Well, I really did it to myself last week.  I’ve let myself be under so much stress for so long that my body just gave out on me.  I caught a nasty flu bug and spent half of Memorial Day weekend in bed with the flu.  If you read my last post, you know that we’ve been eating way too much restaurant food and I was looking forward to some home cooking.  I planned to make this wonderful feta stuffed Greek chicken that I love so much.  I even rescued Herbert  (my sourdough starter) from possible sudden death so that I could bake bread. Bread is necessary for this meal to accompany the wonderful feta stuffing.  Unfortunately, Herbert looked pretty awful.  He had managed to produce a two-inch layer of dark gray hooch in the intervening weeks since I last baked.  I truly thought he was a goner. Once I poured off the disgusting, vile fluid and fed Herbert with fluffy wholesome flour and clean water, he was back to normal.  I made that great recipe for sourdough rye baguettes that I’ve been hooked on for awhile.  The dough was fermenting on the counter and suddenly; I felt like I was fermenting too.  The flu hit me like a ton of bricks.

I spent the rest of Sunday in bed with a fever and when all of Monday turned out to be much, much more of the same, I asked F. to put the chicken and some nice grass fed steaks we bought for Monday’s barbeque in the freezer.  I knew I wouldn’t be cooking for a while.  On Sunday, I already knew I would kiss bread-baking goodbye so I had popped the bread dough in the fridge.  The whole rest of the week went by and I never did get back to that bread dough. 

As the week progressed and I felt better and better I started to plan out those meals we missed.  I pulled the meat out of deep freeze and allowed it to defrost in the fridge.  I kept eyeing the bread dough wondering if I could keep pushing it or if I should give up and toss it.  I keep reading about other bloggers who are doing the whole “no knead bread” evolution thingy where you make a master dough, dump it in the fridge for up to a week and lop off chunks of the master dough for fresh bread throughout the week.  I am also well aware that a long slow rise in the fridge for a couple of days makes bread more flavorful. I wasn’t too worried. 

I took the dough out of the fridge this afternoon and let it warm up and rise on the counter.  I popped it out of the bowl a few hours later and kneaded it a bit.  The outer layer of the dough had oxidized.  I had hoped I could mix it in, but it didn’t really knead in, so that worried me a bit.  The dough smelled great and looked great otherwise so I decided that it wouldn’t kill me.  I formed the baguettes and let them rise.  When I baked the bread it rose in the oven really well.  I am out of practice though and didn’t notice the temp was really off in my crazy oven today.  The bread got way too brown.  Luckily, I decided to cover the loaves with seeds so it was hard to tell.  The flavor and texture were really nice on these loaves.  I learned a lesson this week.  I can probably have fresh bread during the week if I plan a couple of days ahead.  Make the dough.  Let it rise all evening.  Pop it in the fridge for a couple of days.  Come home for lunch the day I want to bake and take it out to warm and rise.  I’ll really need to do this.  What a luxury it would be to have warm bread and butter on a work night!

Take care everyone!  Please drop me a message if you have time.  I still check the old blog daily and love to hear from everyone.

Work is stressing me out bad!  I felt like I was falling behind after being gone for weeks.  Then my coworker left to have her baby and I have had to pick up her duties as well as mine.  I have been working long hours and I haven’t been eating as well as I should.  I’m still cooking but in amounts that haven’t gotten us through the week and I have been relying on a lot of restaurant food for the past few weeks.  Such bad habits I have and they are too, too easy to fall back on! 

It is such a vicious circle.  I am stressed so I eat bad things which makes me tired so I don’t get any exercise so I get more stressed and more tired and eat bad things and so on and so and so on.

Yesterday, I decided to slow the merri-go-round I have been on and do some simple baking to go with something that feels so restorative to eat.  I made a very whole-wheat version of my sourdough pitas to go with some sun dried tomato hummus.  The pitas contained the usual white flour starter I have cultivated but the dough was entirely whole-wheat flour aside from a half cup of white flour.  The bread came out very hearty but scrumptious.  The hummus was my take on a hummus I sometimes buy at Trader Joes.  The hummus from TJs is quite sweet.  Mine has a fuller flavor due to using the oil from the sun dried tomatoes and a healthy dose of Aleppo pepper.  Aleppo pepper is a Middle Eastern pepper that has a nice heat and a complex flavor.  It truly complements the sweet tomato flavor in this hummus.  If you can acquire some, make sure to use it in this recipe.  As an alternative, cayenne in a smaller amount will do just fine.

Eating these two homemade goodies together made me feel happy and very restored.  I’m not sure if it was the fiber and minerals in the garbanzo beans or calcium in the tahini or vitamin C from the garlic and lemon juice or the antioxidants in the olive oil or the lycopine from the sun dried tomatoes but this snack was definitely a cure for what was ailing me!

Sun Dried Tomato Hummus

2-3 cloves of garlic

½ cup sun dried tomatoes in oil, drained

3 tbsp olive oil from the jar of sun dried tomatoes

1 15 oz can of garbanzo beans

Salt to taste

6 tbsp tahini

Juice of one lemon

½ tsp Aleppo pepper or a dash or two of cayenne to taste

Liquid from garbanzo beans as needed

In a food processor, chop the garlic.  Add the sun-dried tomatoes and pulse until the tomatoes are finely chopped.  Measure out 3 tbsp of oil from the sun-dried tomatoes and add the oil to the tomatoes and garlic.  (Add more olive oil to your jar of tomatoes to replace the oil you took and cover the tomatoes so that they don’t spoil).  Drain the can of garbanzos in a sieve over a bowl.  Reserve the liquid from the beans.  Add the beans, lemon juice, tahini and Aleppo pepper to the bowl of the food processor.  Process until mostly smooth.  Add liquid from the beans a tablespoon at a time with the processor running until the hummus is a smooth consistency.  I used about 5 tbsp of liquid.  You may use more or less depending on the texture you like for your dip.  Taste the hummus and add salt to taste, pulsing a couple of times to mix.  Enjoy with fresh pitas.

I’m a low maintenance kinda gal.  If I can save myself from a little work, I am a happy camper.  Normally, I keep my sourdough starter in the fridge.  Refrigerating the starter probably doesn’t do much for its development but it keeps me from having to think about its care and well being in between baking sessions.  This past week was an exception.  I took the starter out of the fridge a week ago Friday in anticipation of making pizza.  I knew I wanted to make biscuits later in the week, so I kept it out and fed it daily until Thursday when I finally made the biscuits.  Well, by then it was so close to the weekend that I decided a few more days of feeding wouldn’t kill me. 

Last night, I found a baguette recipe in my copy of Williams-Sonoma essentials of baking.  The recipe was written for commercial yeast, but I was happy to notice a side bar that explained how to make a variation with starter.  The variation called for making the sponge the night before with starter and then the recipe called for commercial yeast in the actual bread dough.  Since I never use commercial yeast anymore, I don’t have any in the house.  I decided to only use the starter for leavening and just stretch out the proofing time a little longer than called for.  I wanted loaves that were a little sturdier than their all white version so I substituted some stone ground whole-wheat and some rye flour for some of the white flour.

The recipe makes enough dough for three small baguettes.  My dough forming skills still need a lot of practice.  My loaves were cute, not pretty.  They are a little malformed and squat and fat.  I love them anyway.  Why?  Because of the flavor and the texture.   I think having the starter out for so long and then giving the sponge a full thirteen hours to do its thing before the long proofing period really gave them a nice sweet tart flavor.  This bread pleasantly surprised me; the center of the bread was fluffy, moist and soft.  Almost like sandwich bread but the outside was crispy to the point that it shatters to the bite.  The sweet tart flavor I told you about hits the tongue and then you taste a touch of salt. 

We grabbed a loaf the minute we thought it was cool enough to eat.  We brought out some manchego cheese and demolished most of that first loaf of bread in a single sitting.  It was so very delicious!

Sourdough wheat and rye baguettes

Adapted from Williams-Sonoma essentials of baking

For the sponge:

½ cup well fed sourdough starter

1 ½ cups water

1 tsp sugar

2 cups unbleached white flour

For the Dough:

¾ cup unbleached white flour

¼ cup rye flour

1 cup stone ground whole-wheat flour

1 ½ tsp salt

cornmeal for dusting your peel

extra flour for dusting your cutting board

The night before you want to bake, Mix all of the sponge ingredients thoroughly in the bowl of a standing mixer and cover loosely with plastic wrap.  Let the sponge stand overnight at least 11-13 hours.  The next morning, the sponge should be very active and bubbly.

Add the salt, white, rye, and whole-wheat flours to the sponge.  With the dough hook inserted into your mixer, mix on the lowest speed to combine.  Kick the speed up one notch and knead the dough for 7 minutes.  The dough should pull away from the sides and form a ball.  If it does not, add a little more white flour a tbsp at a time until it does.  Form the dough into a ball and then grease your bowl and return the dough to the bowl.  Cover the dough with a clean dishtowel and let it rise for 1 ½ to 2 hours.  The dough should double in size.

Punch down the dough.  Re-cover the bowl with the towel and let it rise again for about an hour.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and cut it into thirds with a bench scraper or a sharp knife.  Shape each third into a round.  Cover the dough with the dishtowel and let it rest 10 minutes before shaping. 

Work with one dough ball at a time.  Slap the dough hard onto the work surface.  Flatten the dough with the heel of your hand.  Roll a third of the dough to the center and push the seam in a little to seal it.  Roll the dough onto itself until you have an oval loaf.  Elongate the loaf by rolling it on the work surface exerting pressure from the middle of the loaf out.  Dust a peel or a cookie sheet with cornmeal.  Place the loaf on the peel.  Repeat this process with the other two balls of dough.  Let the dough rise for 40 minutes to an hour until it has doubled and the dough feels light and spongy when you lightly poke or squeeze it.

Put a pizza stone in your oven and preheat the oven to 500 degrees f. as soon as you are done shaping the loaves.  Place a cake pan in the oven

When the loaves are done proofing, slash them on the diagonal 4 or 5 times with a sharp knife.  Transfer the loaves to the pizza stone, toss a cup of water into the cake pan for steam and then close the oven door fast and lower the heat to 450 degrees f.  Bake the loaves for 20-25 minutes until they are golden brown and sound hollow when you tap them.  Cool the loaves for 20 minutes before you uncontrollably scarf one down with butter or cheese.

I’m usually really good at gauging how much food to make in two nights of cooking to last us most of the week.  Somehow two pizzas and a Rachel Ray recipe for Chicken Goulash did not last us past lunchtime on Wednesday.  Although I am struggling with a weight problem and I have been trying to cut my portions, my boyfriend is one of those lucky people who can eat vast quantities of food and still maintain his weight.  The problem with keeping active and thereby maintaining a high metabolism is that he sometimes loses weight, which he can’t afford to lose.  He seems to be in one of those lose weight without trying modes so I think he tried to remedy the problem by eating bigger portions, thus, we ran out of food.

What to do, what to do?  Well, after lurking around the Arctic Carbivores site for the past couple of weeks, I saw them post a link to a recipe for Sourdough biscuits.  These are similar to buttermilk biscuits but contain sourdough.  I had to have them!  So, I moseyed into the kitchen and found a huge supply of broccoli (not unusual if you know my boyfriend and his love for this cruciferous veggie).  I had some leftover cream, some onions, and more odds and ends.  I would make cream of broccoli soup.  Soup was a great excuse for having biscuits I thought. 

The biscuits.  When I saw the biscuits on the other blog, I asked the Blogger what she (or he?) thought the sourdough was doing in there.  I was told that they (one part of the couple bakes the other one blogs) thought it contributed to the “fluffy nature” of the muffins and also helped them rise.  I have to agree.  The recipe calls for the starter, baking powder, baking soda and buttermilk, which together would all help the dough, rise.  After baking up the dough, I have to also say that the starter gave the biscuits flavor and texture too.  Look at the picture.  Do you see the layers?  These biscuits expanded and made fluffy layers!  The insides were soft and the outsides were crisp.  My starter is never very sour, but I could taste a pleasant malted grain flavor that I have often experienced in some of my better sourdough breads.  This recipe is a keeper and if you enjoy sourdough I recommend you try this recipe.  I’m not sure how mine compared to theirs since I used whole-wheat pastry flour, which makes for a slightly heavier end product, but either the whole-wheat pastry flour or white flour should work just fine.  So how was dinner?  The broccoli soup was insipid.  The biscuits were superb!

If you have a chance, run over to the Arctic Carbivores blog.  They are new bloggers but they bake and blog several times a week so there is plenty to see there.  I have to say; I’m impressed by how much they bake.  They are fearless sourdough experimenters and there is a lot of good baking going on over there!

Sourdough biscuits

Adapted from the Golden sourdough biscuits recipe on Recipe finder

2 cups whole-wheat pastry flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp kosher salt

½ tsp baking soda

½ cup cold unsalted butter

1 cup well fed sourdough starter

½ cup buttermilk

1 – 2 tbsp melted butter for brushing the muffins

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees f.

In a largish bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt and baking soda.  Using a pastry-cutter cut the cold butter into the flour mixture until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.  Don’t let the butter get too warm, you want the cold butter chunks to stay pretty solid to help with the flakiness of the finished biscuits.  Mix together sourdough starter and buttermilk.  Add the buttermilk mixture to the flour mixture.  Using a silicone spatula, mix the dough until well combined. 

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface.  Knead the dough a dozen times.  The original recipe says to roll the dough to a ½” thickness.  I think we can get away with slightly thicker biscuits.  Mine seemed a little wimpy this time around.  Cut the dough with a 2 12” biscuit cutter.  Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or butter the cookie sheet.  The original recipe instructed us to place the rounds 2” apart but they did not become larger in girth just in height.  I didn’t want to use a second cookie sheet so I placed my biscuits close, almost touching in order to fit them all on the same sheet and they were fine. 

Bake the biscuits for 12 – 15 minutes until golden browned.  Remove from the oven and brush the biscuits with melted butter.  Allow them to cool before serving.  I tried them both hot out of the oven and cooled down.  The cooled biscuits had a much more complex flavor. 

Tonight was sourdough pizza night.  I love making pizza at home.  The way I do it is a lot of work but the end product is truly worth it.  The pizza crust I work with makes enough dough for two pizzas.  What I try to do is make the starring ingredients things that are very different from each other.  The supporting players can be the same to help cut down on the work.  This strategy gives us two very different pizzas to choose from.

If you want to make my pizza, go here to read an earlier post that will give you the crust recipe and a general idea of what to do.  Make sure all of your ingredients are as dry as possible.   Cook any extra liquid out of your sauce and drain then squeeze excess liquid from all canned ingredients such as olives or artichokes.  Here are the ingredients lists for tonight’s featured pizzas:

Salmon and beet greens pizza:

Pizza sauce (this was merely a can of whole roma tomatoes cooked down with fresh garlic, onion powder, oregano, basil, salt and pepper)

Beet greens (sautéed in olive oil, fresh garlic, green onions and red pepper flakes.  This mixture was then braised in red wine until soft and all liquid was evaporated)

Shredded mozzarella cheese

Shredded Quattro Fromaggio (four cheese blend from Trader Joes)

One can of boneless, skinless pink salmon

Chopped artichoke hearts (canned, packed in water)

Sliced black olives

Sliced red onions

Sliced roasted red peppers

Chopped fresh garlic

Canadian Bacon and pineapple deluxe:

Pizza sauce

Canadian bacon

Pineapple, (canned and packed in it’s own juices)

Sliced black olives

Sliced roasted red peppers

Chopped fresh garlic

I hope you’ll try to make your own pizza.  The sourdough crust is wonderful but if you need to use store bought pizza dough, it will still turn out better than anything you can buy!

I have an admission to make.  This won’t be news to anyone who really knows me well.  But for those of you who don’t know me, I really dislike the holidays.  I’m not a shopper and I am big on procrastination so I end up being so stressed out that a crumple into a tiny little stress ball that keeps imploding and imploding until I feel like a lump of coal.  Early in the month of December, I saw a couple of blog events that dealt with holiday baking that I would have loved to participate in, I even bought the ingredients for some amazing looking but horribly complex cookies.  I was so close to participating and as a new Blogger, I know I should have, but I didn’t.  I normally try to do some baking but I couldn’t.  After an office potluck (I brought salad in a vain attempt to eat something healthy), a department Christmas party, family staying with us for a week followed by all of us joining more family further south for another week, I was drained.

Before all of this mayhem started, I bought myself a present of a couple of cookbooks.  I wasn’t able to think of touching them before the New Year, but now that things are calm, I was able to get a look.  One of the books I got was the King Arthur Flour whole-grain baking book.  This book has some really fantastic looking recipes and I can’t wait to delve into the recipes further.  For now, I was after sourdough.

Poor Herbert has been languishing in the fridge for weeks and weeks.  I did give Herbert a mercy feeding sometime before Christmas, but I really felt like I needed to use my sourdough starter for real.  Using the starter usually entails a couple of days thawing from the cold and a couple of good feedings.  The mercy feeding consisted of some food and a quick couple of hours to absorb it before going back into lockup. 

I chose to make sourdough waffles from another book I got in the same shipment:  Wild Fermentation by Sandor Elix Katz.  I also chose to modify the Walnut-Currant Sourdough Bread recipe from the King Arthur Flour book.  I fed Herbert the day before I wanted to start and then set up two preferments the night before I wanted to bake.  Both of these sourdough goodies came out really well.  Here is my take on the bread:

 Raison-Walnut Sourdough Bread:

Adapted from the King Arthur Flour whole grain baking book

Levain: 

½ cup stone ground whole-wheat flour

¼ cup room temperature water

1 tbsp, active well fed sourdough starter

Dough: 

The entire Levain from above

1 ½ cups stone ground whole-wheat flour

1 cup unbleached white flour

1 cup room temperature water

2 tbsp honey, use an assertive honey like an avocado or buckwheat honey

1 tsp salt

¼ cup raisons

¼ cup walnuts, broken up if in large pieces

Corn meal

The night before you want to bake, make the levain.  You want to give the mixture at least a full twelve hours to ferment.  The book said it would look bubbly and expanded when it was ready, mine just looked like mini bread dough but it definitely doubled:  Mix whole-wheat flour, water and starter well.  Cover the bowl with a layer of plastic wrap.  Once again, leave to ferment overnight, at least twelve hours.

In the bowl of a standing mixer combine the levain, whole-wheat flour, white flour and water.  Use your paddle attachment to mix the ingredients at the lowest speed until just mixed together.  Let this mixture stand 20 minutes.  After 20 minutes, add honey and salt.  Mix on low speed until the new ingredients are mixed in thoroughly.  Increase the speed to kneading speed and knead the dough for two more minutes.  Cover the bowl and let the dough rest thirty minutes.

After thirty minutes, turn the dough out onto a floured board.  Pat the dough into a 6”x9” rectangle.  Sprinkle the raisons over the dough and then fold the edges horizontally in over the raisons.  Pat the dough into the 6”x9” rectangle again.  Sprinkle the walnuts over the dough and then fold the dough into thirds again.  Move the dough to your bowl and let it rise for thirty minutes.  You will now repeat the patting, folding, thirty-minute rest sequence three more times.  After you have folded and rested the dough a total of four times for 2 – 2 ½ hours total, shape the bread into a round being careful not to let the raisons or nuts tear the surface of the bread.  Turn the loaf into a floured banneton (I didn’t get one for Christmas, but this book taught me that you can line a colander with a floured linen dish towel to mimic a banneton, how cool and money saving is that?!).  Cover the dough and let it rise 2 – 3 hours. 

45 minutes before baking time, preheat the oven with a pizza stone and a metal pan in it to 450 degrees.  When you are ready to bake, sprinkle a peel or a baking sheet with corn meal.  Invert the dough out of the banneton and onto the peel.  Use the peel to move the bread to your baking stone.  Toss a cup of water into the metal pan for steam and close the oven door fast.  Bake the loaf for 15 minutes and then lower the temperature to 400 degrees.  Bake for 30- 35 minutes longer. Use the peel to remove the bread from the oven to a cooling rack.  Cool the bread thoroughly before letting yourself get tempted to cut off a big slice.  The bread will keep cooking until it cools.

This bread had a dense crumb and a shatteringly crisp crust the night I baked it.  The next day after being stored in a plastic bag on the counter, the crust was chewy but the bread had a wonderful flavor.  This loaf was incredible used as the bread for a fried egg sandwich in the morning.

My subscription to Sunset magazine has been such a good investment over the years.  Not only do I find out things like good places to shop in Cambria or where the best Mochi shop in little Tokyo is, but I also get so many good ideas for food.  The one thing I find ironic about this publication is that the best recipes don’t come from their staff.  No.  The best recipes come from their readers. Sunset magazine readers have to be the most inventive group of cooks on the planet.

When I received the September issue of Sunset, I sat down to page through the magazine as I always do.  I had to stop and book mark a recipe right away.  Staring at me from the page was the most amazing onion and cheese covered little breads.  They were Red Onion and Gorgonzola flatbreads.  They looked mouth watering delicious!  And…of course, they were from the section of recipes submitted by talented Sunset readers.  I knew I would need to make these luscious little breads sometime. 

The dough called for semolina flour.  I have never used semolina for baking but the idea of using pasta flour in bread was very appealing to me.  Since September, I have had it in the back of my mind that I need semolina flour.  I have casually looked for it in every store I have been to, but have not bumped into it.  I guess if I had been making an effort to find it, I would have a bag of it in my pantry now, but I was lazy.  Today, I wanted to make soup and I wanted to use my sourdough starter.  I remembered this recipe and went to take a look at it.  I looked up semolina flour and found out it is prized as hard wheat with high gluten content.  I decided I would use whole-wheat flour for semolina and use sourdough starter for yeast and some of the water.  I didn’t have Gorgonzola but I did have a smoked provolone.  I was ready to go play in the kitchen.

I mixed up the dough, making the usual adjustments I make when attempting to use my starter for yeast.  The original recipe called for mixing the dough but not kneading it.  Since I did not have that high gluten content semolina to work with, I made sure I kneaded the dough a few minutes to work up some gluten in the dough.  The kitchen was chilly today and my starter was having a hard time waking up from being in the fridge so I had to let the dough ferment for a couple of hours.  I mixed up the topping ingredients, shredded my cheese and then got to work.  The original recipe instructs you to bake these on cookie sheets in two batches for 15 minutes each.  I decided to use my pizza stone.  I was only able to work with eight mini flatbreads at a time so I had to do four batches.  The pizza stone gets hotter than a cookie sheet so I found out the hard way that I only needed 13 minutes per batch.  Don’t worry.  That first batch came out very dark, but did not burn.

Fresh out of the oven, these little breads were remarkable.  The sourdough crust was shatteringly crisp.  The onions were sweet from the balsamic vinegar but caramelized.  The smoked cheese was a perfect contrast to the other flavors.  I could not stop snacking on these as they came out of the oven.  They were that good.

If you don’t have a sourdough starter, go here to look up the original recipe.  If you have a starter and you are ready for a treat, here is my version.  Be creative.  I can already think of many variations on this theme.  For example:  spinach and garlic with kasseri or feta cheese?  Roasted red peppers, green onions and jack cheese?  How about sautéed Kale, garlic, and bleu cheese?   Just find a great red wine, some friends and you have a party!

Red Onion sourdough mini flatbreads

Adapted from the September 2007 issue of Sunset Magazine

½ cup sourdough starter

1 cup water

2 cups unbleached white flour

1 cup stone ground whole-wheat flour

4 tbsp olive oil, divided

2 tsp salt, divided

1 medium red onion

1 tbsp fresh rosemary leaves, minced

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

½ tsp red chili flakes

4-6 ounces smoked provolone, shredded

Cornmeal for dusting

In a large bowl, combine sourdough starter, water, white and whole-wheat flours and 1 tsp of the salt.  Mix until it comes together into a ball.  Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and knead for 5 to 7 minutes.  Transfer the dough to a clean bowl that has been oiled.  Cover the bowl with a clean, damp towel and allow it to ferment for 1 to 2 hours until doubled in bulk. 

An hour before you are ready to bake the flatbreads, put a pizza stone in the oven and preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  Sprinkle a peel or two baking sheets with cornmeal.

Halve the onion lengthwise and then slice it thinly.  In a bowl, combine the sliced onions, minced rosemary, 2 tbsp olive oil, balsamic vinegar, 1 tsp of salt and chili flakes.  Cover and set aside. 

Divide the dough in two.  Roll the dough halves into two long tube shapes.  Divide each into 16 pieces.  Roll each piece into a ball and return the balls to the covered bowl.  Working with 8 balls at a time.  Roll each ball into a thin round.  Place each round on the cornmeal dusted peel or cookie sheet you intend to use to transfer the flatbreads to the oven.  Top each round of dough with about a teaspoon of onion mixture and a sprinkling of cheese.  Transfer to the pizza stone in the oven and bake for 13 minutes.  Remove the flatbreads to a plate with a spatula.  Repeat this process 3 more times until all 32 breads are baked.

I love pizza.  Oh my god do I love it!  Even when it is bad it is good.  It is bread.  It is melted cheese.  It is an amazing concoction of textures and flavors.  If I could be allowed to eat only one food for the rest of my life, it would have to be pizza!  I now make pizza.  My pizza is better than any pizza I have ever had.  Hands down.  The only problem with my pizza is that it takes all day to make and it can be an exhausting pain.  But ooooooh.  It is soooo worth the time and effort.

On Sunday, I decided that Herbert hadn’t been shown any love in too many weeks.  He had been sitting in the fridge, neglected, belching up hooch for way too long.  Our grocery trip was imminent and I had leftover homemade spaghetti sauce and leftover homemade pesto both needing to be used up in the fridge.  Pizza was the logical conclusion to how to deal with these situations.  I grabbed Herbert and fed him warm water and flour.  Within an hour, Herbert was awake and bubbling away in his crock.  We took off for the grocery store and the farmer’s market.  I would comb the market for yummy things.  I tend to like a pizza with lots and lots of toppings.  This tendency is often my undoing.  I end up locked in the kitchen, slave to pizza and the perfection it can be.

When we got back, I made the sponge for the pizza dough.  I went for a walk and dilly-dallied until an hour and a half went by.  The sponge looked good, so I added the rest of the bread ingredients and used my mixer to mix and knead the dough.  Now, bread baking and sourdough in particular can be finicky.  Bread dough will either come together well or it won’t.  I’m not really sure why.  It could be temperature, humidity, the phases of the moon, a leap year, Friday the thirteenth or just karma, but every once in a while, you have dough that just won’t cooperate.  My dough decided to be wet, wet, wet.  When this happens, add flour to your dough one tablespoon at a time until it finally wants to play nice and form a ball in the mixing bowl.  I added flour, added flour and repeated and repeated.  I got it to ball up but it was still very wet.  What a pain.  I wasn’t too worried.  Wet dough can be nice because the dough will get airy and form holes when it rises and bakes, it can just be challenging to work with. 

I left the dough to rise for an hour.  It should have doubled.  It didn’t.  Ok.  I figured I could go to the gym and come back.  I came back an hour and half later and it looked very similar to when I left.  Sigh.  I wasn’t worried.  Pizza is flat bread.  My Pita’s don’t rise the way bread should either and they turn out fine.  If I was really making bread, I would have been more concerned.  I dumped the dough onto the counter and added more flour while gently folding the dough hoping to dry it out a little but not deflate it.  I cut the dough in half.  The recipe I use is the Alton Brown Country bread recipe from the Herbert post with a tweak or two.  It makes amazing Pizza dough.  Absolutely delicious!  It is crunchy yet chewy with a flavor that is nutty and wheaty.  Yum.  The good thing is that it makes enough dough for two pizzas.  One for the  red sauce and one for the pesto.  Anyway, I digress.  After cutting the dough in half, I went to roll it out.  Sticky, sticky, ew!  I had to dust the board, the dough and the rolling pin liberally with flour.  Roll. Scrape.  Move to a liberally corn meal doused pizza peel.  Repeat.  The dough could now rest and continue to rise because after so many hours, the work would just begin.

The pizza stone was warming in the oven and I set about to make the toppings.  Pizza #1:  Red sauce, mozzarella, four cheese blend, spinach, red onions, kalamata olives, red peppers, sautéed shitake mushrooms, chopped fresh garlic and chicken basil sausage.  Pizza #2:  Same as #1 to help with sanity except substitute zucchini for spinach, and pesto for red sauce.  Normally, pizza #1 and #2 will have some similarities but other huge glaring differences.  Maybe a salmon pizza and a kielbasa pizza this time, with a combo of different veggies.  Shrimp pizza with a Canadian bacon pizza next time with different sauces and combos of veggies.  Whatever will cause me the most headaches but the most bang for my buck.  So I start chopping onions, olives, peppers, garlic, and zucchini.  The kitchen is becoming hell because the oven has been on for a good half hour and the temperature is getting awful.  Chop shitakes, sauté in olive oil, garlic and red wine.  Transfer to a bowl.  Spinach has been simultaneously rinsing.  As the mushrooms are removed from the pan, chopped spinach goes in.  When it is cooked down, I remove it and in goes the sausage.  The heat in the kitchen is becoming stifling but I have ingredients coming together now. 

By now my boyfriend is getting the kind of post gym hunger that encourages him to help the process go faster.  He starts to open packages of cheese while I start to lovingly spread pesto on one pizza and red sauce on the other.  I squeeze the liquid out of the spinach and add it to the red sauce pizza.  We add cheese to both.  Next we just start tossing ingredients on both pies.  Once they are groaning under the weight of too many toppings, we decide the red sauce pizza looks perkiest so we toss it in the oven.  This is a two-person operation.  The dough is sticky and immobile.  I shake the peel, he uses a large wooden spatula to coax the pizza off of the peel and onto the stone.  Success.  The pizza bakes for thirteen minutes and we are ready to start eating.  We repeat the two-person operation and get pizza two in.  Did I mention that I made salad sometime after the bread dough and before the toppings?  I did!  Aren’t you impressed with me?  I quickly dress the salad with oil, vinegar and herbs.  We open a nice bottle of wine and flop down at the table exhausted but happy and eat the best pizza we have ever had.

Sourdough Pizza

Crust adapted from Alton Brown’s Country bread recipe on Epicurious.com, Makes 2 pizzas

Crust:

1 cup warm water (105°F to 115°F)
3/4 cup sourdough starter
1/4 cup buttermilk
2 cups unbleached white flour

1 1/3 cups (or more) stone ground whole wheat flour

2 teaspoons salt
Nonstick vegetable oil spray

Cornmeal

Toppings:

Spaghetti sauce or pesto sauce (or both) about a quarter cup for each pizza

8 oz mozzerella cheese

4 oz Quatro Fromaggio (4 cheese blend from Trader Joes)

3 oz shitake mushrooms, sliced and sautéed in olive oil, garlic and wine

2 small red peppers sliced

1 small red onion, thinly sliced

about 20 pitted kalamata olives, chopped

One large head of Spinach, sautéed, cooled and liquid squeezed out

4-5 large garlic cloves, roughly chopped

4 chicken basil sausages, removed from casings and sautéed in olive oil 15 minutes.

Mix first 3 crust ingredients in bowl of heavy-duty mixer. Add 2 cups unbleached white flour; stir to blend. Cover bowl with kitchen towel. Let rise in warm draft-free area until doubled in volume, about 1 1/2 hours.

Using dough hook, mix in 1 1/3 cups stone ground whole-wheat flour and salt at lowest setting. Increase speed slightly; knead dough 5 minutes, adding more flour by tablespoonfuls if dough sticks to sides of bowl. Let dough rest 15 minutes. Knead on low 5 minutes. Scrape dough from hook into bowl. Remove bowl from stand. Coat a rubber spatula with nonstick spray. Slide spatula under and around dough, coating dough lightly. Cover bowl with kitchen towel. Let dough rise until doubled in volume, about 1 hour.

Turn dough out onto floured surface and fold over on itself several times to flatten (be careful not to press too hard and deflate the dough). Divide in half. Roll each half of the dough into a ¼” thick round and transfer each round to a pizza peel or baking sheet coated in cornmeal.   Cover with a clean kitchen towel.  Let rise for at least a half hour.

An hour before making pizza, place a baking stone in your oven and preheat to 500°F.

Spread sauce on pizzas.  Add spinach to top of sauce (one or both pizzas).  Sprinkle mozzarella and four-cheese blend onto pizzas.  Add remaining toppings.  Bake pizzas one at a time for 13 minutes each.  Remove from oven and let cool slightly before cutting and serving. 

When I was a kid, my favorite foods were pizza and spaghetti.  I loved to eat these foods so much that my Mom would joke that I should have been born into an Italian family.  As I got older, I started to become exposed to new foods and soon discovered that the Mediterranean has many other wonderful cuisines to explore and love.  My boyfriend’s Mom is of Greek descent.  She is an amazing cook and she was the person who taught me how to make a perfect Greek salad.  She makes leg of lamb that is to die for.  She also showed me that hummus does not have to come out of a plastic container.  After being able to share my boyfriend’s wonderful family, I really became interested in Mediterranean food. 

One thing you need to accompany anything from grilled meat to hummus is a good pita.  A lot of the pita breads available at the store, especially the ones with whole grains in them, have a dry, brittle consistency.  When dining in Greek restaurants, I have come across pitas without the pocket that are tender and soft but they are usually made of pure white flour.  Back in my bread machine days, I learned how to produce a really good mostly whole-wheat pita.  Between my bread machine and my pizza stone, I was set.  We could have pitas within a couple of hours.  I would make them whenever a good pita was needed and completely stopped buying pitas at the store.

When I started sourdough baking, I wondered if I could make my pitas with the starter instead of commercial yeast.  By the time I had begun to think about it, I had already begun to make bread without commercial yeast.  I had purchased the “Bread Bakers Apprentice” by Peter Reinhart and Ron Manville and had been fiddling with the recipes so that I could use just my starter for baking.  On the page with the recipe for Lavash Crackers was a sidebar note on how to adapt the recipe for pitas.  One day, I decided to try to adapt his notes to sourdough.  Sadly, doing this produced very few pitas, I think I got two or three.  The day I tried this experiment and noticed the small dough ball I was creating, I whipped up a batch of the bread machine pitas too as a supplement.  In comparing the two side by side, I can say both are wonderful, but the sourdough pitas were better.  They had a far better texture and because of the addition of honey instead of sugar, a much better flavor.  I have changed the recipe so that I now get eight pitas and they are over half whole-wheat.  We made souvlaki sandwiches this week and the pitas went so fast that I actually had to make a second batch!  (Which means frighteningly enough, two people went through nearly sixteen pitas in one week, yikes!)

Sourdough Pitas

2 cups unbleached white flour

2 ½ cups stone ground whole-wheat flour

1 ½ tsp salt

3 tbsp honey

3 tbsp olive oil

1 ½ cups sourdough starter

¾ to 1 cup water

Stir together both kinds of flour, salt, honey, olive oil, and sourdough starter.  Begin mixing in water a little bit at a time until the mixture just forms a ball of dough.  This dough will be fairly stiff.  Move the dough to a lightly floured surface and knead for 10-12 minutes until it is elastic and doesn’t break easily when you stretch a small amount of dough.  Form a ball of dough.  Lightly oil a clean bowl and roll the dough ball around in the oiled bowl.  Cover the bowl with a clean, damp dishtowel.  Allow the dough to rise and ferment in a warm place between ninety minutes and two hours.  Forty-five minutes to an hour before you bake the pitas, preheat the oven with a pizza stone* inside to 500 degrees F.  After the dough has risen, transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface.  Using a knife or a bench scraper cut the dough in two.  Roll each half into a thick, even oblong shape and divide each piece into four pieces.  Depending on how large your pizza stone is, you may be able to work on two pitas at a time.  Take a piece of dough, form a round ball and then use a rolling pin to flatten the ball into about a quarter of an inch thick round.   Assuming a large pizza stone, repeat this process.  Place two pitas onto the pizza stone quickly, so as not to lose the oven heat.  Bake pitas three minutes.  Your pitas may or may not expand fully to form a pocket.  If they only blister up in places, don’t worry.  They’ll still be good.  Use a pizza peel, or tongs to remove pitas.  Pile the pitas on a plate where they will eventually deflate and cool.  Repeat the instructions for forming pitas and baking pitas until all eight pitas are baked.  Pitas can be stored in a Ziploc bag on the counter for a couple of days or stored in the fridge for up to a week.  If you store them in the fridge, reheat them in a 300 degree F. oven for two to three minutes. (You want them warm not toasted).

*If you don’t have a pizza stone, you should be able to use a heavy-duty cookie sheet – one that can withstand high heat.  It has been a long time since I have made pitas without the baking stone so you may have to experiment but I think you may have to add a couple of minutes to the baking time.

Why is my first article on sourdough about English muffins?  It is because I feel very strongly that we can all make better food than we can buy.  Commercial English muffins (see the ingredients on this link) have some shady ingredients like high fructose corn syrup (which probably contains genetically modified corn), soybean oil (which could come from genetically modified soy), monoglycerides and preservatives.  Why would you want to eat this stuff when you could eat a bread product lovingly produced at home with good quality ingredients? 

How good are homemade English muffins?  A Blogger whose writing I love can tell you.  The Sourdough Monkey Wrangler makes such great English muffins that he used them as currency to barter for groceries at his local Farmer’s market.  That’s how good homemade is over commercial muffins.

The recipe I am using started life on another great blog called Baking Bites.  Here is a link to that recipe.  I like my muffins to have a little more earthiness and nutrition to them so I have added a little bit of stone ground whole wheat flour and I have substituted honey for sugar because it adds a wonderful flavor.  As a matter of fact, if you can find an assertive honey like an avocado honey you will get better flavor than if you use a mild honey.  A word of warning on technique, do not get too over-enthusiastic when you roll your muffins out.  I have a tendency to roll them too thin and I don’t end up with the nice chubby muffins one would expect and that can easily be cut in half when toasting time arrives.

Honey Wheat English Muffins

½ cup sourdough starter (fed)

2 cups unbleached white flour

1 cup stone ground whole-wheat flour

1 cup water

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

2 tbsp honey

cornmeal

Combine starter with 2 cups unbleached white flour and one cup of water in a largish bowl that will accommodate having this mixture triple in size.  Stir well.  Cover with plastic wrap and allow the sponge to sit out overnight (so that you can have English muffins in time for breakfast).  The original recipe says this step should take 7-10 hours.  If you are a non-morning person like me you can wait up to 11 hours and still be ok, I have tested this .  In the morning, add the baking soda, salt, and honey.  Mix a bit to combine.  Add the stone ground whole-wheat flour a couple of tablespoons at a time, until the dough loses its stickiness.  You may have to add a tablespoon or two more flour.  The dough will be a little sticky still but you don’t want it to be really wet.  A little stickiness is good however because this is the condition that will help make those nooks and crannies we all love in an English muffin.  Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and roll the dough out to a height of about a half an inch or a little taller.  (This is where I get in trouble because obviously I don’t know what a half-inch looks like).  Use a lightly floured biscuit cutter to cut as many rounds as possible (at least a 4” cutter is ideal).  Now, I don’t know how many people will agree with me on this because poor handling of the dough could be disastrous, but I hate wasting dough so when you get through the first round of cutting you’ll have scraps.  I gingerly smash the scraps together, carefully roll them back out and get a couple more muffins out of this.  That last bit of dough?  I make a free form muffin.  Transfer the rounds to a cornmeal covered baking sheet and sprinkle the tops of them with cornmeal.  Leave the muffins to rise, covered with a clean dishtowel for about 45 minutes. Heat an electric nonstick pancake grill to between 325 and 350 degrees F.  (Alternatively, heat a lightly oiled or nonstick skillet on the stove to medium/medium high).  Cook the muffins for 6 minutes on each side, turning once.  The muffins will turn a light brown on each side.  The sides of the muffins should look dry like the edges of a pancake before you do the first flip.  Let the muffins cool completely before you use them or store them (they will continue to cook a bit while they are still warm).  Make sure you toast them before eating them.  An un-toasted English muffin is a crime against humanity.

So you have a big ‘ol pile of English muffins and you want something yummy to do with them.  How about a breakfast sandwich?

Pesto-Gouda Breakfast Sandwich

For each sandwich:

1 English muffin – sliced and toasted

1 Egg fried until the yolk is solid

Sliced Gouda

Pesto

Spread a thin layer of pesto on each side of your toasted English muffin.  Top the lower muffin half with sliced gouda cheese.  Top with a hot fried egg so that the cheese gets melty.  Top with the other half of the English muffin.  Serve immediately.