Month: October 2011

Pizza Night at Rönkkös

Here’s some photos from our pizza night next door at our family/friends place next door (well, next door once you’ve traveled to my home in Finland). I got to try making pizzas in a traditional Finnish ‘leivinuuni’, a type of bread oven. How was it? Well, I’ve called off all my meetings/work next week and we’ll be building one!

UPDATE: I actually have spent a large portion of last year designing a new type of wood fired oven called Uuni

Relatively Quick and Easy Pizza Sauce

Following on from my dough recipe last week, it’s time to spread some sauce on our pizza.

Relatively Quick and Easy Pizza Sauce

The sauce is a balancing act between sweet, salt, heat and, of course, quality of the tomatoes. It might take a bit of experimenting and trying out but as long as you don’t boil it for too long and are careful with seasoning, you’ll be fine.

Ingredients

  • 1 onion
  • clove of garlic
  • 2 tins of good quality plum tomatoes
  • 140 g tomato purée
  • 2 tbsp of sugar
  • 1/2 tsp chillie flakes
  • Salt and pepper

Method

  1. Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in a large sauce pan, add roughly chopped garlic and onion.
  2. Fry for 3 minutes or until they start changing colour a little.
  3. Add sugar and stir until the onions start caramelising, minute or two at longest.
  4. Pour in your tinned tomatoes and stir so the tomatoes break up. (Get the best plum tomatoes your money can by. Napolitana are available in most places and are pretty good.)
  5. Mix in tomato purée.
  6. Add seasoning, chillie flakes and basil, simmer for 6-8 minutes.
  7. Blend very well with a hand blender

 

Preparation time: 5 minute(s)

Cooking time: 20 minutes

Enough for about 8-10 pizzas.8

Vegetarian Mushroom Pâté

Want that special vegetarian friend or wife to love you even more? Try this excellently simple and pretty quick mushroom pâté. You can serve it hot straight off the pan or keep it in the fridge for a fair few days. Excellent on top of some toasted French bread.

Vegetarian Mushroom Pâté

Ingredients

  • 150 g oyster mushrooms
  • 150 g button mushrooms
  • Basil
  • 3 Spring onions
  • 2 shallots
  • Garlic
  • 2 tbsp sour cream
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Coarse mustard

Method

  1. Fry chopped mushrooms, spring onion, garlic and shallots in a bit of butter and on low heat until they stop giving moisture. Be careful not to let them get brown.
  2. Half way through above, add basil, thyme and seasoning.
  3. Mix in mustard and sour cream.
  4. Take off the heat after about a minute or so
  5. Divide into ramekins and garnish with a sprig of thyme.

Preparation time: 10 minute(s)

Cooking time: 20 minutes

Number of servings (yield): 4

Near Perfect Pizza Dough

Every pizza has to start with the dough. No dough, no pizza. Obviously.

I started making pizzas about year and a bit ago. With ‘started’, I mean that before that I’d only make them occasionally, couple of times a year. It turns out that there’s a lot to it if you’re critical of what you’re doing and aim to make better pizzas than 95 % of pizzerias offer.

Back home, in Finland, a home made pizza used to consist of flattened bread dough with ketchup working as the sauce and fried mince, tinned pineapple, tomatoes and mild edam as toppings. That’s how my grandma used to make them. Today, I think people also have some olives on top.

I know that’s a bit harsh and that’s not everybody’s experience of home pizzas but I think that experience is what made me try harder. Try to make pizzas that actually kick ass and you would hesitate ordering another pizza in a restaurant as you know that you can make better ones at home. It’s a bit like with steaks. Most restaurant steaks are pretty average as it’s not hard to learn how to grill ‘the perfect steak’.

This is why we’re starting Month of Pizza with the dough. With a bit of trial and error, anyone can make a kick-ass pizza dough that’ll rival anything you can whack ten quid on in a restaurant.

Pizza Dough

Ingredients

  • 500 g of Type ’00’ flour – available in most supermarkets. Use strong bread flour if not available
  • 300 ml luke warm water
  • 8 g dry yeast
  • 3 tbsp olive oil
  • 25 g (2 tbsp) caster sugar
  • 10 g (2 tsp) salt

Method

  1. Mix salt into the flour in a large mixing bowl
  2. Mix water, yeast, sugar and 2/3 of oil together in another bowl
  3. Make a well in the middle of the flour, pour water in that and let it sit for 10-20 minutes until the yeast start working
  4. If you’re using a kitchen mixer such as a Kenwood Chef, mix the dough on low speed for 10 minutes.
  5. While the doing is being mixed, add remaining oil to keep dough from sticking too much.
  6. If you’re hand kneeding, mix the dough by hand in the bowl and pour on your kitchen surface. You should kneed the dough for about 15 minutes and no less to ensure right kind of consistency. There’s plenty of good videos on YouTube to show you how.

    7. (personally, I really like my 1970s Kenwood Chef I got of off eBay.)

Preparation time: 15 minute(s)

Cooking time: 1 hour(s)

Number of servings (yield): 3-6

Proving

If there’s two important stages to making dough, first is kneeding, second is proving. When the dough is rising, yeast eats and burns sugars from the flour to alcohol and carbon dioxide. The CO2 expands the dough and stretches the gluten, thus making it stronger.

There’s two proving methods I use. First one is quick, just leave it in a mixing bowl and let it rise , covered with cling film or towel, for an hour or until it’s doubled in size.

Cold proving pizza dough

The second is to divide the dough into smaller portions, about four or five, place them into containers with enough room to grow and put them in the fridge. This is called cold proving. I’m not sure of the science and and mechanics of it but it seems like the slow pace the fought tales to rise, it adds to the texture and flavour of the final product. You’ll need to leave it in the fridge for at least 12-24 hours. Many pizzerias that use this method leave the dough to cold proof for up 36-48 hours.

Yes, it’s a lot slow process but results are worth it.

If kneading and rising is done properly, you’ll end up with a dough that can be stretched till it resembles graphene in its thinness. (Your mileage may and will vary.)

Once the dough’s been proven, you need to knock it back. In other words, drop it back on the surface and gently kneed it until most of the air bubbles are gone.

Now it’s ready for rolling, pushing, tossing and stretching into the best pizzas you’ve ever made. These days, I use this amount of dough to make four pizzas but it’s possible to carefully roll up to 8 very very thin pizzas out of this. Once rolled to size, you can leave the base to rest for 10-15 minutes until adding toppings and baking.

If you do end up using this method, please leave a comment and perhaps even a photo on our Facebook page or below!