BA, you're dinners tend to sound so well-planned and rounded. Around here we don't do a lot of sides with meals. A salad and a bowl of soup or a sandwich is often dinner, sometimes not even the salad.
Recently I've been topping pizza with artichoke hearts, mushrooms, tomato chunks, 8 ounces of whole-milk mozzarella, 6 ounces of havarti and a sprinkling of 4-cheese blend (parmesan, asiago, provolone and romano.) This for a 15x20 pizza.
My sauce recipe, which I'll post after the next time I make it, makes enough sauce to lightly cover 3 of these pizzas. I brush it on so it is pretty uniform.
I think sauce is more important in a stuffed pizza than in a deep dish one, and for a thin crust pizza you really don't want the sauce to overpower everything else.
Happy Birthday, Joan.
A dough with a lot of oven spring makes a great deep dish pizza.
We have appointments to get the vaccine on Wednesday.
I've tried several lames, the one I like best is a holder for a double-edge razor blade that I got at SFBI, but most of the time I wind up using a 7 inch knife.
I've been tempted to buy a surgeon's bistoury, but I really think the problem isn't the blade, it's the dough. Some days it slices beautifully, other days with the same dough recipe it is like slicing peanut butter, it stick to everything.
I'm going to try a different way of proofing my doughs, I bought a plastic storage box that fits over my 3/4 sheet pans, that way I don't have to cover them with plastic wrap and I can use some hot water to raise the humidity, a bit more like a professional proofing cabinet.
Tonight's pizza was really good with a thin but crisp crust. I put some ham on half of it, it was good but probably not something I'd do very often.
I haven't done any of the BBGA online courses yet, they're a suggested fee of $125, and I think that's a bit steep for less than a half-day of online training, especially since I'm a hands-on learning person. But if Debra Wink does her sourdough class online, I'd probably take that one. (I was scheduled to go to Texas for her two day seminar on sourdough when Covid started cancelling everything.)
I'm planning to rebuild a rye starter again, I may try using that on my Roman/semolina crust with an overnight retarded ferment.
Chatham is also running a course in April on using stencils and dyes to decorate breads. I'm thinking of taking that one, too.
I saw an example of a bread that was shaped as a boule and then scissors were used to cut a fancy pattern in it, probably beyond my limited artistic skills, though.
No eggs in his dough recipe, but it does have sunflower oil and he uses an egg yolk wash.
There are some vegan challah recipes out there, and one site claims it is OK to use either egg or olive oil, so I guess it is possible to make challah without egg.
I may have to make a small batch of his dough just to see how it feels and what it tastes like. I usually use the challah recipe in BBA, and it is pretty eggy. One thing I've noticed when trying to braid it is that the strands will start to puff up again right after they're rolled out, so by the time you have 8 of them done you've got to de-gas them all.
I started a batch of pizza dough tonight, Sunday will be Pizza Day.
I wasn't patient enough with my rye bread and got blowouts along the length of both loaves. Doesn't ruin the taste, though.
We're in the middle of a thunderstorm, believe it or not!
Interestingly enough, his Challah dough recipe, which you can get if you subscribe to his site, doesn't have any egg in it, though he does use an egg yolk wash. It does have sugar and sunflower oil in it.
One of the items on his Instagram page is a braided loaf that looks like it must be made from a dozen or more strands. (He doesn't say how many, though he does ask for guesses, so maybe he'll post the right answer some time.)
We are having ham on rye bread and potatoes au gratin.
