September 29, 2007 · 2 Comments
There’s no doubt homemade pizza dough is better than all but the most delicious pizzeria versions, but can never get everything together early enough to allow for a few hours of rising time. Luckily I have a quick-rise pizza dough recipe that needs only 10 minutes of rising time, so homemade pizza remains a weeknight dinner option. The recipe below was copied from an Eating Well magazine long, long ago (maybe ten years ago?) and is one of the dirtiest recipes in my recipe notebook–always a good sign!
Eating Well’s Quick Rise Pizza Dough
preheat oven to 500 degrees (and remember to put your pizza brick in first–I broke ours last night!)
4-4.5 c. flour
2 pkg. rapid-rise yeast
2 t. salt
1 T. sugar
2 T. olive oil
cornmeal for baking
In a large bowl combine 3 cups of the flour, yeast, salt, and sugar. Add the olive oil to 1 3/4 c. water at 125° F (warm to wrist), then stir the whole mixture into the dry ingredients. Add as much of the remaining flour as you need to make a sticky but kneadable dough, then knead for 8-10 minutes (truth be told, I rarely knead this long but I probably should!) Then let the dough rest/rise for 10 minutes.
After the dough rises I usually divide it into eight parts, but you can make them a little bigger or smaller if you want. Top with whatever you like on your pizza, then bake on cornmeal–they will puff up quite a bit, so I’d suggest going a little easy on the cheese or it goes everywhere.
My apologies to anyone who doesn’t “bake by feel” as I didn’t copy down all the specifics of the recipe and I’ve been making it so long I don’t remember how long they were supposed to bake. I just bake them until they look done (edges browning a bit, cheese totally melted) and really, they’re always good.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: recipes
September 19, 2007 · 2 Comments
I’m always on the lookout for something new and tasty at the grocery store. I’ve found a couple of things recently that are delicious enough to share! Since there are folks out there who are being paid to plug products on their blogs I feel like I need to mention that I’m totally unconnected with these products or any “buzz” or “viral” marketing companies. No one is paying me to plug these products, I just want the products I like to sell well enough that they don’t disappear!
Crema Agria from Darigold
If you’re not in the northwest you might be out of luck on this one, but Darigold is now making a Mexican-style sour cream. I like “regular” sour cream just fine, but this is extra delicious. It seems to be a little runnier and just a little bit saltier. I’ve purchased other versions of soured cream (there seem to be different versions from just about every Central American country!) at the Mexican grocery store, but this is quite a bit less expensive and they sell it at our Fred Meyer (though I didn’t see it at our Safeway). It might behave a little differently than sour cream in recipes, but it’s really good on nachos, tostadas, etc.. We’re already on our second tub.
Roasted Nut Crunch Bars from Nature Valley
These seem to be a limited release–there’s nothing about them on the Nature Valley site, and very little on teh interwebs in general. This is too bad, because they’re really good. They’re almost all nuts (and sunflower seeds) glued together with a little bit of candy–sort of like a not-too-sweet peanut brittle. I tried the peanut crunch flavor, but there’s also an almond crunch version I’ll try when they go on sale again. The peanut version’s list of ingredients includes peanuts, sunflower seeds, sugar, corn syrup, almond flour, and salt. That’s it. It would be nice if they’d drop the corn syrup, but like I said, they’re almost all nuts anyway. If you’re wondering if you can find them “in a store near you” check out the General Mills product finder.
Anyone else try something new from the grocery store lately? Good? Bad? Ugly?
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: groceries
