Cookaholics Bulletin Board

I am after a pretty high end pizza, but using home equipment. We have been making our own dough, which is pretty good. I have some sourdough starters and will try incorporating sour dough into our routine, though Filipino taste buds seem to disinclined towards it. We make our own tomato sauce, using plum tomatoes, a bit of onion, a small amount of sugar. What we have now is a fairly bright and very fresh sauce, even if it comes out of freezer. My wife quit eating pizza due to the sourness or, perhaps, age of the commercial sauces. When we made our own, her objections evaporated and pizza became one of her favorites.

So to add a bit of depth to our sauce, I just recently started adding anchovy, one small filet to a fairly large amount of sauce, maybe 24 plum tomatoes, peeled and seeded, prior to cooking. It adds an small but interesting note. Any other ideas on improving or varying tomato sauce for pizza? I considering have specific sauces for particular toppings. Maybe no anchovy and minimal cooking if it is to be a vegetarian style pizza concentrating on the flavors of cheese and vegetable toppings. A heavier or more meaty tasting sauce (a la anchovy) for meat toppings. I am thinking about using a bit of soy sauce as well. I have been haunting competition chili recipes for ideas about rounding out the flavor profiles. But I don't want to lose that brightness of a fresh made sauce.

Since fresh mozzarella is almost unobtainable here in the Philippines, I am learning to make my own. The project will start in May, as I am gathering my cheese making ingredients now. I cannot make mozzarella cheaper than the imported pizza oriented (dryer) mozzarella, but I can hopefully make it better. Or at least fresher.

The same for sausage, but that is next years project, with an eye toward pepperoni and spicy Hungarian sausages as toppings along with some good old beef hotdogs for my own consumption.

I will look at other sauce toppings for Pizza Bianca down the road, but right now I'm concentrating on tomato based pizza sauce. And hunting any ideas or suggestions about making interesting variations of it.

Tatoosh,

My pizza sauce is pretty straight forward...I like to keep it simple. I saute some garlic and red pepper flakes in a fair amount of olive oil until fragrant. I then add crushed tomatoes and cook briefly...maybe 5 minutes? At the end I add a squeeze of lemon. It really brightens the sauce up.

I like a really thin crust pizza, and use 00 Italian flour. It's marvelous, although I'm sure impossible to get in your neck of the world.

Amy

I have been meaning to try a bit of lemon too! I thought it was mainly to keep the sauce fresh. It would be added after the sauce if finished cooking? Or do you add it in while cooking?

I recently turned the family on to fresh squeezed lemonade. They usually had the powdered version if they ate at a restaurant since that seems to be all they serve here. But it wasn't a big transition for them since calamansi or kalamansi (depending on whose spelling it) is a small citrus fruit, sometimes used as an ornamental in the South, but the juice is a staple of cooking here and often mixed with sugar and water as a native remedy for cough.

We buy lemons twice a week now, about one dollar or a dollar and a quarter a kilo. Not the yellow lemons normally found in the States, but a green lemon with the same taste and acidity as the yellow variety. Sadly, they do not provide a similar flavor in terms of zest. If I need zest, I have to invest in the much more expensive yellow imported lemons.

I will give our recent tomato sauce a squirt of lemon juice, maybe a tablespoon for 250 to 350 grams of sauce?

A tablespoon for that amount may be a little much. I'd try about 1-2 teaspoons and then see how you like it. You can always add more, but you can't take away!

And, yes, I add it at the end.

Amy

Tat, perhaps it is time for the worlds first Balut pizza...

Toosh,

It is very easy to make excellent ricotta. You can add some salt and drain it to improve the flavor and texture.

1 part vinegar (5%) to 16 parts whole organic milk
Bring milk to a boil (stirring at the end), remove from heat
Add vinegar, whisk as it cools
Strain in a container with an appropriate shape for the final cheese
Gold filter, brewing filter, chinois

You may even use some cream...

Tim

Amy, I appreciate the guidance and will add the lemon juice slowly, testing as I go.

DaBullMan, I've tried balut twice. But I'm not quite as adventurous as Andrew Zimmern of "Bizarre Foods" fame or even Anthony Bourdain, who is willing to risk a bit of gastric distress in search of new flavors and culinary delights. A friend of mine is heading off to try fruit bat for the first time, which is pretty darn exotic in my book. But if people liked it, I'd try to make it, to be sure.

I just introduced my wife to anchovies. Well, I tried to introduce her to them years ago and got a resounding "No". Odd, since she loves fish. A couple of days ago, when I said I was going to try anchovy to kick up the flavor of the sauce, she went along, hesitantly. Her young sister tried a bit of the anchovy straight and liked. Then her brother, the budding student cook, did the same. With two Filipinos declaring it was "lami" (Cebuano for tasty) she gave a fillet a nibble. Instant love. She asked if they were available in the USA and I replied they were. She smiled and said, "I can live there then, even if I can't get my favorite dried fish."

Okay, enough of that, now back to the sauce. Plum tomatoes are available most of the year at varying prices here. The original recipe calls for 12 plum tomatoes, we usually do a double batch, when cooking.

12 plum tomatoes, skinned and seeded. Pureed by your favorite method: blender, stick blender, or food processor
1 white onion (varying availability so we often use one or two shallots which are almost always available)
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp garlic (fresh, minced)
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp salt
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (sometimes a bit hot so we often reduce this in consideration of our guests) But this is the basic sauce that got my wife back to eating pizza again.

Now I will be adding 1/2 anchovy fillet per recipe portion - 1 fillet to a 24 tomato "batch". We might go a bit more down the road, but I want to keep it as a background note, not something that intrudes into the flavor profile. I also have started adding 1 tbsp of fresh basil when I can find it in the market. I chop, add olive oil and freeze, for later use. And we will start out adding a tsp of lemon juice and work our way up for the right amount of brightness.


Tim, I took a whack at a whole milk ricotta, though some cheese gurus said it is really more of a panir or paneer type of cheese. Whatever name you put on it, my attempt failed utterly. Well, not utterly, but the results was not creamy and the small round curds were tough little buggers! I have some vegetable rennet now, so next month I will try a white cheese and see if I can produce a ricotta from the resulting whey (probably adding some whole milk to the process). Since I have both carabao (water buffalo) milk and cows milk available, I don't know which I will use for my initial attempts. The cows milk is a bit cheaper, but the richness of the carabao milk is very tempting.

I am researching my failure, and it was likely due to either too much vinegar or too high a heat. At 5000 feet, water boils a 203F here and my initial recipe called for a 200F or 202F target. I was using a double boiler but on an electric heater that was not quick to respond to temperature adjustments either up or down. I will approach my next attempt even more cautiously in terms of acidity and temperature.

Note: I just checked the amount of our last make of sauce. It was twice as much as I thought, starting with 2 kilo of tomatoes, we have 600 grams of sauce. We don't cook the sauce down a lot, limiting its cooking or simmering to 2 hours or a bit more. I only added 1 anchovy fillet and 1 1/2 tsp of lemon juice. Next time I will up the amounts a bit.

I probably should post this over in baking, but since I have this pizza thread going, I will add it here. I am looking at using an egg (white) wash to seal my pizza crusts that are partially blind baked. I have a home made pizza stone/thermal oven regulator constructed of local bricks. It has worked like a champ to fix my previously unstable oven (in terms of temperature). But since I have no way of knowing the actual composition of the clay, I always use parchment or a tray when cooking on it.

All that said, it has really allowed me to get a crisp bottom on the pizza crust. We blind bake our pizza crust for 4 to 5 minutes at 400F to 450F depending on how long we preheated the oven. The 400F is hour minimum temperature. The 450F seems to be about as hot as my gas oven will go. We did the pre-bake due to sogginess. When I started reading up on protecting pie crusts, one recommendation over at O'Chef's was an egg wash after the blind baking. And that seems like a good idea for my pizza crust. The theory being the egg-white based egg wash would cause a crisper top crust, just as it does on bread crusts, and simultaneously add a moisture barrier from the previously mentioned sauce.

I am hoping this will give me an even "crisper" crust and allow me to pursue, in the future, an ulterior motive, sous vide pizza delivery. Okay, I said it. Crazy, I know! But how many times have you gotten "cold pizza" or at least something between "cool" and "tepid" pizza? When I read about sous vide being used to hold entree's for up to an hour and a half without deterioration, a little bulb went off. Why not vac the pizza and stick it in a hot water beer chest, about 145 to 150 degrees and use that to take it where we want it. Upon arrival, unseal and voila! hot ... or at least pretty warm, pizza! Which would allow me to take a pretty presentable pizza to the parties and potlucks.

One concern with vacuum packing the pizza is the sauce being "drawn" into the crust like a marinade. So the whole concept may fail upon that problem. But an egg wash might help protect the crust from moisture penetration. I am not sure how a hot or even warm pizza will act in a vacuum over a period of time, say half an hour to one hour maximum. But the idea is fun to play with and if it works, Hoorah. If not, it will have been a learning experience.

I don't plan to create a full on vacuum in the pizza pouch, but to draw out air pockets as much as possible to allow for the water immersion to work at keeping the pizza nicely warm in transit. I doubt Pizza Hut or Shakey's will be adopting my approach any time soon, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will work without turning the crust to mush.

Well, I certainly wouldn't have thought about using an egg white wash on pizza crust. When I worked at the Biltmore we used to par-bake pizza crusts for room service, but we never did anything more than that. Are you heavy on the sauce?

Amy

Tatoosh,

Here's a more detailed and tested recipe for making your own ricotta, which may help:
http://fuzzychef.org/archives/Making-Yo ... -2009.html

Also, you might consider the "30 minute mozzarella". It's not always great mozzarella, but it's generally good enough for pizza, and cheap.
http://www.cheesemaking.com/howtomakemo ... heese.html

Speaking of which, you might be able to get water buffalo milk in the Phillipines, no?