Cauliflower Flatbread

This was one of the strangest, silliest things I've ever made, but it was surprisingly tasty, so I thought I'd memorialize it here.

I've been avoiding sugar, white flour, and the like (also, red meat) for the last month. That's pretty easy: Just make different foods. We make curries and salads instead of sandwiches and pasta dishes. I'm not the kind to seek out special products (low-carb bread?!) or recipes to mimic the things I'm not eating. But I stumbled upon a paleo diet blog while looking up the nutritional content of something or other, and it had a recipe for cauliflower pizza.

The internet, it turns out, is teeming with recipes for cauliflower pizza.

The idea stuck in my head, and finally I just decided to try it.

Basically, the cauliflower gives structure to the ... well, it's not a dough at all — more of a malleable paste. Cheese provides most of the flavor and browning. And egg holds it together. I didn't expect each slice would stay in one piece, but it does.

Reading these two posts helped me: The Lucky Penny and Closet Cooking. I didn't squeeze the water out of the cooked cauliflower, though I'll try that next time. I won't recreate the entire recipe here — read their blogs — but here are the proportions I used:

1/2 small head of cauliflower, grated on a box grater, about 2 1/2 cups before nuking
4 oz cheese (I used cheddar because we have a lot of it, with a little Parmesan)
1 pinch salt
1 egg
1 t Italian herbs

I put goat cheese, roasted red pepper strips and marinated artichokes on it, and baked it on my Silpat, which was perfect, for about 35 minutes (it was very thin) at 400 degrees.

I couldn't bring myself to call it pizza, because, well, no, but I think flatbread is a reasonable term. It's very cheesy and really fun to make.

Simplicity

We went out for Italian pizza lunches at the two best places near here with Mary Ellen, and had a variety of 12-inch pizzas ranging from Margherita to prosciutto with arugula. Quite a worthwhile project, although fattening. I don't always succeed in getting my photos in order here, but a prosciutto, arugula, and truffle oil pizza is pictured.

And here's the cobbler recipe from your childhood.

Fruit Cobbler

Place in a baking dish or 10-inch pyrex pie plate:

4 to 6 cups prepared fruit (berries, or cut-up peaches, or a mixture)
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour

Make biscuit topping:

1 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar

Mix with fork.

1/3 cup milk or water
1/6 (2 and 2/3 tablespoons) cup oil

Mix liquids and stir into flour mixture, stirring only until lightly blended. Drop by teaspoon blobs onto fruit. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar if desired. Bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. Serve warm, maybe with ice cream.

My Pizza Method

Here's how I do pizza: I start the dough in the bread machine about two hours before serving time (this was 2/3 whole wheat and 1/3 third unbleached flour) and let it rise until puffy.


I preheat the oven and the pizza stone at 450 degrees for a long time, at least 20 minutes before baking; roll out the dough into a rough circle and then fit it to my perforated pizza pan. I don't let it rise again at this point, although I know some people do.


I brush the dough with olive oil, and then put a layer of shredded cheese, then various toppings--this had fresh tomatoes and herbs chopped together with garlic, and then anchovies, olives, and jalapenos.



I bake the pizza in the pan set on top of the hot stone for 8 minutes, then slide it off onto the bare st0ne to finish for about 8 more minutes. I find this method eliminates any disastrous transfer from a peel to oven, especially if the dough is sticky.

Roasted Garlic, Sun-Dried Tomato, and Goat Cheese Pizza

That's a really pretentious name for our very best favorite pizza. I think I started making this when you were in high school.

For this one I made a crust of 2/3 white and 1/3 spelt flours. I baked 10 garlic cloves in olive oil in a little baking dish for 30 minutes. I soaked some sun-dried tomatoes in boiling water for 15 minutes, then drained them and tossed them with a little of the oil from the garlic.

I brushed the raw pizza crust with the garlic oil, then spread on a thin layer of mixed shredded Italian cheeses. Then I decorated it with the sun-dried tomatoes, the chopped garlic, and 6 ounces crumbled goat cheese, and sprinkled it with chopped fresh basil and parsley. Mmmm.

Calzone II

Here's another calzone, this one much more traditional. The filling was homemade Italian sausage, sauteed onions and garlic, ricotta, mozzarella, and parsley. I added some fresh thyme and dried oregano too, I think.

I have a sinus infection and am not doing much cooking, which is why I'm writing about food from a week or two back and don't remember exactly what I did. Makes for poor food blogging, I know. But the calzones are lovely, aren't they?

Calzone

I made a calzone using my regular pizza dough recipe. It's a fairly wet dough, which made it a little tough to work with. Lots of cornmeal on the peel made it all okay.

No ricotta in this one -- just what we had around, which was homemade Italian sausage, mozzarella, and sauce made with canned tomatoes.

Mom, I used to love those calzones you made with ham and cheese when we were kids. I think that was my birthday dinner for several years running, wasn't it?

"There's a Hole in My Pizza, Dear Eva, Dear Eva. . ."

There's a hole in my pizza because it has a spelt crust, and when I jerked it off the pan onto the pizza stone, it didn't hang together. I want to say that it was incoherent, but that's not quite the right word, either.

It was delicious, and I'm looking forward to a leftover piece for lunch. First there's a layer of pesto; then various cheeses left in the cheese drawer (mostly fresh Parmesan, but also a little goat cheese); thinly sliced onions; diced tomatoes; anchovies; fresh jalapenos; and Kalamata olives. Yum.

If this pizza had been more perfect, I would have named it the "Colin Powell Endorsement Memorial Pizza" to show my enthusiasm.

Pizza Again, with Chiles

I made a few pizzas the other night. Same crust recipe as I've been using for the last two years, though I got away from it for a while -- I kept making my pizza doughs as wet as my bread doughs, and they just weren't holding together. I also had some not-so-delicious over-risings and one or two mediocre batches with spelt flour. So I'm pleased to report that my pizza-fu is back.

This one had hot Italian sausage, red bell peppers, and onions, all pre-sauteed; plain tomato sauce from a jar; mozzarella; and parmesan. You can see the little shaved thin pieces of parmesan in the picture.

I also made a delicious pie with homemade pesto and fresh tomatoes and mozzarella, but it didn't photograph so well.

I know I post pictures of garden chiles all the time, but they're so pretty that I can't help it. And they are the perfect pizza accompaniment. Here we have ordoños (the purple and small yellow), chiltepins (the tiny green and orange balls), a Thai chile (the wrinkly tall red one), dedo di moças (the big glossy orange and green ones), and tabascos (the bigger yellow and the red at the bottom right. Whew.

This is how you eat fresh chiles, in case you are wondering how I consume all these fiery peppers without doing myself physical harm.

Margherita

I was proud of this pizza. Garden basil and garden tomatoes, pure and authentic, except for the cheese: that's queso fresco. It was convincingly mozzarella-like.

It's gluten-packed, though -- no spelt in sight.

Spelt Pizza

This was tasty. I made pizza my old regular way, which I had been craving since Dad gave up wheat. I used whole spelt flour, yeast, a little olive oil, salt, 1/4 teaspoon sugar. At the last minute I decided to use 2/3 cup "gluten-free flour"--next time I'll use all spelt, because the dough wasn't quite elastic enough.

This pizza had fresh tomato, basil, chicken chorizo, olives, canned jalapeno slices, yellow bell peppers, and mixed Italian grated cheese.

Local Pizza

I am overjoyed to have a local pizza joint, the kind where we walk in and the waitress waves cheerfully and then ambles over to our table with a pitcher of the correct beer. Any deviation from our routine is cause for comment: once I placed a to-go order, and when Lawson went to pick it up she said "You're early, and your pizza's too small." (Usually we arrive late enough that we are the last people there and the waitress starts mopping with Pine-Sol as we are finishing our pitcher.)

About a year ago we decided to try every pizza in town. We've had some accomplices in the quest, most notably Ken and Melanie, but we haven't been very methodical and still have a long way to go. And much of the time when we want to go out for pizza, we go to our local place. It's less than two miles away and has excellent ambience: plastic checkered tablecloths, comfortable booths, wrestling on the TV, friendly pregnant teenagers, and assorted townie customers in camouflage hats and TapouT T-shirts.

It does not have the world's greatest pizza. We can make much fancier and more delicious pizzas at home. It's not New York-style or Sicilian or anything identifiably regional...it might be slightly Greek, but not intensely so. It's not super-thin cracker-style Southern crust. It's not soft bland pizza chain crust. But it has a few things going for it:

• It is HOT. It comes to the table steaming and crispy and perfect, with no delay between oven and us.
• The crust is crisp and airy such that its flavor doesn't much matter. The flavor is above average but not impressive in any way. But the texture is just right. It's also retrievable, in that a few minutes in the toaster oven the next day will return the crust to almost its original state.
• The sauce is subtle and balanced and not applied too heavily.
• The ingredients are applied with the proper hand. If we order four toppings, slightly less of each topping is used than if we order three toppings. There is never a glut of Genoa salami or mushrooms or cheese or anything else -- they are applied thoughtfully.

I wish we had more perfect local markets and eateries.

With Anchovies

This was a good spontaneous pizza: whole wheat crust; pesto from the freezer; a mix of jack and parmesan cheeses; then anchovies, Kalamata olives, cherry tomatoes, roasted red peppers from a jar, and fresh jalapenos from the garden.

To cook pizza, I preheat a pizza stone in the oven for about half and hour at 450 degrees. Then I build the pizza on a perforated pan sprayed with olive oil. I put the pan on the stone to bake for 8 minutes or until it firms up, then I slide it off onto the stone to finish baking for about 8 more minutes. This seems a lot less risky than using a peel to slide the raw pizza into the oven. The crust still rest directly on the stone for the last half of the baking time, so it gets nice and brown and thoroughly cooked.

We have had a cherry tomato orgy lately. We use them on pizza, in soup, and eat them for breakfast and lunch. It's only a miniature version of your tomato crop in the summer, but what a pleasant phenomenon in November and December.

Green and Red Tomato Pizza

This was a Viana La Place idea: make a pizza with all the tomatoes you have to pick the day before the first frost, both red and green. In our case, they were green, yellow, and red. She suggested leaving the cheese off, but I added some fresh mozzarella and herbs, and it was delicious. The green tomatoes were tart and very good.

I have a number of longer posts planned for the next few days; I just wanted to get this up.

Pizza and Wine

Maybe I shouldn't be lifting the curtain on the glamour implied by close-up food photos against a lovely tile table, but here is a recent dinner we ate.

I have no idea what we were watching on TV. I do not know who that man is.

I make pizza often. When I make a batch of dough, I usually separate it into four pieces, each of which goes into an oiled 1-quart freezer bag. I freeze all the dough unless I'm going to cook it the very next day; freezing improves the flavor and texture so much that even a few days in the freezer is well worth it.

Making pizza dough the same day as I want to eat it is never worth it. New dough just doesn't taste good or behave properly.

If I take the dough out of the freezer in the morning before work, it's perfectly thawed on the counter by dinnertime. And at that point the dough is so soft and stretchy that I just gently remove it from the bag with oiled hands and pull it into shape.


Peter Reinhardt's recipe for New York style crust is about my favorite; this is it, except with the options removed:

5 cups bread flour
1 1/2 tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
3 tablespoons olive oil
Almost 2 cups water

Mix, knead, and let rise for an hour or two, then divide into four balls and handle as above. Try never to roll out or punch down the dough -- let it rest if it ever gets tough. Bake at highest temperature possible on hottest surface possible. This makes four 10" pizzas.

Recovery

We had commercial take-out pizza Saturday night, and it made me rededicate myself to cooking fresh, unsalty things. It was horrible. Rubbery cheese, doughy crust, and salt—help, I’m obsessing about this pizza! I’m going to have nightmares!

Now, on to the antidotes. Tonight we had a little fillet of fresh silver salmon from Alaska, caught by our neighbor on a fishing expedition. I prepped it with lemon juice, salt, and pepper, then spread on a mixture of sambal and brown sugar before broiling. With it we had a thoroughly baked sweet potato—soft, unctuous—and this wonderful green bean salad from the Jack Bishop cookbook.

Green Bean and Tomato Salad

Lightly cook enough fresh young green beans for 2 to 4 people. Drain and cool.

Then mix:

2 ripe tomatoes, cut in ½ inch dice
1 green onion, thinly sliced
Juice of ½ lemon
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper
Black olives
Minced parsley
Chopped walnuts

Add green beans and top with
½ cup crumbled feta cheese

The night immediately following the pizza incident we had the vegetable curry pictured above, with a cucumber/green onion/rice vinegar salad and brown rice, followed by champagne grapes. We’re feeling better now.

Succotash Pizza and a New Knife

It had to be done, right? Right?

I love okra. I love pizza. We have many fresh tomatoes. Tomatoes, okra, and corn go together brilliantly. It was natural that I would want to put all these things together. But I couldn't shake the memory of the pizzas served from carts on the street in London: soggy and unbrowned, cluttered with greasy cheese and all the wrong vegetables. One of those pizzas had corn on it. It seemed to have been dumped right out of the can onto the pizza.

To avoid the yucky canned corn effect, I roasted loose kernels of frozen corn ahead of time. After 10 minutes at 425 degrees, they were nutty and gently browned, and much more appealing. I roasted the okra a bit, too, but I needn't have. Fresh tomatoes, a little mozzarella, one sliced poblano chile, and grated Asiago and Parmesan pulled all the flavors together quite well.

I also made a classic pizza Margherita to balance things out.

Our friend Mark is visiting from Kyoto and gave us this amazing knife, shown here with the poblano:

It's made by a company called Aritsugu, which I'd never heard of but have enjoyed reading about. Lawson's and my names are carved in the blade (on the other side -- this side says Aritsugu). It's beautiful.

Pizzas

Our friend Mark lives in Kyoto and must be fed pizza when he comes to visit the US. The lower one is pepperoni; the upper one is herbs, anchovies, and mascarpone.

I'll be in San Francisco with no computer for the next four days...and then I'll be in Tucson! I promise we will post something together.

Pizza Crust

It has been a lame, uninspired week of cooking around here, but I am tired of the yogurt picture, so I'm posting a picture of some pretty pizza crust I made last week.

Return to Sanity

Well, that’s the goal, anyway. We’re not even very busy, but my plan to eat vegetable-rich, vibrant, balanced meals has often given way to overly rich, hastily-executed ones instead.

On Monday, our newly widowed neighbor heard water running, went outside to investigate, and went flying down her ice-covered brick steps. The pipe carrying water to her swamp cooler on the roof had frozen and burst. Dad went up the roof to diagnose the problem, we turned off the water supply, she called her plumber who came within a couple of hours, and for just over $100 she got a new pipe and bonus resolution of a clogged bathtub drain. But this definitely required a comforting meal of homemade pizza with ham, green peppers, and olives. Dad contributed a salad of baby spinach, arugula, and mesclun.

I made Rocco DiSpirito’s Cauliflower Soup with Basil Syrup and Pine Nuts for the first course, but decided it wasn’t really worth the trouble. Fun to do, not all that exciting to eat. I have read in the Washington Post and other places recently that cauliflower is now fashionable. Imagine that. How did your roasted cauliflower turn out?

Dough

For years I've been complaining about the poor pizza available in this town, mumbling especially about the lack of decent crust, and making my own pizza, which is never as perfect as I want but gets better all the time. Lawson liked my pizza but has also always defended the cracker crust (absurdly thin and flavorless) and piled-on toppings of places like Pizza Man on Rosewood Drive.

Then, a few months ago we visited a New York/college-town-style pizza place in Athens, GA after a show. It was two in the morning and the place was packed. We leaned against the counter and watched the dough guy shape pizza after pizza, easily but with great concentration. It was pretty sensual, actually, and I learned more about handling dough in that 15 minutes than from any single book I've read...it was very much like watching a musician much more talented than you. And since then Lawson has been excited about pizza. He bought me this Peter Reinhardt book for Christmas, tromped around town looking for unglazed tiles for the oven, and is learning to toss dough, New York-style.

I'm excited that he's excited, but I also feel a little protective of the dough-and-baking arena. Lawson excels at everything culinary -- stir-frying, seasoning, saucemaking, chopping -- but isn't very interested in baking, which is my favorite thing to do in the kitchen. I kind of feel like it's my territory, so it's hard to share pizza-making duties. But I imagine the shared work will make our pizzas much, much better. And so far, I'm still making the doughs.



I made some so-called neo-Neapolitan dough from the Reinhardt book; this is supposed to be the best kind for tossing. I prefer wetter doughs; my standard pizza dough recipe contains no oil -- I've had better luck that way. The neo-Neapolitan dough had lots of oil and honey and was very springy. I smoothed and pulled out the dough, and Lawson practiced tossing it, and it turned out to be the best pizza I've ever made at home.



Today I also pulled my old sourdough starter out of the fridge. You gave it to me years ago; I think you got it from Jack Kearns. When I moved out here to South Carolina, I drove the whole way with it on the seat next to me in an ice bucket I stole from a motel and filled with ice each morning. It's survived on years of neglect: about once a year I pull it out and spend a few days feeding it and baking a few loaves, then return it to the fridge to ignore for another year. As a result it is absurdly acidic and has a slight cheesy/fruity edge that goes away after a few feedings.

I've read that making it less wet will make it less acidic, as will feeding it water instead of milk. So I'll try that.