The Quest for Perfect Pizza
It seems very self-obsessed to call something that you’ve cooked yourself “perfect” but, having spent a fair amount of time getting our recipe just how we wanted it, I think we’ve finally mastered our own version of perfect pizza.
We’ve experimented with different types of dough and have finally settled on Jamie Oliver’s recipe – we do still have some trouble getting it to rise in our draughty kitchen but it doesn’t seem to affect the finished dish.
Our preferred tomato sauce is easier than versions we’ve used before and has just the right balance of richness and sweetness: a simple case of frying some garlic until it begins to colour, adding a tin of good tomatoes and some herbs with a touch of salt and pepper and cooking for just a few minutes.
Toppings vary, this one was chilli, anchovies, capers, lemon juice and lemon zest – another Jamie recipe. Salami or cured ham usually feature though, as do olives. Our favourite mozarella comes from Marks and Spencer although there seem to be new brands popping up all the time so this changes depending on where we happen to be shopping.
The real key to perfect pizza though is the cooking method. A pizza stone makes a huge difference, it transmits heat in a way that a regular baking tray doesn’t and is something we’ve used right from the start. A hot oven is crucial too. We thought using the barbecue was the way to go but, after several attempts, we realised we just couldn’t keep the heat in for long enough to create the crunchy base that is so important.Â
The revelation came in the form of Heston Blummenthal, well known for his pursuit of perfection. His method for perfect pizza requires a cast iron frying pan and an oven heated for 20 minutes by the grill. We use his grill method but in conjunction with the pizza stone and it works a treat: if Stephen’s singed hair wasn’t a good enough indicator of just how hot the oven was, our oven thermometer registered an amazing 300 degrees, quite a feat considering the dial only goes to 190.
We still haven’t mastered the black, blistered edges that pizza cooked in wood-fired oven creates but I’m not sure we’re ever going to manage that in a domestic oven. This is as close to perfect as I think we’re going to get but I’m quite happy with “almost-perfect pizza”
Pizza Dough – makes two pizzas (this is originally Jamie Oliver’s recipe for 6-8 pizzas with quantities amended for 2 pizzas and the method altered to allow for a hand mixer)
250g Tipo ‘00’ flour
1 teaspoon sea salt
4g dried yeast
1 teaspoon golden caster sugar
160ml lukewarm water
Sieve the flour and salt into a large mixing bowl. In a jug, mix the yeast, sugar and olive oil into the water and leave for a few minutes (until it starts to bubble slightly) then pour into the bowl. Mix together with a wooden spoon and then knead with a hand blender until you have a smooth, springy dough. Place the ball of dough on a flour-dusted surface and flour the top of it. Cover with cling-film and leave for 15 minutes.
Remove the cling film and knead the dough around a bit to push the air out with your hands, form into bases and top with tomato sauce.
Tomato Sauce
Olive oil, for frying
2 cloves garlic, crushed
Small bunch or oregano or basil
Tin of tomatoes, juice discarded
Salt and pepper
Fry garlic in olive oil until it just begins to colour, add the tomatoes, herbs and salt and pepper and break up the tomatoes. Cook on a low heat for five minutes. Blend if preferred and leave to cool.
Toppings
I don’t think I need to tell you what to put on top, (although I would tell you not to use pineapple, if you asked me) but I would say don’t forget to oil the edges of the dough as it makes a big difference to the all important crunch factor. A final point is, let the pizza cool before you slice or start to eat. Aside from the fact that cheese heated to 300 degrees will remove a layer of skin from your fingers, it will allow everything to set and the base will continue to crisp as it cools down.
Method
Remove all but one shelf from the oven, add the pizza stone and turn the grill on to maximum. Shut the door and leave the oven to heat up for 20 minutes. When you are ready to cook your pizza, remove the stone from the oven, close the door so the oven heats back up, and add the base to the stone*. Add the toppings as quickly as you can and return the stone to the oven, shut the door and leave the pizza to cook until the cheese has melted and the edges of the pizza have coloured. This will probably take about five minutes.
*Ideally, you should assemble the pizza before sliding it on to the stone so that as little heat as possible is lost, we haven’t ever managed this successfully but give it a go if you’re feeling brave.
Braised Broad Beans with Lemon and Mint
This dish was recommended to me by a friend and comes from The Modern Vegetarian by Maria Ella. The original version uses dill but since I’m not much of a dill fan, I opted for the alternative suggestion of mint.
I love broad beans but I don’t enjoy the podding, I know many people talk of it being therapeutic or go misty eyed recounting stories of sitting on their grandmother’s knee in the summer sunshine but I just find it makes my hands sore and turns my nails green. A kilo of beans that need double podding made my hands very sore and green indeed and I began to worry about the effort versus fulfilment ratio. I need not have worried though because the end result was quite simply brilliant.
The smaller beans had broken down and merged with the leeks and spring onions into a tasty (although not attractive looking) mush leaving the larger beans with a decent amount of bite and providing a great contrast. I’m not sure if this was supposed to happen or not but I liked it anyway. The lemon and mint added a light touch to the full, earthy flavour and created a cohesive and well rounded dish.
We served this with some griddled halloumi cheese and some toasted white bread that had been rubbed with garlic and drizzled with oil. The combination worked very well but I think this is a dish that has many possibilities: blended slightly and served as a dip, blended completely and served as soup or as it is but with the addition of bacon.
As much as we both loved it, it’s going to be a while before I can face shelling another kilo of broad beans though so those options will have to wait for now.
Serves Four (I’m not sure about this, we ate the whole lot with cheese and bread as well, four as a starter maybe?)
1 kg fresh broad beans in their shells
Olive oil for frying
Four spring onions and four baby leeks, finely chopped (original recipe states 1 onion, chopped, or a bunch of spring onions)
1 garlic clove, crushed
Pinch of sugar
Pinch of sea salt
300ml vegetable stock
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Small bunch of mint, finely chopped (original recipe stated dill)
Bring a large pan of water to the boil, add the beans and cook briefly (about two minutes for large beans). Rinse under cold water and then remove outer skins.
Heat some oil in a large pan and gently fry the spring onion and leeks until softened – about three minutes.
Add the garlic, sugar and sea salt and cook for a further two minutes.
Add the beans and the stock and simmer over a low heat for about 20 minutes.
Remove from the heat, stir in the lemon juice and mint and leave to stand for an hour before serving. Don’t worry if there looks like too much liquid, the beans will continue to soak this up while they cool.
Barbecued Sardines
For a while now we have been keeping an eye out for fresh sardines, so it was some coincidence that on the day that we decided that we were going to barbecue fish, we came across some Cornish sardines in Waitrose. We gutted them, then marinated them in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, parsley, salt and pepper:
We also had some baby leeks that we coated in a little olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper before putting onto the barbecue. The barbecue was a little too hot at this stage and the green, leafy ends of the leeks got singed, but the white ends were mostly okay.
Then we put the sardines on. The barbecue was still too hot at this stage (impatience…) and the oiliness of the fish and marinade caused some worrying flare-ups that endangered my eyebrows at times. We kept moving them around and turning them (which was the main cause of the flare-ups) and they were soon cooked, albeit a little darker than intended:
Although they were a little more “well done” than intended on the outside, they were perfectly cooked on the inside and very tasty. The leeks were really good too and are something we should try again with a little more patience when the fire is not as hot.
Steamed Salmon with Stir Fried Vegetables
After a long weekend in Sweden where we survived mostly on crisps and Daim bar ice-cream, something light with plenty of vegetables was definitely required this evening. A quick browse through the vegetable archive of the site led me to a steamed fish dish which was exactly what I was looking for.
I started off by marinating some salmon fillets in lime juice, garlic, coriander, lemongrass and chilli. After about 30 minutes, these went into the bamboo steamer where they sat happily for 10 minutes. In the meantime, Stephen stir-fried some vegetables in oil, spring onion and garlic before adding some soy sauce and fish sauce just before the end and serving with some rice.
The fish was good, the vegetables were good too actually but the combination of the two wasn’t quite right. The vegetables were too highly seasoned for the delicate fish and the more subtle flavours of the lemongrass and coriander were lost against the powerful soy sauce and fish sauce. Another one for the “needs some work” category.
Sweden
We arrived back from a long weekend in Sweden this afternoon. We went over because I was playing cricket and we were staying in a small town so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to do much gastronomic exploring, but we took a few pictures of anything other than our staple diet of crisps and beer as we went along.
The most interesting gastronomic experience was actually seeing the bag of freshly picked golden chanterelle mushrooms that some people had found in the forest. We were initially keen on the idea when someone suggested going to look for mushrooms, but ended up sitting around drinking too much strong lager instead of going. Which in hindsight was a missed opportunity, especially seeing as the weather in Sweden has apparently been ideal for mushrooms this year, with alternating wet and warm spells.
On the first evening it was certainly wet rather than warm, so we paid a visit to a bar / restaurant nearby. We had visited it when we visited two years earlier and were rather wary of it, but the only alternative that we knew about was a particularly nasty pizza place.
I chose pyttipanna, which I had eaten elsewhere last time we visited. It is a dish of diced potato, meat and sometimes vegetables, often served with beetroot and a fried egg:
I think that my pyttipanna won in the edibility stakes that night, as others ordered… pasta bolognaise:
… a mystery pasta that I can’t remember the name of but can see that it contains bacon, olives, cream and some herbs:
… and there was another dish that was schnitzel with a mushroom sauce and “roast” potatoes which was almost inedible except for the superbly fresh chanterelles in the mushroom sauce.
The next day we had hot dogs during a break in the cricket. They were actually served during a drinks break rather than during the lunch break. Here is one with mustard, ketchup and “roasted onions”, which look a bit like deep-fried onion crumbs and give a nice oniony crunch when sprinkled onto things:
While investigating the local supermarket, Kerri found a bag of cinnamon rolls, which were rather tasty. Then the next day someone brought some home made ones along to the cricket, which were very tasty indeed. They are known as “kanelbulle” in Swedish:
A barbecue the next day, with chicken burgers and beef burgers. Sadly the only picture of an assembled burger was one that I’d already half eaten and that didn’t look very appetising, so these have to do:
And this little fellow was a bit too small to eat, so we threw him back, but clearly he told all his larger friends to avoid the apparently tasty worms floating around nearby because we didn’t catch anything worth eating:
If we find ourselves there again, we’ll see if we can organise to go over a couple of days early to visit Stockholm and the lakes and also do some proper gastronomic exploration.
Lamb Chops, New Potatoes and Fried Courgettes
A relatively quick dinner this evening before we head to Sweden tomorrow for a long weekend.
Lamb chops coated in a little rosemary and salt, then pan fried. The courgettes were sliced, salted for half an hour, and then coated in seasoned flour and also fried. The new potatoes were boiled and then dressed with grain mustard, olive oil, salt and pepper and mixed with mint and spring onions.
The chops were good and the courgettes turned out really well. The courgettes were from my sister and brother in law’s garden where they have very impressively been growing a wide range of vegetables. If we try this method again, I think that adding some mild spices to the seasoned flour would complement the courgettes very well. The potatoes were not great – the skins were somewhat bitter and the flesh wasn’t as tasty as it could have been.
Pappardelle Rigate with Bolognaise Sauce
Yesterday we cooked some Bolognaise sauce, planning to eat it with spaghetti this evening. As it turned out, we had some lovely-looking pappardelle rigate in the cupboard, so we used these instead. The “rigate” means that the pappardelle are ridged (just visible in the picture above) and this makes more of the sauce stick to them. I’m certain it’s not traditional to eat it with Bolognaise sauce, but we did anyway.
We followed a recipe similar to our usual recipe, except used white wine instead of red, didn’t add any lardons and added loads of mixed fresh herbs (parsely, sage and rosemary) from the garden. The result was lighter than usual and put an interesting slant on something that we usually make to pretty much the same recipe each time; sometimes when we have a recipe that works really well we are worried to change it in case it goes awry and disappoints, but this time there was no disappointing.
Weekend Barbecue Number Two
After yesterday’s barbecue with friends, we spent today barbecuing at home with Stephen’s family. We knew we would be eating early so we opted for a leg of lamb which could be marinated in advance and cooked quickly. It’s also the perfect size for five and, if you’re lucky, will provide you with leftovers.
We used our normal marinade (olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, salt and pepper and oregano) and left the butterflied lamb leg in the fridge for 24 hours before cooking it over indirect heat. It took about 45 minutes and was turned three times in total, perfect for the busy host 🙂
Alongside the lamb, we ate some hummus and tzatziki with some wholemeal flatbreads and some barbecued fennel. I’m still trying to appreciate fennel so this was a great way for me to try it out, the smokiness worked well with the pungent note of aniseed but it’s still a flavour I’m struggling with.
Weekend Barbecue Number One
We spent Saturday enjoying the sunshine at a friend’s annual barbecue. Amongst other things (that sadly didn’t photograph well), we ate squid that had been marinated in chilli and a Japanese spice I can’t remember the name of and mackerel that had spent the morning sucking up some red curry paste.
We took along a couple of salads to go with the meat and fish:
Our favourite potato salad and the spiced tomato and cucumber salad we made for the first time recently. This version was much better than before and both benefited from being made in advance and resting in the fridge until required.
Potato Salad – Serves Four
250g new potatoes
1 red onion, finely diced
Juice of one lemon
Small splash of red wine vinegar
Tablespoon wholegrain mustard
Small bunch of parsley, finely chopped
Small bunch of mint, finely chopped
Salt and pepper
Start by soaking the red onion in a mixture of lemon juice and water to remove any bitterness, adding more water if it doesn’t cover the onion. Leave to soak for about an hour.
Boil new potatoes in salted water until cook through and allow to drain thoroughly. While the potatoes are cooking, take all the other ingredients and make up the dressing. When the potatoes are still warm, add the dressing and the drained red onion. Refrigerate until needed (but bring back to room temperature before serving).
Dijon mustard works well here, as does spring onion or chives in place of the red onion.
Bacon, Mozzarella and Broad Bean Salad
Tonight we made a salad of spinach leaves with bacon, mozzarella, broad beans and avocado, which we served with a simple dressing made from olive oil, lemon juice, wholegrain mustard and salt and pepper. We also made some toasted sliced of bread drizzled with olive oil and rubbed with a garlic clove.
This had the potential to be really good, or so we thought, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. The bacon was from Emmet’s, a really good deli in Peasenhall in Suffolk. They make their own bacon and we’ve had it before and really liked it, but this time although it had a good flavour, it tasted very, very salty and was quite chewy (that was probably overcooking on our part). The broad beans were a bit floury in the middle – maybe we didn’t cook them enough. And the avocado wasn’t quite ripe enough.
Also, either one of the avocado or the beans (probably the avocado) needed to go – they just didn’t work well together. The avocado did work well on its own in the dressing, but didn’t go well with the rest of the salad. The garlicky toasted croutons were good though, and the mozzarella was nice. Apart from them though, it was just an excuse for a complete moan-fest, so apologies for that.
