A Few Good Things I Cooked Recently
I am once again writing about some good food and drink prepared recently in my kitchen. With no further ado:
Pizza
I made a big batch of pizza dough and let it do its thing in the fridge for five
days before our first pizza night of the week. I am definitely interested in
trying new pizza recipes, but lately I’ve had some pretty great luck with the
following:
1. Bloom a couple heaping spoonfuls of yeast in warm water with a spoonful of
sugar.
2. Make an 85% hydration dough with around 550 grams of bread flour (about 140g
flour per personal pizza, this recipe makes four) and 2% salt, plus a couple
teaspoons of diastatic malt powder.
3. Let sit for half an hour, then knead for five minutes.
4. Proof it in the oven for two to three hours. I like it a bit overproofed.
5. Take it out, punch it down, divide it into olive oil-greased bowls/deli
containers, and let it sit in the fridge at least 24 hours but ideally a
couple days before making pizza.
These were, as usual, a hit. Just a good, basic cheese pizza. For the sake of experimentation (and not letting good ingredients go to waste) I used some Rao’s marinara sauce left over from the other day and it worked great. I also tried some of the Paul Prudhomme brand “Pizza and Pasta Magic” seasoning and found that it was delicious, especially when paired with some very hot pepper flakes.
Pizza… Again!
Hey, we had two more personal pizzas worth of dough in the fridge, why not run it back? All done the same, with the exception of adding that Prudhomme seasoning to the pizza before it was baked. This time I’ll show off a picture of the crust because seriously, that dough recipe does amazing things when it hits a 550 F baking steel.
American Chinese + Thanksgiving Fusion: Cranberry Chicken
Bear with me here. I made a batch of orange chicken, which I do semi-regularly and in all modesty very well. Before I got to preparing dinner, though, I had a thought: cranberry sauce goes great with poultry (source: every Thanksgiving meal, but more significantly, every day-after-Thanksgiving sandwich ever), so why not make a cranberry sauce in the same way one would make an orange sauce for orange chicken? I decided to make two sauces while the chicken was frying. A standard orange sauce (orange juice, soy sauce, shaoxing wine, sugar, salt, cornstarch, sesame oil, MSG, dried orange peel or orange zest if we’re feeling fancy (and a little sugar if peel/zest is going in)) and then a cranberry sauce made exactly the same but with cranberry juice. It was delicious. I want to try again with 100% cranberry juice instead of the sweetened juice I was using so I can control the sweetness and intensity of the cranberry flavor a little more but honestly that just worked. This will be making another appearance on the table, and soon.
A Cosmo, kind of
I don’t have a picture for this, but the jug of cranberry juice in the fridge inspired me to look up “cranberry juice cocktails” just to see what all it could be used in. First result: the Cosmopolitan. I’d heard of this but never tried one, so I (kind of) mixed one up. Apparently one is supposed to use 100% cranberry juice and then sweeten with simple syrup, but just skipping a step and using the sweetened juice seemed to work just fine. Additionally, I didn’t have any Cointreau on hand, but I do keep some Grand Marnier around for Crepes Suzette, so I used that as a substitute orange liquor. Long story short, I am now a fan of the Cosmo, that one is definitely going into the repertoire.
Anyway, that’s about it - made some good food, ate some good food, will probably make and eat some more good food soon.