A wood-fired pizza party: everything was delicious, even the burnt bits
Also: cooking when your brain is letting you down, sambal-bolognese, upside-down pecan kugel and Chris Morocco makes Korean food based on taste and touch alone
The83K’s Taco Bell correspondent Rachel has been trying to get me to attend a monthly cookbook club gathering for the last few years — and I finally decided to stop being a schmuck and go for once — the fact that I’d get to see some old friends, meet some new ones, eat some tasty chow, introduce some of them to the brilliant and beautiful Mary and MAKE PIZZA IN A WOOD–FIRED OVEN certainly didn’t hurt, either.
Using recipes from Genevieve Taylor’s fantastic cookbook as a starting point, we assembled at Marissa and Julie’s cool-AF Lincolnwood home for beverages and fire, with just about everyone bringing sauces (which weren’t too watery or too thick, and just ever-so-slightly sweet), toppings (well-seasoned meats like soppressata and ‘nduja; ideally proportioned veggies, cooked down if too watery when raw) and cheeses (lots of different varieties of mozzarella and fontina on hand, as well as some parm for the lactose intolerant.) Meredith’s caramelized onions made every pie we piled them onto tasty — though, to be fair, as our hosts stated and were later proved true — no matter what you put into a wood-fired oven, unless you absolutely incinerate it, it’s going to be at least okay, and more often than not, delicious.
Which was a good thing, as none of us were professional pizzaiolos, and like a dumbass I never got around to taking Derrick or Dennis up on their offers to show me how to make, shape or handle crusts for quick, high-temperature cooking, so our pies turned out a little less circular and a little more ameoba-y.
But thanks to Miz Taylor’s low-knead dough recipe, some encouragement from Mary and a little luck — I managed to make a set of crusts that did not embarrass, and, in fact, were better than okay.
John called it THEODOUGH, the name for which I could not improve upon in a thousand years.
Even the first pie I took a crack at — the one in the lower left frame, the one that looks like it was par-baked in jet-engine exhaust — tasted amazing.
Marissa, Julie — hell, anyone else out there with a wood-fired oven — I’ll make the dough if you’ll eat whatever pizzas you’ll let me make. That was fun as hell.*
Low-Knead Pizza Dough — for wood fired ovens (adapted from Genevieve Taylor’s The Ultimate Wood Fired Oven Cookbook)
900 g strong white bread flour, plus more for dusting and shaping
2 tsp (plus a leeeeetle bit more) instant yeast
3 tsp fine salt
600 ml hand-hot water
4 tbsp olive oil, plus more for handling
Put flour, yeast and salt into a large mixing bowl and whisk together until ingredients are incorporated evenly. Add water and oil and bring together with hands or wooden spoon until you get a shaggy mass with no loose flour. Cover with a tea towel and leave to stand for 10 minutes.
Lightly oil a decent sized workspace and rub a little oil on your own hands, too. Scrape the dough out, along with any stragglers left in the bowl — then rub a little oil across all the surfaces in the bowl. Set aside.
Very lightly knead the dough for ten seconds or so, grabbing a large hunk and stretching it — one stretch-and-pull every second. Return dough to the bowl. Repeat this cycle — cover, rest for 10 minutes, knead — two more times. After the third cycle, allow to rest, covered, for about an hour at room temperature, until the dough has risen about 50 percent. (If you’d like to work ahead, this stuff will wait in the fridge 4-6 hours, but bring it out of the cold an hour ahead of shaping.)
About an hour before you want to begin firing your pizzas, begin the second prove (rise) — get your dough out and dust your workspace, hands and two baking sheets with flour. Tip your bowl over to one side and gently push the dough onto the workspace. Do not over handle the dough or you’ll pop all the air our little yeast friends have worked so hard to produce. Form your dough into an oblong loaf shape — then, with either a big knife or a bench scraper, cut the dough into halves. Cut those halves into halves, and then halve again, so you’re left with 8 roughly similarly sized pieces.
Take a piece of dough, cup it between your floured palms and rotate it between your hands, pulling down as you turn. If you’ve worked your dough properly, you should, with a little work, be able to get a tight ball shape with no lines. Place dough onto a baking sheet and repeat with the remaining 7 pieces. Use two baking sheets to ensure dough pieces don’t touch as they rise.
Allow to rise for another hour, and your dough (or THEODOUGH, as I encourage you to call it) will be ready for the oven.
Optional: have some small- or medium-grind cornmeal on hand to dust your pizza peel – you can use flour, but I find the cornmeal lends the crust a popcorn note and extra crunch that’s kind of fantastic.
If you’ve read this far, and this often — you’ve probably been enjoying The83K for the length of our brief existence. Won’t you help us get bigger and better and become a Patron?
Thank you for subscribing to and spending time with The83k. This newsletter will remain free for you, friends and food fans, who are enjoying the food coverage here — but I’m hoping to offer in broader and more in-depth stories and features in the future (like the interview above.) I'd like to dedicate more time to it and make it a sustainable concern for everyone who wants more of that delicious, useful content (and frequent roundups of everything you like about food.)
Please consider becoming a Patron and help make The83k bigger and better.
OH AND THERE'S A BUNCH OF PERKS, TOO.
The first monthly roundup of The83k content will drop the first week of September — FOR PATREON SUPPORTERS ONLY!
Also: if you don't want to subscribe, or just want to make a one-time donation – OR want all the goodies but don't want to use Patreon, please feel free to use this link: paypal.me/theohahn
Again: thank you, friends!
Things you should make:
Rosh Hashanah is right around the corner — and whether you’re Jewish or not, all of these recipes look like winners — especially that Sous Vide Leg of Lamb With Mint, Cumin, and Black Mustard.
I made this southern-influenced Upside-Down Pecan Kugel for my old officemates many years ago, and it was a stone-cold stunner. I plan on finally diving into the book it came from — a fascinating history of Jewish food in the south.
DEFINITELY MAKE THIS: A sauce with all the flavor development of an old-school bolognese in a fraction of the time, featuring spicy Asian flavors. Sambal-Bolognese.
More and more folks I know have young’uns who are embracing a vegetarian lifestyle. For those of you trying to figure out how to feed your own little herbivores — this list of recipes might come in handy.
Links:
How To Feed Yourself When You're Depressed:
“Garbage brain aside, I’m incredibly lucky to have had not just the inclination, but also the safety net and opportunities required to pursue cooking as a career. Along the way, I’ve developed an arsenal of recipes I can rely on when being alive is almost unbearably taxing. I hope that you find something in here that helps, because no matter what your brain says, you gotta eat.”
I have got to get my patoot to Minneapolis.
Many dishes — garlic-scape kimchi, spicy-sweet short-rib pizza, a farro salad based loosely on bibimbap — draw liberally from Ms. Kim’s Korean-American childhood, deepening the restaurant’s flavor palette while stopping short of defining its sensibility.
“This is just the food I like,” Ms. Kim said.
Growing up in Apple Valley, a Twin Cities suburb, she said, “I felt like a Midwesterner. I identified as Minnesotan. I never really identified as Korean. I’d always tried to hide it. My food is an expression of that.”
Rachel shared this baker’s Instagram account with me, and I CAN’T. STOP. LOOKING. AT. THESE. CAKES.
Things you should watch or listen to:
Bon Appetit’s Chris Morocco is occasionally challenged by his colleagues to reproduce a dish that he is allowed to taste, touch and feel BUT NOT SEE. If you know about Morocco’s supertaster superpowers, the results of these challenges will not surprise you. Cool stuff.
I’m a relatively recent fan of The Splendid Table; if your brain craves smart, passionate chats about food and cooking — you’ve found your new commute podcast.
You ALREADY know what dinosaurs taste like.
That’s it for this edition of The83K newsletter. If you have any tips or suggestions for things you’d like to see here, please drop me a line at the83k@gmail.com.
*Some of the friends who attended the pizza-making party said they thought Paul Hollywood is attractive. Those people are stupid fartfaces.