Oh, how I love carbs. I spent a recent day off wandering around town and indulging in some culinary fun, and when I tallied up my dishes at the end of the day, I realized I had eaten nothing but bagels and pizza.
It was a good day.
So when my usual Wednesday night plans got cancelled, I jumped at the chance to take the hands-on pizza-making class at Astor with Chef Emily (who led that delicious and merciful hands-on lobster class a couple months back). And it was a win, because we didn't just make pizza. We did that, and it was fantastic, but things went to a whole 'nother level when we found out we would also be making my other favorite thing in the world: cheese.
Mmmmmm, cheese.
So for most of the time I was too busy with the hands-on dough mixing/kneading/stretching and the cheese pouring/pinching/pulling to actually lay hands on my camera, but what does it matter what things looked like along the way when the finished product is so very pretty:
In addition to the thin crust (so easy, so good) we also made a few deep-dish pizzas with focaccia dough:
Delicious, delicious.
How was the cheese-making, and would I do it at home? We made ricotta from whole milk, cream, and white vinegar, and I would definitely do that again. I even have cheesecloth. Score. You heat and curdle the milk, then ladle it into a cheesecloth-lined sieve and let it drain until it firms up. Very simple. The mozzarella was definitely harder to replicate, for several reasons; we started with a block of curd from Murray's, and since they don't sell it in chunks smaller than 20 pounds, I'm unlikely to tackle that task; and the making of the cheese involved thrusting our hands into ice water to numb them, and then plunging them into near-boiling water and stretching the curds with our fingers.
(Yes, you should have seen jaws drop around the room when that step was explained.)
So we mixed our thin-crust dough and let it rise while we made cheese, cooked up tomato sauce, and sliced toppings, and while the prep was happening the dough rose plenty:
Unnecessary zoom! Also, dough-cano!
Also: yum.
And yum.
And yum.
(I should mention, also, that along with the meats-and-mozz-with-tomato-sauce traditional pies, two of those above were sweeter white pies: fig/honey/cherry/ricotta with mint, and tangerine/thyme/honey/ricotta with black pepper. Honey before baking, herbs after. Utterly delicious.)
(I should also mention that supreming a tangerine is a gigantic pain in the you-know-what if they are seedy. Seedless citrus is a whole lot easier on your knife and your nerves. But it can be done, to very tasty effect.)
And mom picking beans at our Ohio home and the two of us sitting around the kitchen table stringing them up for the winter. I don't remember how they taste but I remember the good times associated with them.
Posted by: viagra online | December 07, 2010 at 09:22 PM