Homemade pizza

Quick and easy recipe for homemade pizza (no special oven needed).

Homemade pizza

Dough (following Jeff Varasano's quick yeast culture recipe)
2 parts Caputo "00" flour
1 part Unbleached flour
Regular baking yeast (proofed in warm water)
Salt

Sauce
Canned peeled plum (Italian) tomatoes
Garlic
Extra-virgin olive oil
Fresh basil
White or yellow onion (optional)
Crushed red pepper (optional)

Autolyse and wet-knead (see link above) your dough ingredients. Let rest 20 min in mixer then knead again with more flour. Let rest a few hours in the fridge, remove, and let warm to room temperature.

Sautee onion and garlic in olive oil over medium heat. Drain canned tomatoes and add when garlic is golden brown. If you burn the garlic, throw it away and start over (it's not worth trying to salvage!). Reduce heat and simmer (can cook for 30 min or a few hours, depending on your preferred consistency). During cooking, tomatoes can be broken up with a spoon or, if you want fewer chunks, you can puree the sauce in a blender after cooking.

Knead out thin and top your dough with a little sauce, cheese of choice, and any other creative topping you can think of. We tried a few different types of pizza: mozzarella and basil, white pizza with garlic and parmesan, and chicken and basil. Thow it in the oven (broil or as hot as you can get it), with a pizza stone if possible. Cook until bubbly and delicious!

Don't mind our square-shaped pizzas below!

Palalia Pale Ale

Palalia Pale Ale (IPA) - 5 gal (19 L)
Slightly modified from Charlie Papazian's recipe.

Ingredients:
3 lbs sparking amber dried malt extract
3 lbs golden light dried malt extract
1 lb crystal malt
0.5 lbs malted barley
2 tsp gypsum
2 oz Northern Brewer hops (boiling)
0.75 oz Cascade hops (finishing)
1 pkg American-type ale yeast
0.75 c priming sugar (bottling)

Toast malted barley at 350 °F for 10 min. Steep at 140-160 °F for 30 min.

Boil schedule:
60 min Malt extract, boiling hops, gypsum
1 min Finishing hops













1/3/10 Boiled. Pitched yeast. S.G.=1.053
1/8/10 Major fermentation activity stopped. Racked to secondary fermenter. S.G.=1.015
1/17/10 Bottled. S.G.=1.015
1/29/10 Tasted first bottle (bottled for 2 weeks). Tastes good! A little more turbid than I wanted it to be, but the copper color is good. Taste is fairly well balanced, bitter, and assertive. The roasted malts come through well on the finish. The lower ABV of this beer is more in line with an English IPA than an American or West Coast IPA.
1/7/10 Tasted again (bottled for 3 weeks). Keeps getting better and better! Flavor is more refined, drier, and more balanced. Clarity improved (better pour?).

O.G. = 1.053
F.G. = 1.015

(OG - FG) x 105 = 3.99 = ABW
ABW * 1.25 = 4.99 = ABV

Homemade kimchi

Here's a recipe for homemade kimchi I tried recently. This is my first crack at it, but it came out really well! It seems like you can try a lot of different vegetables in kimchi, so I'll be making again, changing up the ingredients a little bit.

Homemade kimchi
1 head cabbage
1 head bok choy
1 head tatsoi
3 green onions
8-10 small radishes
3 large carrots
Korean red pepper flakes
Fish sauce
Bonito flakes






























Peel and soak cabbage in salty water (1 cup salt:10 cups water) for several hours or overnight. Rinse and cut into bite-sized pieces. Cut up other vegetables in the same way and combine. Mash vegetables (to release water) and add spices to taste (READ: use gloves!). Jar and fill with water if necessary to submerge vegetables. Leave lid loosely tightened to allow CO2 to bubble out (READ: otherwise jar may burst!). Let sit out for a day or two, depending on how sour you like your kimchi. Throw it in the fridge. It will keep for a week or two, continuing to get sour with time.

Wild mushroom dishes

Three dishes made with edible wild mushrooms collected in Mendocino. We used Pig's Ears (Gomphus clavatus) for the sauteed mushrooms and risotto, and Yellow Foot/Winter Chanterelle (Cantharellus tubaeformis) for the soup, but any chanterelles would work for either.

For each recipe, mushrooms should be cleaned (with fingers and a moist towel - NOT washed) and dry-sauteed after preparing. This procedure constitutes cooking over high heat without butter or oil to release fluids contained within the mushrooms. This liquid is then poured off and discarded, and/or allowed to evaporate.















Sauteed wild mushrooms
After dry-sauteeing, reduce heat and add olive oil, salt, pepper and minced garlic. Cook 5-10 minutes, or until mushrooms are tender and garlic is golden-brown. Add coarsely-chopped parsley during the last few minutes.




























Wild mushroom risotto
Sautee some onion with salt in tab of butter and olive oil until translucent. In a separate pan, sautee mushrooms with butter after dry-sauteeing. Back in the original pan, add arborio rice, continue to sautee for 5 minutes, then add mushrooms, salt, and pepper. Add another pat of butter and stir. Add white wine, allow alcohol to evaporate. Next, add stock (homemade is best) one ladle at a time. When just about done, add parsley, season as necessary. Garnish with parsley, serve with lemon wedge.














Cream of chanterelle soup
Sautee some onion in butter, add mushrooms (after dry-sauteeing), salt and pepper and continue to sautee. Add a couple tablespoons of flour and sautee until flour is cooked and nutty. Add stock and simmer. Add cream, continue to simmer, and season as necessary.

Mendocino mushrooms

I took a camping trip to Mendocino this past weekend (at and near Van Damme State Park). Hiking was great, including stunning coastal scenery, breaching whales, diverse and abundant mushrooms, and a pygmy forest. Pictures don't capture the beauty, but check them out below!

Dogfish Head Brewery

I recently took a tour of the Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, DE. If you aren't familiar with this craft brewery, they make some seriously off-the-wall ales. Relatively new to the beermaking scene, their sales have really spread in the last decade. The tour was adequate, but I was a little underwhelmed as a homebrewer. I was hoping for a little more depth, but I suppose a personal tour would have been better for that. Also, I was looking forward to sampling some non-retailed or rare beers, but they served only four standard beers. Still, a fun tour at a brewery that is pushing the envelope of craft beermaking.













We also got a chance to see the famed Palo Santo wooden cask, which is used to age some unique beer. The New Yorker covered this interesting story here. I'd love to see Dogfish Head do some lagers, but that is another story.

Hiking Cold Canyon

Here are some pictures from hiking at Cold Canyon a few days ago. Enjoy!