homemade – StewsCat

I tried a new pizza dough recipe this past weekend – mostly due to my lack of planning. I oftentimes start putting the dough together the night before to allow the yeast to essentially knead the dough with a long fermentation. However I forgot to do this so woke up on Sunday realizing I needed a quicker recipe. I have done my usual same-day bread recipe for pizza dough but was wondering if there was another option. After some google searching, I settled on a recipe that sounded fairly simple yet good. This recipe is adapted from Roberta’s (a well-known pizzeria in Brooklyn, NY). I didn’t have any 00 flour so just used AP flour for the entire recipe.

Ingredients:

306 g AP flour
8 g fine sea salt
2 g active dry yeast
4 g olive oil
200 g warm tap water

I combined the flour and salt in a mixing bowl. In my measuring cup, I combined the warm water, olive oil and dry yeast. I allowed the yeast to bloom for a few minutes before mixing it with the flour/salt mixture. I kneaded/mixed the dough in the bowl for 3 minutes.

I then covered the bowl with a towel and let it sit for 15 minutes.

I proceeded to knead the dough again for 3 minutes within the bowl. I was a bit surprised how much the dough had formed up into a cohesive ball.

Earlier in the day I had made some pasta so had a large sheet of parchment paper on the counter that was floured.

So I just took the dough and placed it on the parchment paper, divided the dough in half, and formed two balls.

I let the dough rest under a towel (I used my water bottle sprayer to mist the top to maintain moisture) for about 3 hours. The dough continued to rise.

img_20170108_174749 — *After 3 hours of rest*

I preheated my oven to 545F. I took one ball of dough and on a well-floured countertop flattened the dough out into a pizza shape. I then topped it with marinara, mozzarella, mushrooms, zucchini.

About 1-2 minutes before the pizza was done, I removed it and topped it with some prosciutto.

Et voilà

The above recipe makes 2 good-sized pizzas. I did like this recipe because the dough seemed sturdier than ones I’ve made in the past. It was easy to create the pizza shape and didn’t rip/tear like some of the ones I’ve created. Overall I thought the taste was decent.

-StewsCat

I picked up some semolina durum wheat flour at the local specialty grocery store (Corti Bros.). I had been making some egg noodles for pasta the last few months with AP flour. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make a dough entirely out of just semolina so looked up some recipes. I found that you can do a 50:50 semolina:AP flour mix.

100g – Semolina durum wheat flour
100g – AP flour
2 eggs
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp Avocado oil (we don’t have any olive oil in the house currently)

I started by weighing out the flour and adding the salt.

I mixed it together with my fingers because I don’t have a sifter.

Then I created a well to place the eggs and oil. I used a fork to scramble the eggs.

I slowly mixed in the flour with the egg mixture and continued to mix and then knead for about 5 minutes, creating a cohesive dough ball.

I let the dough sit at room temperature for about 1.5 hours (I read you should let it sit for at least an hour but can let it sit for multiple hours if needed). In the meantime, I started work on the sauce. I already had some plain San Marzano tomato sauce that I had made previously for pizza. Now I just needed to make the other ingredients added to the pasta and the sauce.

I sautéed some chicken sausage, then vegetables and finally added in the pre-made tomato sauce.

Then I went back to work on the pasta dough. I broke off between a golf ball and tennis ball sized piece, flattened it into a disc and floured it. I have a small hand crank pasta machine. One half of it has rollers of adjustable thickness to gradually thin out the pasta dough. On the thickest setting I ran the disc of dough through once. Then I folded this in half, re-dusted with flour, and put it through again. I did this 4-5 times before then gradually decreasing the thickness (from 7 to 3).

The other half of the pasta machine has 2 different rollers of various widths for pasta. This cuts the thin length of dough into actual strands of pasta.

What I’ve learned is that after you create the strands of pasta, you need to liberally dust/cover the pasta strands to prevent them from sticking together. The great thing about freshly made pasta is that it cooks super quick. I boiled up some water and salted it and then added the pasta. I cooked the pasta for about 3 minutes and then drained out the water and added some oil to the pasta.