[Mike Nolan]

I've seen reports that ranchers are culling their herds to deal with drought and other factors, but I think the WSJ's point was that consumers are bypassing the higher priced cuts for cheaper ones, and the supply chain is lowering the price to get rid of excess inventory of the higher end cuts.

[Mike Nolan]

Most weeks there's been at least one variant on steak on sale here, last week it was NY strip. It looks like it'll be top sirloin starting tomorrow. I haven't done that one on the new grill yet.

The chicken was a one-day sale, no rain checks, and it was all gone by the time I got to the store. But I've got one or two in the freezer so it wasn't a major problem here. My wife gets tired of chicken faster than she does beef.

[Mike Nolan]

Last night we had burgers on the grill with sauteed mushrooms and salad, tonight it'll be NY strip steak on the grill, mushrooms and baked potato. (I bought 3 large NY strip steaks (about 12 ounces each) on sale last week, so I need to either use or freeze them.)

[Mike Nolan]

I do understand reluctance to change what they already like to eat, my wife has several breads she doesn't like me to tinker with.

But pizza on the grill is enough different from other pizza that it's an open book for changes.

We used to get a really good thin crust pizza from a pizzeria near us in Evanston 50 years ago, their crust and sauce were completely different from anyone else's. Unfortunately, it closed, so reproducing it from a 1970's memory is probably an impossible challenge.

[Mike Nolan]

Well, my wife is allergic to garlic, so that won't be an option here.

I used the pizza dough recipe that's in the KAF pizza school emails:

300 grams flour (I used a combination of KAF AP and BRM pastry flour since I don't have their 00 pizza flour)
222 grams water
1.5 tsp yeast
1 tablespoon oil (The recipe calls for olive oil, but I used a canola/soy blend)
1 teaspoon salt

That's about 74% hydration, and it was pretty slack, but you roll it out using semolina and that would lower the final hydration number, probably into the 60's. I'm planning to make pizza on the grill again over the weekend, I'll weigh a piece of dough before and after I roll it out to see how much additional flour got added. (My wife would like to know that for carb counting anyway.)

We've been doing lavosh pizza in the winter a lot, I use a combination of mozzarella and havarti cheese on it.

[Mike Nolan]

I often put semolina in pizza dough, so using it when rolling out the dough for the grilled pizza wasn't a problem for me, even though a fair amount of it wound up being incorporated into the pizza dough.

[Mike Nolan]

I grew up in a small town in NW Illinois, and the city water was very high in iron, many plumbing fixtures would have a dark brown stain from it.

I'm told they had to upgrade the water system a number of years ago because it wasn't compliant with updated state water quality standards for municipal water systems. I don't know if that addressed the iron issue, though.

[Mike Nolan]

When I was growing up, my grandfather had a cabin outside of town (on the Apple River) where we'd go on Thursday and Sunday afternoons. It didn't have a potable water source, so we always took gallon jugs of tap water with us, and kept a jug of water in the fridge (the cabin did have electricity), which always tasted so much different than just water straight out of the jug.

I hope you have some bottled water on hand to get you through your well crisis.

[Mike Nolan]

Boiling water would gelatinize some of the starch in the flour, similar to how tangzhong bread works.

[Mike Nolan]

Sticking wasn't a problem at all, the grill was at about 400 degrees, I just slid the dough off the peel (dusted with semolina so the dough moved around easily) onto the grill, and in about a minute it was set up enough on the bottom to move around with tongs and pick it up to see how it was cooking.

The dough is a bit sticky when you start to shape it, but you keep dusting it with semolina as you work it. I think the semolina also adds a little crunch to the crust, I often add it to other pizza crust recipes.

With some grill styles you might need to put a little oil on the grill, but our new Napoleon grill has fairly wide grill surfaces with an 'S' shape.. I was a little worried the first time I made burgers that they might crumble and fall through the openings, but that hasn't been a problem. I use 80% lean meat when doing burgers on the grill, a lower fat content meat might be more crumbly.

After you grill the bottom for 2-3 minutes and it starts to develop some dark spots (some sites call them 'leopard spots'), you take it off, flip it over, put the toppings on the now-grilled surface and then put it back on the grill to cook the other side.

I probably put too much toppings on the savory pizza (I often do), and there's a lot of the toppings left over since I was originally planning two savory pizzas but Diane suggested the dessert pizza, an excellent idea!

For the dessert pizza, I spread a little butter on the surface before dusting it with cinnamon/brown sugar, saving a little of that to put on top of the bananas. The marshmallows were cut into 4 pieces and didn't puff up a lot, though several of them had some nice brown areas on them.

We liked both the savory pizza and the dessert pizza, and one batch of dough makes enough for the two of us, possibly with a piece or two left over. (There weren't any leftovers last night, but I was HUNGRY by the time the pizzas came off the grill.)

We'll definitely make pizzas on the grill again, but it probably won't be an every-week thing, and not in cold weather. The dough should work indoors as well, I'd be tempted to do them in a cast iron pan on the stove rather than in the oven, I suspect it'd be more like the outdoor grill. Might need a lid on the pan, though.

[Mike Nolan]

We're starting to see two or three hummingbirds at a time, chasing each other away from the feeders, of course. They're SO competitive. We usually have them around until the latter part of September, depending on how soon cooler weather shows up. One day in the 30's and they're gone.

I've got about 12 feeders hung at this point, I think I have two or three more I could hang, including two window feeders.

[Mike Nolan]

When I took the course on making steamed dumplings, we rolled them out using a small dowel. The instructor was making almost perfectly round ones, she had obviously had a lot of practice at it. The good news is that the not-quite-round ones taste just as good.

[Mike Nolan]

A friend of mine was making tortellini yesterday, they looked great, he is a very precise cook.

[Mike Nolan]

I was looking at a tortilla press last year, not for making tortillas but for making empanadas and possibly even thin pizzas.

I don't think a 6" press would be big enough for pizzas, though it'd be fine for empanadas.

There's a burrito place in town that has a really big press that flattens and cooks their flour tortillas in about a minute. I've seen a similar press at Blaze Pizza for making their pizzas, which are somewhere around 10" in diameter. It doesn't cook the dough, and it leaves a rim like you would want on a pizza.

We prefer hard corn shells for tacos, and I'm happy buying the stand-n-stuff ones in the store. Our younger son preferred flour tortillas but he's in San Fran now. (In January it will be 10 years since he moved there.)

Anyway, the reviews on the metal presses were a mixed bag, apparently the handle that applies the pressure is the weak link, literally.

[Mike Nolan]

I made the pizzas on the grill tonight, one regular one with mushrooms, artichoke hearts, tomato chunks and cheese and one dessert one with bananas, chocolate, marshmallows, cinnamon and brown sugar. Both are about 10 inches in diameter. They were both great!

The crust is the recipe King Arthur sent out with their first Pizza School email two weeks ago, except that instead of using their 00 pizza flour I used a blend of AP and pastry flour. It is a good crust, very different from what I've been making and not like any take-out pizza I've had. How much of that is the dough recipe and how much of it is cooking it on a grill is hard to say.

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