Smoky Chook

My favourite smell is chicken fat burning on charcoal. The slightly sweet smoke is an aroma that always makes me breathe deeply and salivate.

There's a kinda-sorta restaurant supply store in Tacoma, not too far from where I work. A co-worker and I drove over there at lunch last week and poked around. It was actually pretty cool: this is the first place I've seen in the NW with meat that's right for BBQ. They have pig shoulders, Boston butts, and St. Louis cut ribs.

I was drooling.

Perhaps best of all, I found 40-pound bags of mesquite lump charcoal for $15. That's an incredible buy: I've paid as much as $1/lb for good lump charcoal. This is definitely the best price I've ever seen.

I'm no great fan of mesquite smoke: I don't dislike it, but I don't see why people rave over it either. But I have to say I really like cooking on it. It holds a steady temperature, burns long, and burns clean. I still like Wicked Good Charcoal the best, but lump mesquite has become quite a favourite here.

I realized Friday that we had a couple chooks in the freezer, and I thought "What a great opportunity to try out my new charcoal!" So out they came.

I thawed them out, put them in a pan, and sprinkled them generously with salt, black pepper, and garlic powder.

From Smoky Chook

I chopped up and onion and stuffed it into their little bottoms

From Smoky Chook

Then they went onto the grill

From Smoky Chook

You've heard me say it before: 90% of barbecuing is keeping a steady temperature. you want it to stay at or around 200F. The weather was windy and damp yesterday, and temperature was a slight challenge. But I gotta say, the mesquite really keeps a steady burn. Once I got it into the groove, it held a very steady temp for most of the six hours they were on the grill.

In this shot, the grill had just been open, so the thermometer's showing a little low. It caught back up quickly.

From Smoky Chook

We brought them in after dark. The one on the right was a little torn up, as I managed to tear the skin when flipping them (I cooked them partly on their backs, partly on their breasts).

From Smoky Chook

All in all, I'd call it a success.

That's Amore!

There's been some interest about our pizza-making adventures. When we moved out here, we quickly realized this isn't really pizza territory. We finally decided we needed to make our own. So at least once a week we whip up some pizzes. Ames took some photos of our pizza-making session last night, and I thought I'd sort of walk through how we did it, and what came out.

First a quick note. There are many styles of pizza, and there are excellent pies in every style. My personal favourite is "New York" style: the pies are large, but thin. The crust is thin and chewy, not crispy. This is the style I've been trying to perfect in our kitchen.

Start with the dough. Pizza crust needs to ferment at least overnight before trying to use it; so I always make the dough as early as I can. This weekend I used dough Sunday that I had made on Saturday, but I prefer to let it sit longer than that.

As I documented previously, I originally started with a recipe supposedly from Peter Reinhart. That works pretty well, but we've tweaked it a bit. So here's what I used this weekend:

• 2 cups of sourdough starter


• 4 cups water


• 3 1/2 teaspoons salt


• 14 1/2 cups flour

It was raining on the weekend (in Washington? really?), so I used more flour than I normally do. Just for reference, I generally don't measure the flour. You need enough to make a sticky dough.

The dough was split into six pieces and put into plastic containers in the fridge.

From That's Amore

The next day, I had to grate cheese, make sauce, and prepare toppings before cooking. I started with the cheese. Nothing special, just whatever was cheap at the store. I grated it in my Bosch Universal.

From That's Amore

After the cheese came the sauce. Pizza sauce is best as simple as possible, at least for how we're using it. It shouldn't be cooked prior to the actual baking of the pizza, and should contain as few ingredients as possible. So here's my recipe:

• 4 whole peeled tomatoes from a can


• 1/4 teaspoon of sugar


• 1/4 teaspoon of salt


• enough oregano to see... I typically use 1 tablespoon

This was a double batch:

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

I put all that into a tub and frap it with a hand blender until it's all mixed, but not totally pureed. It should still have some texture.

From That's Amore

After the sauce, I prepared some simple toppings. I like cheese pizza best, but not everyone agrees with me. So last night we used pepperoni, Italian sausage, red onions, and mushrooms.

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

Now to make the pies...

We let the dough warm an hour or so before cooking. I shape it on a floured counter.

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

I used to cook the pizzas directly on the stone in the oven, but I've found it's very easy to mess them up, and the size of the pizza is limited to the size of the peel. So we got a couple 16-inch pans, and we've started to use this technique:

1. put the pie in the oven on a pan


2. half-way through, when the crust is cooked enough to hold its shape, we slide the pie off the pan to finish on the stone

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

So here's a crust spread out on a 16-inch pan:

From That's Amore

Once the dough's been spread, time to build the pizza:

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

We cook the pizza at 500F.

Having cooked the pizza thoroughly, we pull it out and slice it:

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

This crust wasn't quite right. The colour is a little pale on the edges. But the bottom looked great:

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

The next pie was a half-n-half: pepperoni on one side; pepperoni, sausage, onions, and mushrooms on the other. That's what Mama Lena's calls a "Coney Island":

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

From That's Amore

And being 16-inch pies, they can be eaten properly: folded and eaten "taco style":

From That's Amore

So that's how we do pizza here. Ames got some good pictures, didn't she?

A grip on life

So my experiments with pizza have led into the wider realm of sourdough.

The offspring and I decided to get a good sourdough going after we realized that great pizza just might require sourdough. Our first attempt was to capture wild yeast on the counter. We tried to work with it, but it was a constant disappointment.

Our second attempt was a grape-based starter. The grape-based starter appears to be working. We made pizza first. This was our first no-dry-yeast pizza attempt, and it worked admirably.

(I know the first pizza picture is blurry: we had some camera issues that night, and I salvaged what I could.)

From Grip on Life

From Grip on Life

I decided to try bread after that, but my starter was sluggish. I ended up making a few loaves, but I cheated and spiked the dough with dry yeast. Still, they were decent:

From Grip on Life

From Grip on Life

I used a slight variation on the Berkeley Sourdough I found online. I found the recipe made an extremely dry dough, so I use more starter than they recommend, add the water and salt to it, and then knead in flour to form a decent consistency. The results seem pretty good.

From Grip on Life

I fed my sourdough again this weekend, and it got really foamy. So I started a new batch tonight. In fact, the sponge I made to get the bread going was foaming nicely enough that I made it into a dough much earlier than I had planned. I'm leaving the dough out on the counter overnight to rise. I'll see how it's doing in the morning.


I must admit I've been intrigued with the catalogue Sourdoughs International has online. I'm more than a little tempted to drop some cash on a starter from them. But frankly, I'm out $20 or so in flour and $5 in grapes right now, and that's produced a good deal of pizza and bread already. Part of my interest has been that this hobby is so cheap; I'm going to keep seeing what I can hack together in my kitchen before I start ordering more exotic starters online.

The First of September

Wow... we're already at the Ber Months! This year is speeding past far too quickly for me to keep up with it.

But regardless of my personal ineptitude, Happy Ber Months everyone!

Well, I'm back

I'm back on Vancouver Island. Again.

I never come to Canada, but I have to talk myself into going back across the border.

Pie!

It's no secret I love pizza. I tend to take Jeff Varasano's view of things: "Pizza is the most sensuous of foods."

From Pizza

North Carolina is not really a pizza state, but in the last decade a number of refugees from New York have brought good pizza with them. In fact, I had the pleasure of introducing at least three New Yorkers in Charlotte to good pizza. That is, I had the priviledge of pointing out that there was pizza in Charlotte made by a fellow ex-New Yorker. It was always a pleasure to see someone's face light up when they tasted "the first real pizza since I came here."

My three favourite pizza places in Charlotte were Luigi's Pizza in Steele Creek, Tony's Pizza in the Galleria, and Brooklyn Brothers in Concord. All three made amazing pies. At one time Mama Lena's would have topped the list, but since their move to Waxhaw, the quality seems to be lacking. Perhaps I got them on an off night: I hope so, because Mama Lena's used to be a thing of rare and exquisite beauty.

But since moving to the Northwest, we've been in a pizza wilderness, in einem trocken und duerren Land, da kein Wasser ist. I hear there is excellent pizza here, but I haven't found it. In fact, I took the trouble of visiting the one place in Seattle I had heard really made perfect pies, only to find out they're closed on Sundays. That was disappointing. Like journeying to Mecca only to find they've moved it.

To exacerbate the situation, there are a few foods I cannot prepare for the life of me. I can't make pancakes or pizza, among others.

So I finally realized no one else could save me, I had to save myself (how very Council of Trent of me!). I bit the bullet, googled some pizza dough recipes, and Ames and I have been trying to learn to make a good pie.

We started with a recipe ostensibly by Peter Reinhart. This recipe is a good one, but not perfect. We've been tweaking it a bit, largely inspired by Jeff Varasano's excellent pizza-making tutorial.

We followed Varasano's lead on the pizza sauce, and we've started to produce some decent pies. We're limited by an electric oven that only gets so hot and can only hold so big a pie, but we've made some that aren't too shabby.

It took a few to start getting them the right shape, so the first few were sort of ugly:

From Pizza

But Ames started making them nice, and was kind enough to give me some tips, so they got more and more round:

From Pizza

But she definitely still holds the record:

From Pizza

From Pizza

Our pizzas still aren't perfect, but we're working on it. Here are some of the tricks we've learned so far, which seem to have made some real difference in the quality of the finished product:

• The dough needs to ferment at least 24 hours before use. We're following the Reinhart method of fermenting it cold in the refrigerator, but I'm toying with the idea of an on-the-counter ferment.



• Varasano's auto-lysing advice is good: I've taken to throwing all the dough ingredients into the bowl and walking away for 20--30 minutes while they get to know one another.



• I've taken oil out of the dough: the dough is now flour, water, yeast, and salt. The oil makes the dough too brittle.



• We're making the dough a little wetter every time. We don't use the cake-batter-like dough that an 800F brick oven uses, but it's a lot more like custard everytime we make a batch. We have yet to get it too wet.



• We've thrown out all the fancy pizza sauce recipes and gone with Varasano's advice: we just blend some whole canned tomatoes, add some sugar, salt, and enough oregano to see, and spread it on. We never cook the sauce, and we make it as simple as we can.

We'll never be able to fake the years of experience that Luigi and Tony have, but we're making better pies than we can get through Domino's or Papa John's. That's enough to make us want to make it again, every time.

Here's to good pie!

From Pizza

Idiots to the left, morons to the right...

Once again I am amazed at the stupidity of the idiots working at one of my banks.

I closed an account there a month or so ago, or so I thought. I mean, when they say "OK, we closed your account" and it disappears from your online banking interface, you really have some excuse to think it was closed.

Imagine my surprise when I received a somewhat threatening card in the mail, saying it had been overdrawn, and please deposit enough to cover $----.-- that you owe us, or we'll close the account and file it on your credit report, etc.

So I called them to straighten it out.

Those idiots had essentially re-opened the account (i.e. they put it in a "pending closing" state) so they could credit the account $0.03 for an interest payment or something (I never kept more than $100 in it, so if it was an interest payment, it sounds about right). Then, because it was not actually closed (although they had explicitly told me it was), it began to accrue fees. Of course, there was no money in it to cover the fees, because they had transferred it all out when they originally told me they had closed it. That, for the short of memory, was when I had asked them to close the account. As in, "please close this account."

So the morons stopped the closing of my account (although they had certainly said it had been closed) to credit it $0.03---three bloody cents---and then slapped me with $12 or so of fees.

Then they had the audacity to send me a threatening letter for not paying the fees.

Here's an idea: when someone closes one of several accounts in your bank and you owe them some money (say, $0.03), why wouldn't you just credit it to another of the accounts they have with you? Or why not send them a cheque? Why would you postpone the closing (the one you told them had already been completed) and slap them with fees? In what universe is this a good idea? What possible customer profile does this appeal to? In what imagined reality is this good customer service? What sort of nincompoop would establish this as the correct workflow?

I mean really, how do these people remember to breathe?