It's a busy time of year, and this pregnancy is hitting me hard.
I have been cooking, but only one thing interesting enough to post, and it was slightly an accident.
My friend over at bearingblog has been testing different versions of bread recipes and reporting on the results. That's what you get when a PhD engineer is also a homeschooling mom interested in frugality and sustainable living.
I hosted a pizza party for several pre-schoolers a couple of weeks ago on a Friday. In preparation, I made a batch of whole wheat pizza dough on Thursday night so that it could rise and develop slowly in the fridge for almost 24 hours. On Friday morning before work I had a momentary panic that I wouldn't have enough crust, so I made another batch with bread flour (whole wheat was gone). I mixed it in the bread machine using the usual bread machine recipe and then put it in the fridge to rest, develop, and rise. It turned out that the whole wheat crust was more than enough for the crew, so I had an entire extra crust. Motivation to eat it on Saturday was lacking, so it sat in the fridge until Sunday lunchtime.
Let me state this in no uncertain terms. Best Crust I Have Ever Made. By this point it had risen so much that I froze half and made about a 10 inch diameter pizza with the other half. When I stretched it out it stayed stretched. It baked crispy on the bottom and chewy in the middle. I was able to make it nice and thin. There was a slight sourdoughish flavor.
The problem? How often do I have enough space in the fridge to accommodate a mixing bowl full of pizza dough for more than 2 days? Not very. In winter this could be accomplished in my mudroom though even if we weren't low on food.
The moral of this rambly story? It really does help to let your dough have a nice long, cool rising time. If only I could plan that far ahead more often...
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3 comments:
I think Mark would laugh at you for indirectly calling me frugal. I might pretend to live sustainably, but deep down I'm really an epicure.
Re: no space in your fridge: Why not just put the dough in a picnic cooler with a couple of ice packs and leave that on your porch?
I think your discovery about long-rising pizza crust is one that many people have made accidentally when a planned pizza dinner fell through and the dough had to wait another 24-48 hours. I think that happened to me for the first time maybe six or seven years ago. Definitely makes a better crust, and I am not sure why I don't do it on purpose more often (because I do meal plans every week, and tend to do pizza towards the end when I start to run out of stuff, because a lot of little bits go a long way on a pizza.)
The ironic thing is that I am good about making crust at least 12 hours ahead and usually more like 24, but despite my best intentions with regards to meal planning I'm just not there with a weekly menu. Actually knowing 2+ days ahead what we will be eating in the future seems like a conceit of science fiction.
Hence our frequent bean-centric dinners because I don't want to wait for meat to defrost and didn't think to do it beforehand...
Let me know when you get fed up with no weekly meal plan, if you need to get sent to Make A Weekly Meal Plan School. Maybe 2 kids will push you over the edge. But I would expect that you would have the sort of mind that would not have difficulty doing this, once you make up your mind to do it.
My friend H. never used to make one either. She was always the type that relied on creativity and skill to figure out what to cook at 4:30 p.m. every day, a style that has seemed insane to me ever since I was a college student living alone, but which I grudgingly admired in people who were able to pull it off. But that got old for her and one day she asked me to show her how to make a meal plan. I was incredulous that someone would need to be shown this. She was incredulous that I would assume it would be easy for anyone to make a meal plan.
She was right. It took us 3 hours for me to walk her through the process of something that takes me 30 minutes per week. I could not believe it. And I had to write down a detailed step-by-step set of instructions for her to keep. Later I got it back and turned it into a blog post: Meal Planning Algorithm.But the good news is that she's been doing her meal plans every week for a few years now, and it doesn't take her any longer than it takes me. Even though she literally didn't think she'd be able to do that.
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