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Made pizza last night. To echo some comments from Mike and BA - I use parchment. I roll out the dough and place it on parchment on a peel. Then I put sauce and cheese and toppings on and then slide the pizza onto the pizza stone. A cookie sheet or the pack of a sheet pan would work just as well as a peel. I cook the pizza on the parchment on the stone until the crust is set then slide the parchment out and give the pizza a turn.
I understand people who don't like pizza stones and if I only used them when I was making bread or pizza I probably wouldn't use them either. But I leave them in the oven all the time and they help to regulate the heat and keep it constant.
We have a commercial range now and it is hard to disassemble and put back together. It goes up to about 500 and that is what I use to make pizzas. Before this we had a commercial range and it was stupid easy to take off the oven knobs and adjust it to 750-ish (750 is as high as my oven thermometers go) which was unsafe but made great pizza pretty quickly.
I made my own sausage last night. I used a 1.5 tsp of fennel, oregano, garlic, onions, crushed red pepper, and basil. I used 1 tsp of salt into 3/4 lb of ground pork. I could have used more of everything except maybe the salt and the red pepper. I might also add a little cayenne and the Italian sausage at the store adds parsley and thyme. Some of the online recipes say to grind the spices in a food processor which would only make sense if you have a little food processor or are making large quantities of spice mix. Either way my kids liked the sausage so I'll keep experimenting.
I may start making my own sauce and, if I am really ambitious I might try my hand at cheese making. The New England Cheesemaking Supply that Mike pointed out is about an hour or so away so maybe I'll drive up and talk to them.
Also remember time adds flavor to your dough. There are dough recipes out there that recommend allowing your dough to proof over five days in a refrigerator. The sweet spot in our house is somewhere between 1.5 and 3 days. To shorten the time I now go for longer on the counter which requires less time in the refrigerator and makes for faster pizza dough. But it still always ages for at least a day and a half.
As BA said, this is an evolutionary process. I still change things from time to time and I try new things just for the sake of trying them. Most recently I've started adding chickpea flour to up the protein for my daughter who only eats pasta, bread, and pizza.
Just checked the side of my box of Morton's and 1/4 tsp weighs 1.2 grams and has 480 mg of sodium.
So my two tsps. would have 8*480=3648 mg. This is divided across nine or 10 pizzas or about 426 mg of sodium per pizza.
I was stunned at how much sodium is in "plain" canned tomatoes. Pomi crushed tomatoes was much lower coming in at 10 mg but otherwise everything else is at least 180 mg or more.
All these companies are trying to move away from "preservatives" and the two natural preservatives are salt and sugar. I have a book a friend gave me that I have yet to read that is The Case Against Sugar. And carbs are still on the bad list! But, at least, fat is back as Mike points out!
I just bought ground pork and I am going to try to make my own sausage this week. We are also having company so they will be subjected to my experiment! I think I need to make more dough too.
You just reminded... I used to make my own paneer and tried to do some Indian cooking. It sounds similar to your ricotta process but I used yogurt instead of milk.
When I lived out west I was not a big fan of Tillamook dairy. Their cheeses seemed a little too bland. A Wisconsin friend of mine told me it was because Oregon didn't have the hard winters that Wisconsin and New York and that affected the milk/cream. But that was a long time ago and cheese making in the US has changed dramatically so they have probably changed too.
Maybe I'll try making some mozzarella. If I do I'll post the results.
Anyone making their own cheese? Whole Foods has cheese making kits and I've always wanted to try it.
I use Morton kosher salt. I'll weigh out a couple of tsps. when I can get back into the kitchen.
Alton Brown has changed quite a bit since his Good Eats days. He found he was getting fat and unhealthy. He has supposedly changed his cooking/eating habits quite a bit since then but I haven't seen him doing anything new other than being a host of shows where others cook.
A chef I knew years ago advocated taking all your spices and dividing them in 3rds and adding them at the beginning, middle, and end of cooking because adding spices at different times effects the flavors versus adding them all at once. I'm not sure if his recipes were too salty or not. But if you decide you want a tsp of salt or 12 mg and then divide it in thirds you wouldn't be adding extra salt. He trained at the CA Culinary Institute.
BA, could you put a pan on your stove top on the lowest flame and put your husband's pizza in it and cover it? Or if you have cast iron you could heat the cast iron while baking the pizza then turn off the heat when the pizza comes out and put it in the cast iron.
Fennel on turkey is a smart idea. It would work well on ground pork as well. Most Italian style sausages have fennel in them. So you could buy ground pork or ground turkey and add fennel, garlic (if you like that) and whatever else. When I was making Italian sausage mix (chicken or pork) we used salt, garlic powder, and fennel. Sweet sausage had demerara sugar and hot sausage had red chili flakes. I do not know exact amounts since it was pre-mixed.
I, like your husband, do not like olives. But the first two pizzas I make are cheese (my youngest will only eat cheese) and olive. I also make five pizzas and I do not do the layering BA does. I use to put vegetables on the sauce and cheese on the vegetables but my family likes it better with sauce, cheese, vegetables.
But that's the beauty of making your own pizza - you can figure out what you like best and make it! We live in a town that has one pizza shop per person (I am only slightly exaggerating) and my family still cannot find a place they like better than what I make specifically for them. And, honestly, most of the pizza in our town is mediocre. Who says competition breeds excellence?
I do not saute vegetables before I put them on. I made kalamata olives, orange peppers, red onions, and mushrooms last Sunday. It does make the pizza a little heavier and softer but everything is cut pretty fine it the crust is not soggy. I make it on a pizza stone so that may help absorb some of the water.
If I use pre-slice mushrooms I will break them up into smaller chunks.
If I am adding meat I do pre-cook the meat to 1) reduce the greasiness of the pizza and 2) make sure the meat is cooked through by the time the rest of the pizza is done.
I made turkey meatballs from an Otto Lenghi's Jerusalem cookbook. It had a sauce my wife made but she would not touch the ground turkey. Can't blame her. Ground turkey is unpleasant and I eat it. It had garlic and scallions and zucchini mixed in. My two boys loved it and one of them though it was lamb. I guess he just assumed it was because of the Otto Lenghi book. If you've never seen his they are works of art independent of what they offer in recipes and cooking techniques.
Mike - how much salt do you put in your dough? I'm down to two tsps. for four pounds of dough. If we make the sauce the sodium is low but if we use jarred it's 340 mg per serving. I may start making my own sauce now to see if I can get that reduced. The cheese is 190 per serving but since it has 16 servings per 16 oz. and the sauce is eight servings per 32 oz jar the cheese is higher.
I like your idea of tomato paste but I'm not sure how that would go over with my family. We actually use jarred marinara sauce unless company is coming and then we make our own. I've tried jarred pizza sauce and the ones I've tried are sweeter and don't taste as good.
My wife likes lots of sauce so I tend to be heavy handed there. Also if I suspect a pizza will go into the refrigerator and eaten the next day I use extra sauce because it dries out some.
Next time I make pizza dough I'll pay attention to quantities. I start with three cups of water then add two tsp. of instant yeast (I use SAF red) and add white whole wheat and cake flour in equal portions. The WWW is KAF and the cake is Bob's Red Mill and I add flour until it feels right. I also add 2/3 cup of both red flax meal and chickpea flour (both from Bob's Red Mill). I add a tsp of salt and I am adding in the flour.
I can't tell you about whether celery salt is any better for you than nitrates produced in a lab. I would imagine that there are multiple millions of grant dollars and a bunch of articles on that can be written on this topic.
There was a lengthy article in the NY Time years ago that talked about nitrate-free. It included an interview with the head of Applegate at the time. He said that "nitrate-free" is a USDA designation that the feds require them to use because they do not add chemical nitrates to their meats. They do however, use celery salt as part of the curing process and this has a chemical reaction which causes the salt to produce nitrates so he felt uncomfortable using "nitrate-free" but did so to keep the feds happy.
The turkey breasts we had didn't have any sodium injected in them according to the packaging.
I have been slicing short slices diagonally against the bias. I may try slicing it the long way to get longer strips.
There are two Whole Foods (WF) in town, one with a more skilled butchery than the other. The more skilled butchers have always had bistro steaks and they are labeled as such without the teres major designation. When I was working there I tried finding it on the internet only to find recipes for how to cook steaks like in a bistro - not very useful for helping customers. My more knowledgeable colleagues told me where the cut was located and using diagrams of cattle I figured out where it was from and what it was called.
The second Whole Foods only began carrying this cut recently and they actually have it labeled "teres major" bistro steak but they do not know what the "teres major" is. The people there are good people who try to provide customer service but very few of them go home and study after work (a few in the specialty department do).
I bought roasted turkey and roast beef for my kids lunch. Now I am buying chicken breast and bistro steaks and roasting them myself. It saves some money and I have a little more control over what I am feeding them. And they do not know the difference.
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