaginable but it has a downside which I can't get over with, the overflow of information. How do you organize and archive all these information to re-use them again efficiently? Bookmarking with a browser, right, when is the last time that you organize your bookmark lists? It's not that efficient when what you really want is to go back to one particular web post.

Where did I see that before? Is it from Blog A, .com B or .edu C? Even if you remember the site correctly, there is no guarantee that you could find the same post or topic again. Because human memory is notoriously unreliable.

Cue Yumprint.

It all started when I am sick of generating pdfs every time I see something that interest me. I am talking about cooking. Yes, I have a pdf folder which holds recipes I once saw and thought about making it later. I go back to a few of them routinely but I have to say that I have no clues what the rest of pdfs are. I still use recipe books but it's hard to beat google when you just need to type in a couple of ingredients and get a list of all possible recipes which have ever been attempted. Many of my favorite recipes are available online. There must be a better way to organize online information so that I can find things again quickly.

I was with Pinterest for a while. It is a tool to "file" all your favorite links in one place. Although it does work to some extent, it lacks two key functions which I consider important, the ability to annotate/edit any recipe and to upload the ones which are my own creation or from printed materials. You see, I just want one central depository of recipes and I want to annotate those with my own adaptations and thoughts. And I also find it crucial to keep those online links at a more permanent level. Say, if ever a blogger decides to move the site to somewhere else or to remove it completely, your Pinterest pins will no longer be functional.

Yumprint gives me the solutions I was looking for.

It does:

- automatic extraction of a recipe from its original source to a Yumprint file
- allow a user to edit an original recipe and add reviews
- print a pdf (yes!) from your extracted Yumprint recipe for local storage (if you really want)

A really nice feature to have with Yumprint is the full nutritional analysis of a recipe. I use Calorie Count occasionally to scare myself how many calories I am having if I were to cut my cake too big. Calorie Count is another very easy to use website. Simply copy the ingredients from a recipe and paste them into the white box, the detection of ingredient and amount is done automatically. Adjust the serving size and you get a nice nutritional table in the end. My dream would be to attach such table to my recipe. So far, Yumprint indicates suggested Nutritional Points on each recipe. The higher the points, the better the nutritional value it has. This feature is an on-going development. Let's see whether my wish would come true.

This is my Yumprint collection. Maybe I will see you there?

ps. I found this post very helpful, especially the readers' comments. That's how I got to know about Yumprint. Evernote is another hot favorite from the readers, if you are tempted.

And today it came

The temperature has been sub-zero lately and today the snow finally came. Pretending I was walking in Narnia....

Dîner chez moi - 19-25 January

Saturday - Rosemary garlic potato gratin, grilled sausage, garlic chilli broccoli

Sunday - Grilled five-spiced pork cutlet, mixed-veggie stew, steamed rice

Monday - Bell pepper risotto, plaice with caper garlic white wine sauce

Tuesday - Mostly veggie turkey chilli, steamed rice

Wednesday - Cod in tomato sherry sauce, steamed rice

Thursday - Garlic chilli linguine with grilled pork, steamed broccoli

Dîner chez moi - 12-18 January

First, belated happy new year to you. Being back home for almost a week, work has caught up with me. It's nice to feel that my professional opinions are valued and sought. I have to say that I feel quite pleased with how my work has gone for the last few years. I hope the trend continues in the coming year.

My small English kitchen also starts for real this Saturday. Now both of us are back from holidays and work travel (Yes, already!).  My small goal for our 2013 dinning table is to have more vegetable-based main courses and leave meat/protein as a side. I love vegetables but I think it takes a lot more creativity (and planning) to make vegetables the star of the table (not to mention to please a carnivore). It is a challenge I love to take and it is also a way to venture out my cooking comfort zone.

I am not aiming to become meat-less (I love my steak too much) but I want to see whether I (or we) could live by "Mostly veggies" motto. What about you, do you have any food resolution this year?

Saturday - Spinach and ricotta cannelloni, grilled sausages, garlic buttered bread

Sunday - Vegetarian cottage pie, buttered green beans, cold ham slices

Monday - Baked cod with light crust, roasted ratatouille, steamed rice

Tuesday - Broccoli risotto, grilled smokey sausages

Wednesday - same as Saturday

Thursday - same as Sunday

Friday - wild card