DIY Pies

Summer isn't even here yet, but already the summer of 2014 is shaping up to be the Summer of the Pizza.  You see, a few weeks ago I experienced something of a pizza epiphany (the trigger appeared in The New York Times, so I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone), and since then I've been on a tear.

 fig. a:  Tony's Pizza!

I'd been messing around with pizza recipes for a few years, and I'd experienced a fair degree of success, but I'd never quite hit on a recipe that felt like The One.  Most of the time I was working with variations on Chad Robertson's pizza basics from Tartine Bread.  I've been baking bread quite seriously for a few years now, and my method is very closely based on Robertson's method, so it made sense to follow his lead when it came to pizza, too.  If you follow the instructions in Tartine Bread, the pizza that results is a sourdough-based pie that's a bit on the rustic side for three reasons:  1) because you're essentially pinching dough from your country bread recipe, which contains 10% whole wheat flour, 90% all-purpose flour, and no 00 flour; 2) because your sourdough starter also contains whole wheat flour; and 3) because Robertson recommends dusting your pizza peel with corn meal to help with the transfer of the pizza to your stone. I like "rustic," and Robertson's method results in pizzas that have nice shape and great rise to them, but, still, even though I played around with the formula, it never felt like The One.

 fig. b:  margherita by Falco & Sifton

Then I came across Sam Sifton's collaboration with Anthony Falco in the digital pages of The New York Times back in April.  Sifton wasn't just looking to create good pizza at home, he was aspiring to greatness.  And in order to crack the code, he turned to Falco, the "official pizza czar" at Roberta's, the pizzeria/restaurant/bar/tiki garden/community radio station that's perhaps the defining enterprise and hangout of the Bushwick scene of the last decade.  Roberta's also happens to produce some truly outstanding pizza pies.  What resulted was a manifesto.  After commenting on the sheer amount of pizza consumed in America, then lamenting the fact that so much of that pizza is so poor, Sifton goes ahead and proclaims the arrival of a New Era of DIY Pizza-Making:

Very little pizza is made at home, from scratch. 

I am here to change that.  I am here to say:  You can make pizza at home.  You can make pizza at home that will be the equal of some of the best pizzas available on the planet.  With a minimal amount of planning and practice, you can get good at it, even if you are a relatively novice cook.  [my emphasis]

That's a bold statement worthy of the bold type, but, the thing is, Sifton is just about right.  You can make pizza at home.  You can even make some mighty fine pizzas that are comparable to some of the best pizzas available on the planet.  The only thing you'll likely be missing out on is the effect of baking a pizza fast in a blistering-hot pizza oven that's running somewhere between 700º - 1000º F, especially a wood-fired pizza oven like Roberta's.  But your pizzas will look awesome and you'll be proud to serve them, and, even more importantly, you'll be blown away by just how great your DIY pies taste.  I mean, even your leftover pizza will look and taste great.

  fig. c:  leftover margherita & sausage pizza lunch

As soon as I tried this Roberta's Pizza Dough recipe, it felt like The One.

The secret to the Roberta's recipe is all in the method.  Aside from the 00 flour, the ingredients are as basic as they get.  Sifton urges his readers to make use of a kitchen scale the way real bakers do.  I fully agree, but I've included the volume for the active dry yeast because the amount called for (2 grams) is very small, and my kitchen scale is not particularly trustworthy when it comes to such tiny amounts.  And although the recipe works with a minimum of 3 hours' rising time, it works like a charm and has a great deal more flavour if you start your dough about 24 hours before you plan to make your pizzas.  I've made a few 3-hour, 6-hour, and 8-hour pizzas using this recipe over the last couple of months, but I always get the very best results when I start 20 to 24 hours in advance.  Plan ahead.  What Sifton calls "a little pizza homework" really pays off.

Another one of the reasons that Sifton and Falco's collaboration is such a success, is that the article comes with an accompanying video that's clear and concise and provides a great sense of what the dough should look and feel like at each stage in the process.  Don't miss out on it!

The only specialized pieces of equipment you need to make great pizzas at home are a pizza/baking stone and a pizza peel, but even these aren't 100% essential, and Sifton & Falco suggest some useful cheats.

Anyway, without any further ado:

Roberta's Pizza Dough 

Total time: 20 minutes, plus at least 3 hours of rising time 

Ingredients: 

153 grams 00 flour
153 grams all-purpose flour
8 grams fine sea salt
2 grams active dry yeast (3/4 teaspoon)
4 grams extra-virgin olive oil 

Preparation: 

1.  In a large mixing bowl, combine flours and salt. 

2.  In a small mixing bowl, stir together 200 grams lukewarm tap water, the yeast and the olive oil, then pour it into flour mixture. Knead with your hands until well combined, approximately 3 minutes, then let the mixture rest for 15 minutes. 

3.  Knead rested dough for 3 minutes. Cut into 2 equal pieces and shape each into a ball. Place on a heavily floured surface, cover with dampened cloth, and let rest and rise for 3 to 4 hours at room temperature or for 8 to 24 hours in the refrigerator. (If you refrigerate the dough, remove it 30 to 45 minutes before you begin to shape it for pizza.) 

4. Place your baking stone on the middle rack of your oven and preheat your oven at the very highest setting. 

5.  To make pizza, place each dough ball on a heavily floured surface and use your fingers to stretch it, then your hands to shape it into rounds or squares. Top and bake. 

6.  Check your pizza after about 3-4 minutes.  Rotate your pizza if necessary.  Total baking time will be approximately 4 to 8 minutes, depending on the nature of your oven.   

Yield: 2 x 12-inch pizzas 

[recipe based very closely on the recipe that appears in "A Little Pizza Homework" by Sam Sifton, The New York Times, April 8, 2014]

When it comes to topping your DIY pies, Sifton is a proponent of simplicity:

Topping a pizza is tender work as well.  You do not want to overload the pie.  Doing so leaves it soggy, no matter the heat of the oven.  

He's absolutely right, and the recipes that accompany his article are all minimalist gems from the Roberta's repertoire:  their margherita; a two-cheese pizza that cleverly riffs on cacio e pepe, the classic Roman pasta dish (think lots of pepper); and the Green & White, which combines a simple mozzarella pizza with fresh greens.

But after you've mastered these, you'll likely feel emboldened and start thinking about experimenting with toppings a little.  This recipe is very amenable to such experimentation.  Just remember to keep it simple when you do.

When I got started on this pizza craze back in April, I started out as simple as they get--mostly margheritas and marinaras.  But as soon as I felt I had the hang of this recipe (and that was pretty much immediately), I tried out some more adventurous combinations that I'd collected over the years--combinations that I'd either experienced firsthand, or that I'd read about.  Like this radicchio & gremolata pizza

 fig. d:  radicchio & gremolata pie

that I also read about in The New York Times a few years back.

Or this potato pizza recipe

 fig. e:  potato pie

from Jim "No-knead/Sullivan Street Bakery" Lahey that's been blowing our minds for years.

Or even this breakfast pizza

 fig. f:  sausage & egg breakfast pie

that combined a riff on American Flatbread's classic New Vermont Sausage pizza with an homage to Motorino's breakfast/brunch pizzas.

Feeling lucky?  Here's the recipe for the radicchio pie:

Radicchio & Gremolata Pizza 

1/2 bunch parsley, roughly chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
zest of 2 lemons
zest of 1 orange
extra-virgin olive oil
salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 head radicchio, cored, outer leaves discarded, cut into 1/4-inch strips
4 oz mozzarella
1 oz grated Parmesan or aged pecorino 

Mix the parsley, garlic, citrus zests and enough olive oil to make a loose paste.  Add the salt and the black pepper until the flavour is strong and pleasant to the palate.  Let the gremolata sit for at least 30 minutes, or up to two hours. 

Once you've formed your pizza dough, spread half the gremolata on it, before topping it with half the mozzarella and half the Parmesan or pecorino, and, finally, half the radicchio.  This amount of radicchio might look excessive, but, don't worry, it will reduce significantly. 

Bake until the crust is golden and the radicchio is wilted and a bit charred. 

Eat and repeat. 

Yield:  makes enough topping for 2 x 12-inch pizzas.

[based on a recipe that accompanied "The Slow Route to Homemade Pizza" by Oliver Strand, The New York Times, May 18, 2010]

This beautiful pizza may very well have been the winner at a recent pizza party featuring four different types.  It looks amazing and the taste is unbelievable.  The radicchio gets a bit charred and crispy and caramelized on top; then there's a second layer of radicchio that gets sweet and juicy; and, finally,  there's the cheese and the gremolata to bring it all together and really make it sing.  We're talking a serious showstopper here.

Anyway, that Roberta's Pizza Dough recipe is the key.  Especially if you give it the time it needs to ferment properly.  I've never seen a pizza dough that's such a joy to work with.  And the flavour!

Stay tuned for more about potato pizza, and for my sourdough version of Roberta's Pizza Dough (!).

In the meantime:

Long live pizza!

&

Long live the New Era of DIY Pies!!

aj

Noma 1: Definitely not your average morning Danish, rev. ed.

fig. a: Noma: Nordic Cuisine

There's something downright exhilarating about René Redzepi and Claus Meyer's Noma: Nordic Cuisine (2006). It begins with the photographs that grace the cover and continue throughout the text. Sometimes stark (like the photo above), oftentimes almost absurdly picturesque (like this photograph),

fig. b: landscape by Noma 1

and at times even sublime, much of the impetus behind Noma's photography has to do with situating the restaurant's cuisine within Denmark's formidable landscape, and the impression one gets is of a countryside that's equal measures forbidding and abundant. Thus, alongside pictures of Greenland's desolate glaciers (what remains of them),

fig. c: landscape by Noma 2

you get pictures of lovable old Danish hippies carefully collecting herbs

fig. d: lovable old Danish hippie

that may very well end up on Noma's artfully composed plates--in this case, Hay-baked Celery Root, Black Pudding and Yellow Archangel, the first of the book's winter recipes.

fig. e: Hay-baked Celery Root, Black Pudding and Yellow Archangel

The thing is, according to Noma's philosophical outlook, Greenland's glaciers and southern Denmark's countryside don't form the strict binary opposition one might think they do. Where others see mountains of ice creeping across the landscape, the folks at Noma see "a rich flora and fauna, with crowberries, reindeer, grouse and musk ox." Bounty is in the eye of the beholder.

Now, if you've noted a little Nordic Pride in my description of the Noma cookbook, you're definitely onto something. Already, when the restaurant first began to take shape, there was the idea that a restaurant housed in an old warehouse that had once been part of the Royal Greenland Trade Enterprise and that would soon be the new site of the Nordatlantens Brygge (North Atlantic House) should have a vision that was pan-Nordic in orientation. But over the next nine months, in the lead-up to the restaurant's launch, Noma's vision really took on form. For one thing, Claus Meyer, the owner, and René Redzepi and Mads Refslund, the restaurant's two chefs at the time, took an extensive trip across the north, including jaunts to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland, to search for ingredients and begin the process of making the contacts necessary to establish an alternative to the distribution networks available back in Copenhagen. The trip was a revelation, exceeding all expectations, and immediately the three "gastronomic explorers" knew they were onto a good thing, even if it might mean a lot of extra work.

By the time they returned to Copenhagen and began to work in earnest on what would become Noma's cuisine their vision had begun to develop into a full-fledged philosophy. Among its central tenets: take the Mediterranean notion of terroir, as well as the cultivation of biodiversity and the celebration of seasonality that goes along with it, and use it to utterly reject Southern European cuisine and its dominance of fine dining internationally. In other words, develop a cuisine "built on a basis of traditional and non-traditional Nordic ingredients," as Claus Meyer noted after one early planning meeting, one that would give "expression to the seasons' changes in a maximum way, taking things all the way to the limit." By March 2004, just four months into Noma's life, this sort of feistiness, this proudly anti-Mediterranean attitude, was already paving the way to the Nordic Cuisine Symposium, where in true Danish fashion--this is the same country, after all, that gave birth to Dogme 95--they banged together a 10-point manifesto that set the parameters for this New Nordic Cuisine. There were twelve signatories to this manifesto, representing Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Greenland, and René Redzepi's signature stands front and center.

fig. f: manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine

Anyway, there's a lot here that appeals to us here at "...an endless banquet": seasonality and a focus on indigenous ingredients, Nordic pride and the development of a cuisine that's both innovative and steeped in tradition and that truly represents the region, and, yes, even a manifesto. We've said it before and we're going to say it again: for all the talk about Montreal's "European" flavor, this city, this province, is often at its best when it readily acknowledges its peculiar Nordic character (let's not forget that Montreal is at roughly the same latitude as Milan). Noma: Nordic Cuisine offers a virtual blueprint for how to develop a region's cuisine, how to create a cuisine that truly reflects the terroir, and how to do this within the context of a northerly climate.*

That said, Noma: Nordic Cuisine did present us with a couple of problems. First of all, I would characterize it as being one of those cookbooks that's more interested in spreading the reputation of a particular restaurant and its chef and in communicating with other top chefs than it is in communicating with the amateur. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, of course, but it often results in vagueness when it comes to articulating recipes, and that's certainly the case with Noma. Take the Hay-Baked Celery Root recipe, for instance, which begins like this: "Light the hay with a match, some place away from the kitchen, and burn off the first bit of smoke." The ideas are there, and they're frequently brilliant, but you might have to be a chef (or a psychic) to figure out how to bring them to life. Secondly, Noma's tireless efforts when it came to tracking down indigenous Nordic ingredients means that quite a few of the recipes are impossible to replicate without access to their alternative distribution networks. It might be a little difficult to find local sources for musk ox, yellow archangel, and seakale, but Noma certainly leaves you with the desire to broaden your repertoire of regional and indigenous ingredients, and, overall, there's a surprising amount of overlap between the seasonal specialties there and here: fiddlehead ferns, lobster, hare, jerusalem artichokes, oysters, pears, ramps, and so on.

When it came to actually putting Noma: Nordic Cusine to use, however, we started off very tentatively. Michelle took elements from a couple different recipes and paired them, creating a new breakfast combo all her own. The first was a wonderful spice bread recipe, one that had that exact Northern European spice bread flavor that Michelle had been seeking but had otherwise failed to find. The second was a novel and, quite frankly, ingenious approach to the poaching of an egg, one that allowed for the egg to be aromatized as it cooks--in this case with white truffle oil.** She then added a caramelized scallion as a finishing touch.

fig. g: spice bread, truffled egg, caramelized scallion

Spice Bread (metric)

5 g cinnamon
5 g clove
2 g nutmeg
2 g green anise
150 g rye flour
150 g wheat flour
20 g baking powder
50 g wholewheat flour
100 g honey, preferably chestnut honey
150 g maple syrup
125 g whole milk
125 g eggs
fresh rosemary
butter and salt

Preheat the oven to 160º C. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Crush the spices and sift them over the dry ingredients. Stir in the honey and maple syrup, then the milk, and finally the eggs. Place in a buttered loaf pan and bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, about 45 min. Let cool on a rack.

Spice Bread (imperial)

1 1/2 cups rye flour
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 tbsp baking powder
2 tbsp cinnamon
2 tbsp cloves
1 tbsp nutmeg
1 tbsp green anise
1/3 cup + 1 Tbsp honey
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup milk
2 whole eggs
1 egg yolk

Preheat the oven to 325° F. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Crush the spices and sift them over the dry ingredients. Stir in the honey and maple syrup, then the milk, and finally the eggs. Place in a buttered loaf pan and bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, about 45 min. Let cool on a rack.

Truffled eggs

1 egg per person
truffle oil
microwaveable plastic wrap

The basic method is as follows. Line a coffee cup with a small piece of plastic wrap, making a bowl. Take a small amount of truffle oil and spread it on the bottom. Carefully break an egg into the cup, gather the edges of the plastic up around the egg and twist it tightly closed. Secure it with twine or a twist tie. Repeat with as many eggs as are needed. Bring a small saucepan of water to simmer and maintain its temperature. Drop the eggs into the water and let them poach about 4 minutes. Carefully remove them from the water and gently take off the plastic wrap.

[both recipes from Noma: Nordic Cuisine]

To serve:

Lightly toast the bread and spread it with butter. Top with an egg and a caramelized scallion, season with salt and pepper, and enjoy.

This initial experiment having turned out a smashing success (if a modest one), we decided to take bigger steps with Noma: Nordic Cuisine the next time around.

To be continued...

am/km

P.S. If you'd like to read an actual firsthand account of what it's like to dine at Noma (complete with a whole slew of beautiful photographs)--which just received two Michelin stars in their Main Cities of Europe 2008 guide--check out Very Good Food's in-depth report.

P.S. 2 May 4, 2008: Now The New York Times has published a review of Noma as part of a piece on New Danish Cuisine in Copenhagen. Check it out here.

* More thoughts on cuisine and le grand nord: Just two week ago I attended a conference where one of the presenters, a local poet, waxed poetic (what else, right?) about Quebec's essentially Northern spirit, about the Idea of North that lies at the heart of Québécois culture. Well, as much as I wish this were true on some level, I couldn't help but think that the same culture that declared "Mon pays c'est l'hiver" some forty years ago, has spent the last 50-60 winters focusing its collective energies and fantasies southwards, towards places like Florida and Las Vegas. And, frankly, cuisine here in la belle province oftentimes suffers from the same fixation, which is why Montreal's standout restaurants are the ones that are the most fiercely independent, the ones that recognize that not only does it pay to support local and regional producers, doing so can be a source of inspiration and a sure-fire way to put yourself on the map. Does this mean we're advocating some kind of entrenched provincialism when it comes to cuisine? Of course not, but if you're going to transpose the cuisine of northern Italy or of southwestern France on the Québécois milieu, why not transpose the strong sense of terroir that goes hand-in-hand with those traditions?

** "Whoa! White truffle oil?!? Isn't that as Mediterranean as it comes?" Not at all. Locally harvested truffles figure prominently on Noma's autumn menu. Of course, the truffle we used was Italian, but that's another matter. Those fabulous Tennessean truffles we've been hearing about haven't made their way north in the form of truffle oil yet, to our knowledge.