Pizza Crust

So I may not be from the northeast, but one thing that I think they get absolutely right up here is thin-crust pizza. I also love deep-dish Chicago-style pizza. It’s what I think of as Midwestern pizza that really gets to me (though it’s pretty common in Florida and is what you’ll find as the default from any of the national chains): medium-crust pizza. For me, a pizza is all about its toppings, and if most of what you can taste in any bite is a pillowy mound of crust, then I’m not feeling it.

Chicago-style pizza strikes me as more of a casserole than a pizza pie, and I think of it as its own food group altogether.

It’s possible to get excellent, superlative pizza where I live – it’s one of the things my city is noted for – but that kind of pizza is pretty unhealthy and not an item to indulge in on a day-to-day basis. Making pizza at home gives me more control over the ingredients and allows me to indulge my most fanciful topping whims.

This crust recipe is the product of trial and error. I used this Smitten Kitchen recipe as a starting point, but even this gave me a thicker crust than I wanted. Note that this is not inherent to the recipe itself – one can always roll crust out as thinly as one wants – but I’m using an inverted 12” cast-iron skillet as a pizza stone, so 12” is the diameter limit unless I want cheese and toppings dripping all over my oven floor. Which might have happened the first time I attempted homemade pizza. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, etc. etc., right?

White Wheat Challah with Raisins

Well, this feels rather lazy. I’ve taken my own recipe, swapped out some of the flour for white wheat, and acted as if this is something new. But look: the pictures are different! I made one large loaf instead of two mini-loaves. You can’t pretend as if this doesn’t add visual interest.

What’s more, I added raisins. Raisins. Plump, juicy, organic raisins. Surely you cannot fail to be moved by the raisins. Have you a heart of stone?

Pumpernickel Rye Bread with Raisins

Did you know that pumpernickel bread gets its dark color from cocoa powder? I didn’t – I presumed it had to do with the flour or the caraway seeds. Since regular rye isn’t dark, it should hardly have shocked me that cocoa was behind the pumpernickel hue we know and cherish.

Since we’ve cleared up that mystery, let’s talk pumpernickel. Despite the inclusion of cocoa powder, it tastes nothing like chocolate. Maybe you love it; maybe you hate it. I love it, but I like my breads thick, grainy, and dense. If you like your breads soft, airy, and light, then this is probably not the loaf for you, and you’ve probably never cared for pumpernickel to begin with.

If you like pumpernickel, then you’ll be sure to like this homemade version even more. Unlike store-bought loaves, this one got even more flavorful the longer it sat on my counter and maintained a soft, moist crumb for longer than most bread. It could be the summer humidity, but I’m going to attribute it to inherent pumpernickel goodness.

Whole Grain Sunflower Seed Bread

As part of my recent healthful living kick, I’ve been trying to eat less refined white flour. Luckily, my friends have clued me in about the magical substance known as “white wheat flour.”

I thought at first that it must be some sort of food industry hoax – like probiotic-added yoghurt, say, about which I remain deeply skeptical – until I read up on it and discovered that it really is genuine whole-wheat flour. White wheat flour is simply made from a less bitter varietal of wheat than the standard American version. Even though it’s wholly whole grain, it has a milder flavor and texture than what Americans are accustomed to expecting from whole wheat.

I picked up a bag of it at Trader Joe’s, and I am a total convert. I haven’t had the nerve to use it in place of all-purpose flour in cookies and delicate baked goods, but I think it’s just a matter of time. White whole wheat: the flour of the future!

Having just announced my love for white wheat, I should hasten to add that I really love the flavor of “regular” American whole wheat. However, I find that breads made exclusively from whole wheat flour are simply too dense and earthy. This is another bread I just sort of threw together to see if the use of mostly white wheat would eliminate this excessive graininess. And it does! This bread definitely smacks of wholesomness, but it lacks the sodden lump-like quality one too often obtains from 100% whole wheat loaves.

I love sunflower seeds in bread, and I had quite a few of them on hand, so I included them for more texture and protein. This loaf does have a very high sunflower seed/dough ratio – if you don’t want a very seedy bread, you might want to include only half a cup or so instead of the three-quarters cup I dumped in.

I tend to hack of slices of this and eat it with almond butter for lunch. Husband and I also had this for dinner one night as toasted slices with brie, avocado, tomato, and spring mix lettuce, and it was divine. Because it’s so easy and healthy, I think this is going to be my go-to everyday loaf.

Oatmeal Bread with Apricots and Almonds

So this is a very rustic, very slapdash loaf that I threw together to get rid of some near-stale almonds and dried apricots. And it works! This loaf is delicious.

On occasion, I fall victim to ill-advised Trader Joe’s impulse buys. A cupboard full of almonds and dried apricots was the fruit of such impulsive purchasing (pun … intended?). I thought they might be a nice change from endless permutations of cinnamon raisin bread. Plus, so much white bread was starting to make me feel a bit unwholesome and doughy, so I wanted to make something a healthier.

Cinnamon Raisin Bread

Despite my lukewarm attitude toward cinnamon, I’ve always been a huge fan of cinnamon raisin bread – especially when it has a cinnamon sugar swirl in the middle, all the better for nuggets of butter to nestle in to make the sweetest combination of fat, gluten, and carbs conceivable.

I thought that husband didn’t like cinnamon raisin bread, so imagine my surprise when I got back from my trip to find that he had eaten his way through most of a loaf (from the store) in my absence. Clearly, we had been suffering from grievous miscommunication on the issue. Resolving it provided all the encouragement I needed to make my own.

This process was less linear than anticipated. I started with the recipe suggested in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, but it just didn’t suit. It made two tiny loaves or one large one; I wanted one medium loaf, which is just about what we can eat up before it goes stale or moldy. It took a few tries before I hit upon the right combination in terms of flavor, texture, and size. By “a few,” I mean “about five.”

Pane Siciliano

I hesitate to share this recipe because I am such a slapdash bread baker. In fact, I realized that my very casual approach to cooking and baking that has made me somewhat irritated with The Bread Baker's Apprentice. This was given to me as a Christmas gift, and while it’s resulted in three superior loaves of bread so far (including this one), something about its tone makes me want to argue with and flout its dictates.

I’m sure that if I followed Reinhart’s instructions, step by step, ingredient by ingredient, tedious modification of home baking conditions by tedious modification, I’d get better bread. One of the charms of homemade bread for me, however, is this improvised quality. I don’t want my bread to seem as if it emerged fresh from the hearth of a brick fired oven. So few people bake bread anymore that the simple act of making a loaf at home seems like a monumental accomplishment.

In short: I want to be congratulated for my willingness to bake at home (on occasion). If my bread tasted like it came from a bakery, I’d have to work that much harder for accolades. This bread is really great, but you probably won’t fool anyone into believing it came from the corner Italian bakeshop. And so much the better, I say.

Challah

I realize this blog has been light on poetry lately, but I’ve been doing more cooking and baking than poetry reading. Last week, I immersed myself in The Children's Book– highly recommended if you’re an anglophile and literature nerd like me – and such sustained fiction-reading seems to have crowded all of the poetry out of my head for the moment.

I’m sure it shall return before too terribly long. Perhaps I can appease you with a fine recipe for Challah?

As you probably know, Challah is a traditional Jewish bread that has lots of eggs and a golden, rich texture. It’s probably my favorite bread. Since eggs mean protein, I can even delude myself that it’s healthy, despite its absence of whole grains.

Italian Bread

The Bread Baker's Apprentice is one of those tomes I’d been seeing everywhere on the internet. The book has been roundly and effusively praised, and I’d seen so many scrumptious-looking breads on various food blogs that I was itching to get my hands on my very own copy. My in-laws were the kind santas who bestowed this particular gift this Christmas.

We spent the holidays with them in central Pennsylvania, and I perused the book on the car trip home to Connecticut. I am not one to shy away from dense or complicated tomes, cooking or otherwise. However, this book prefaces the recipes with a solid 50 pages of technical detail, and I had a hard time focusing, especially since the car was gently swaying to and fro and the maniacal swervings of other drivers were a distraction.