Pletzel Pizza? Okay, Lazy Man Pizza...Yiddish Style

Yes, yes, I know – Im a lazy, good-for-nothing. I've blogged about that before.

But that’s only during the summer, I promise. You know, once the weather cools off, I’m back in the kitchen cooking and baking and becoming a whirling dervish of food.  Strange, though, how the summer, while ostensibly offering the greatest seasonal pleasures that the garden has to offer, also makes me want to do nothing but stay in an air-conditioned apartment or move to San Francisco, only one of which is really possible. Oh well; that’s just me. Actually, I secretly long for those two months a year (September and October) when the summer produce bounty is still real AND I feel like cooking. Whatever.

Of course, there is still some cooking to be done. After all, Significant Eater needs to eat... and so do I.  Indeed, I always make breakfast and I even make lunch, once in a while, on the weekends.  

But, I take shortcuts. Lots of ‘em.  And just last week when I stopped by one of my local bakeries,  a bakery that I sometimes slam about their eponymous product, but which I nevertheless love in general... 

I picked up some goodies for the weekend and I had a brilliant idea (at the same time, no less)...how about a pletzel pizza?

Okay, okay – I know what most of you are saying… “What’s a pletzel?” Much less a pletzel pizza.

Literally, translated from Yiddish (thanks to Arthur Schwartz), a pletzel is a small town square; a piazza perhaps. In Paris, the heart of the 13^th century Jewish quarter (in the Marais) was known in Yiddish as the Pletzl, according to jewishvirtuallibrary.org.

Would it help if I told you a pletzel is an onion board? I thought not. Well then, let’s go to the wiki for their definition of a pletzel. Wiki says it’s: 

…a traditional Jewish specialty…an onion and seed covered, focaccia-like flatbread. The dough for pletzel resembles challah dough, but it is rolled very thin and is not allowed to rise.

Wait! So it’s actually nothing like a pizza. Made with a totally different dough, with seeds on it and everything; oy. But it still sorta looks like a pizza, doesn’t it? Go ahead, use your imagination…

See...I thought so...thanks. Anyway, I brushed that pletzel with a bit of olive oil, topped it with sliced heirloom tomatoes (summer!) and a bit of gruyere I had in the fridge and threw it into the toaster oven...

And whaddya know? Pletzel pizza, that’s what. And while it’s nothing like the real deal, it is  a real lazy pizza man’s way out. Sig Eater liked it, or so she said. Well, at least until the fall...

Bialy Wars North vs. South

I have a gripe. I know what you're thinking...perhaps not my first, right? Well, it's not earth-shattering, and it's not as important as say, the debt ceiling, but still. And it's not just me; I have neighbors who say the same thing.

So, what's so important that I've taken it to print? Listen, I've been writing about one of our neighborhood's institutions for at least a couple of years. I first blogged about bialys 2 years ago in this post. But just in case you missed it, we live right around the corner from Kossar's, a rather well-known bialy bakery that has been in existence for over half a century...

Now, don't get me wrong; I like Kossar's. I buy stuff there a lot. It's just that, well, it has changed. In the "old days," the center of the bialy was full of caramelized onions. But just take a look at a bialy I bought there last week...

Onions? You can practically count the "onions" on one hand. Or maybe it's just onion juice. According to the web site, it's onion paste. So what happened? Is there too much automation in the bialy making process? Are they making so many bialys now such that the care isn't taken like it used to be? Beats me.

But a few weeks ago, Significant Eater and I were in Florida. And I stopped by one of their "world-famous" delis to pick up some eats. And one of the eats I happened to buy was a few bialys. Now, take a gander at this...

In my book, that's a bialy. Loaded with onions. Beautifully browned. Practically not even in need of a toaster. Just like the "old days." Or at least as I remember them.

So, will I still buy my bulkas and pletzels and bialys at Kossar's? You bet I will. But I'll be thinking of Flakowitz's with every bite I take.

The "Perfect" Whole-Wheat Bread - Almost

Okay, it's time. Time again for me to try another one of those Cook's Illustrated recipes. Just like I did last December, when I tackled their "Best Pizza Ever" recipe. Without hesitation, I can say that the pizza dough I made using that recipe really came out great.

Well, once this month's Cook's Illustrated arrived, how could I wait? There it was, right on the cover - "Secrets to Perfect Whole-Wheat Bread." Of course, the whole cover of Cook's Illustrated is, ummmmm, covered with those types of pronouncements. For example, just on that same issue's cover you get:

Dressing Up Steaks - Shortcut to 4-Star Pan Sauce

Broccoli-Cheese Soup - Throw Out the Rule Book

Real Boston Cream Pie

All About Butter

Who knew it was so easy? But that's what makes Cook's Illustrated great, and also one of the few food mags that I literally read cover to cover. Now, onto those perfect loaves of whole-wheat bread.

First, understand that it takes 18 - 24 hours from the start until you actually have something resembling a loaf of bread that can be eaten. Second, I can literally take a 10 minute walk to the Essex St. Market and buy a great, artisanal whole wheat bread for about $4 a loaf, which makes me think that there's a lot of work, and it takes a lot of time, to make my own. And unless it's categorically better than Pain d'Avignon's, why bother?

Well, I'm a cook, and I'm a food geek, so why the hell not? Also, I had all the ingredients on hand.

I didn't take pictures of the process, only the results, but it starts the night before with a biga (which is a starter, which is a pre-ferment, which is…something I wrote about here) and also a soaker, which allows the whole-wheat flour to develop to its fullest potential. As I told you, it's very scientific, and much more nerdy than I care to explain here.

The next morning, you actually put the dough together - and having a Kitchen Aid or other heavy-duty stand mixer comes in handy; otherwise, prepare for lots of kneading. Once the dough comes together, then it's only about 3 more hours till it's baked, and 2 more till it cools enough to cut into. Whew.

Now, before showing you the finished product…a mea culpa. Instead of the bread flour called for in the recipe, I mistakenly used all-purpose flour, and that may be the reason for one of the admittedly minor grievances I had with my loaves. So here's what the bread looked like after baking…

And then the loaf cut in half…

And finally, a close-up of a slice…

A couple of things. Take a look at that 'tunnel" up in the right-hand corner of the slice. Not good. Not terrible, but probably not something I should be proud of. Next, see how the "crumb," which is the interior texture of the loaf, gets tighter and tighter towards the bottom of the slice? That's called, I believe, pudding-y, or at least something like that. Whatever it's called, it's not what you're looking for. It might be due to the lower gluten content of the flour I used vs. bread flour. Taken altogether, not a bad first attempt.

If anyone has any suggestions as to what might've gone wrong - I'm all ears.

Although next time, I'll probably head over to the market - it's just so much easier.

Lazy Man Pizza - Oh, Make That Focaccia

Say what? Lazy man chicken is one thing, but lazy man pizza- that's a whole other category!

But it's why I make focaccia and just call it pizza - they're both flatbreads, after all. My main problems when I make (real) pizza are the whole shaping of it and then getting it onto and off of the peel and onto my pizza stone which has been heating for an hour at 550+ degrees...I usually end up with something that looks sort of round (if I'm lucky) and then if I'm really lucky it slides off the peel without a problem...however, after a few disasters with the pizza ending up on the oven door or on the oven floor, I decided to make focaccia my go to flatbread...and just call it pizza. Here's a tip, too - if you serve it already cut into slices, who is really gonna know?

You see, with focaccia, you get to shape it right in the pan in which it bakes, and that's what makes it lazy man pizza in my book. It's also lazy man in that it really only takes a few minutes of work...and a lot of waiting around for the yeasties to do their thing. What could be more lazy man than whipping up some dough and waiting a few hours before the next step? You can nap, shop, surf the webs - all good lazy man projects.

I like to start the night before with a pre-ferment; call it a biga, call it a poolish, call it a starter or call it whatever you wish, it's a mixture of flour, water and a tiny bit of yeast which is stirred till it comes together, covered and allowed to sit in a cool place overnight...next morning, it will be all bubbly and smell delicious...you can use some or all of it when you make your larger batch of dough.

Starter is cool stuff. It will last for a few days (3, at least) if you refrigerate it after it has been fermenting for a while. Frozen, it will last for 3 or 4 months - just put it in the fridge the day before you plan to use it...and take it out of the fridge to warm it up about an hour before you mix up your dough.

At this point, let's see how lazy this all is. A recap, if you will.

1. Night before - whip up starter - go to sleep. 10 minutes work, 8 hours sleep.

2. Mix dough and let rise - 10 minutes work - 2 hours of waiting.

3. Put dough into pan and let proof - 10 minutes work - another hour or more of waiting. By the way, proofing is another term for rising; it just happens after the first rise.

4. Put pan into oven - 1 minute work - wait till it's finished baking. Remove from pan and wait a few minutes before slicing.

Man, have you just been lazy, or what?

By the way, there are a million focaccia recipes out there - I like the recipes in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice and Carol Field's seminal The Italian Baker...you can't go wrong with either of those.

Now of course, you can go the real lazy man route (and I'm sure a few of you will or have) and buy frozen dough or heaven forbid, that product called Boboli. But it will be so much better if you make your own.

Take a look at a few before and after shots of lazy man focaccia. The first of each is simply sprinkled with a touch of rosemary and sea salt and the second is covered with very thinly sliced Yukon gold potatoes, rosemary and French sea salt. And lots of olive oil.

BEFORE

AFTER

What lazy man pizza-making tips do you have?

Do The Rye Thing

Rye bread. If you grew up in New York, raised in a pretend Jewish family (come on, you know the ones - no bacon in the house, but when you went out for Chinese food, the roast spareribs were always the first thing ordered - along with the shrimp with lobster sauce), you know from rye. Pastrami on rye. Salami on rye. Tuna salad on rye. Patty melts at the diner. And so on.
Whenever you got rye bread at the bakery, the question always asked was whether you wanted your rye seeded or un. And you always got to eat the tiny little end piece after the bread went through the slicer, which was the best part, imo.

So, in order to relive a bit of my youth, and because there just isn't that much great rye bread in the bakeries any more, I'm currently in the process of experimenting with rye breads using no yeast. Sourdough ryes, and as mentioned before, sourdough drives me crazy.

To help me with the sourdough project, I recently bought a copy of Ed Wood's Classic Sourdoughs and have been following his sourdough template, which in one form or another is basically fermenting your starter (you do have a starter, don't you?) with a cup to a cup and a half of flour and a cup of water for 8 - 12 hours (depending on ambient temperature), adding another cup of flour and 1/4 cup of water and fermenting for another 8 - 12 hours, followed by shaping, proofing and finally, baking the dough. Here's what the dough looks like after the second long fermentation, when the dough has risen to the top of the bowl and fallen back a bit...

For rye and multigrain breads, I have been baking in loaf pans - I want something that I'm able to slice and freeze and which will give me nice even slices. The first recipe I tried was Wood's German rye bread - very light on the rye - about 20% of the total flour is rye. Must say the bread came out great, if lacking a bit of that rye flavor I'm looking for. Here's the loaf, and notice - such a beautiful crumb (btw, for you non-bread bakers, the crumb is what the interior of the bread is called, as opposed to the crust, which is, well, the crust)...

Then I baked a couple of loaves, with double that amount of rye flour, so about 40% rye and 60% Hecker's unbleached white (my favorite all-around flour). One was proofed and baked in a loaf pan and the other free formed. I have a feeling the doughs were over-proofed; you can see the holes in the proofed loaf and that's what happens when you forget the loaves are proofing; by the time I went in to pre-heat the oven, this is what the loaf looked like, topping way over the loaf pan (note to self - use those timers)...

The boule also had blown up in it's brotform, and it separated dramatically while baking, which I'm pretty sure is do to the too long proofing period...

But the loaf pan bread baked up pretty nicely, though the crumb doesn't look as nice as the bread pictured above...

This bread's rye flavor is much more pronounced (notice the darker color), so I'm thinking that perhaps a bread with 50% rye flour will be just right. In France, a rye with less than 50% rye flour is called a pain de meteil; over 50% rye flour and you've got a pain de seigle. Balthazar Bakery here in New York makes a wonderful pain de seigle, btw.

But enough with the lessons already - you want that rye seeded or un?

Super Bowl Sunday and Pizza

Hey, what can I say...I wanted the Cardinals to win, but at least we got a good game, down to the final minute. But, super bowl weekend means food, and even though I was feeling a bit under the weather, and even though it was just the two of us, I cooked a bunch of stuff anyway.

Here's how Significant Eater and I started the day...

Yep, that's Niman Ranch bacon (one of my favorite, readily available brands), along with Arrowhead Mills stone ground grits, a fried Tello Farm's egg and, oh yeah, Mitch's sourdough toast...as you know, sourdough drives me crazy.

So I figured WTF, make more bread...it's super bowl Sunday. This time, the bread took the shape of pizza. Now, is there anyone more crazy than NYers when it comes to pizza? We've all heard "this is the best," no "that's the best," on and on and on...fwiw, in Manhattan we like Arturo's, UPN, Patsy's (uptown), and maybe one or two others, but on any given day, the pizza, even at one of the stalwarts, can suck. So, might as well make my own.

Now, pizza making, along with bread baking, can turn into obsessions. With pizza, the thing that really matters is the crust. No amount (which, of course, should be minimal) of topping is gonna making a crappy crust taste good. Not gonna happen. That's why, in general, the best pizza in Rome is pizza bianca - basically, a crust with some great olive oil and a bit of salt.

As I said, obsession. One of my favorite pizza making sites is Jeff Varasano's Famous NY Pizza Recipe site. Here, Jeff has reverse engineered the uptown Patsy's crust, when it was simply the best pizza to be had. And, the site is brilliant, one which pizza makers can read and reread over and over again. Though I gotta tell Jeff that I refuse to defeat the locking mechanism on my oven in order to get the temperature up to 800 degrees - just not happening. And that is one of the serious limitations to home pizza making...the oven just doesn't get hot enought. The pizza at Arturo's is baked in an old coal-fired oven , that when really cranking approaches 1100 F.

But, I digress. Books and libraries have been devoted to pizza. Peter Rheinhart, one of the guru's of modern bread baking, has written a tome on pizza. And it goes on and on. So for this pizza making attempt, I actually followed one of Rheinhart's recipes - sort of. And while there was cursing coming from the kitchen (at one point, Significant Eater was heard to call out, "what the fuck is going on in there?"), because the dough was pissing me off, I did manage to bake two delicious pies - even by our annoying, NYer know-it-all standards. Both had 3 cheeses (modest amounts, folks), including fresh mozzarella, real Parmesan and some other high-quality melter, along with red onions, plum tomatoes from a can - (which is what you want to use in the middle of the winter...even sometimes in the middle of the summer), a sprinkling of oregano from Italy (it's different than the oregano from Mexico), extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper. And, after all that, here's what we ended up with.

We easily ate two pies, leaving us barely enough room for the main course.

Oh yeah, that bread in the picture above came from this sourdough loaf, which was helped along, or as Mr. Rheinhart likes to say, "boosted," with a tiny bit of commercial yeast....it's sitting on a giant can of Sicilian anchovies and it had great oven spring along with the fluffiest, most open crumb (see toast above) that I've baked to date - a bit of yeast goes a long way, just don't tell the sourdough purists.

We're No Vegans, but...

A quick peek in my fridge/freezer and you'll find a half dozen quail, 1 smoked ham hock, 4 pounds of lamb shoulder, a coupla pounds of cryo-ed Benton's bacon, a pound or so of La Quercia pancetta (http://www.laquercia.us/), chicken stock, duck confit, duck fat and a big hunk of guanciale (also from La Quercia). To say nothing of 3 year-old parmesan, 2 kinds of pecorino, some goat cheese, and the fixings for a delicious fondue. Yeah, I know - I'm running low.

So what's an unabashed omnivore to do? Well, how about a vegan dinner with home baked sourdough, roasted broccoli and braised fennel, and an entree of potato and leek soup - no, not Vichyssoise (which is cold cream-based leek and potato soup), but hot potato/leek soup, made with nothing but leeks, potatoes, garlic, olive oil, water, salt and pepper. Takes all of about an hour to put together if you're somewhat organized, and here's what you do...

Start with a pound of leeks and clean them really well - but you knew that, otherwise you'll be eating sand. Cut up the leeks and start sweating them in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil (sweating means just what it sounds like - let 'em wilt, but without any color). Add a few cloves of thinly sliced garlic. While this is going on, peel and cube (1" cubes are good) a pound of russet or yukon gold potatoes. Throw them in the pot, cover with water, add salt and pepper, and boil gently till the potatoes fall apart. You can help them along with the side of a wooden spoon. Back to the salt - taste and add more - it'll need it. Potatoes absorb salt like that Star Trek villain that sucked the salt out of people in the episode called The Man Trap. So add more. Don't worry - it still won't be as much salt as is in that bag of chips. Ladle into warm soup bowls - (by the way, if you're serving hot soup, warm up the bowls - it's the little things that count). Drizzle with a bit of olive oil and serve with that crusty bread.

And of course, if you're the cook, you can always snack on a hunk of parmesan while all this cooking is going on - what do you think I am, a vegan or something?

Sourdough Drives Me Crazy

I like to bake, but don't do it enough. Lately, I've been into a cookie (the holidays, of course) and sourdough bread thing. I really like to perfect something before I move on to something else, and sourdough'll drive you crazy. Mothers, barms, poolish, biga, starters, sponges, preferments, ferments, aaaagghhh. You have to be a mini chemist - but I think that's why boys like to bake. Who knows?

Here's a boule (that's what I'm trying to perfect) I recently baked.


And here are shots of my next attempt:

A third attempt - you'll notice they're actually not getting any better, unfortunately:

But I refuse to give up - I tried two loaves the next time, baking one in a covered Dutch oven and the other directly on the stone. You can see my slashing technique, or lack thereof, caused the weird sort of growth in the bread on the left...