The Omnivorous Fish

Do vegetarian moms pour cans of black bean soup all over everything?

At long last and after much conjecture, I am here to tell you that I am moving to the Bay Area.

Sorry, Seattle, you’re too far from work, a little too dark and rainy and P would probably end up working at Tully’s.

And I have to admit that even though Los Angeles makes me want to stab myself in the eye somtimes, I feel very much a Californian these days.

So I’m headed to the city by the bay this weekend. I’m looking up some old friends and acquaintances, and hope to meet some new ones. I’ll be analyzing cities, neighborhoods and restaurants, and sniffing around the food microcosms I know are all over the place up there.

If anybody wants to have coffee or has a recommendation, as always, click “contact me” at the top of the page.

Listening: Whatever hipster music is playing here at Groundworks Coffee in Hollywood. They played “Fade Into You” earlier; very nostalgic.

Last time in the world of pizza, we talked about crust, what we want from the crust and how to make dough. Today, let’s talk about shaping the dough.

You’ve all seen the pizzaiolo (pizza guy) tossing pies in the air. There are hundreds of ways to shape pizza, some very showy, some not. They all have advantages and disadvantages, to home use and to commercial use. As usual, I will try to provide you with enough information for you to make a decision on your own.

Before we get too far into shaping, though, I want to talk a minute about the Tools of the Trade. As always, you don’t need much besides your hands and a stove to make decent food, but there are some things that I really need to stress are important to the making of great pizza. The one thing that will have the greatest effect on the overall taste and texture of your pie is without a doubt some kind of stone on which to bake it. There are pizza or bread stones available in cookware shops that yield good results, but they are often expensive and prone to breakage and usually too small to do much on. Commercial pizza ovens have a kind of composite ceramic material and if you go to a used restaurant supply house, you may be able to get a broken piece of “oven floor” that will fit in your oven, or can be cut (or smashed) to fit. Old school wood-fired ovens have soapstone floors, I am told, but I’ve never worked on one. Another inexpensive alternative is unglazed quarry tiles, which Home Depot used to carry (and may still, but I switched to Lowe’s, who definitely does not carry them) but you can get at any tile shop for about 20 cents apiece. Bread ovens are often made of firebrick, which is the material the interior of fireplaces are made of, and you can buy enough firebrick to line your oven for about $10 at any block yard.

Whatever you use, you’ll want to put your oven rack on the lowest position and cover it with whatever stone medium you choose. If you use tiles, cover as much of the rack as you like, but leave yourself a couple of inches around the perimeter of the stone to allow air to circulate around it. You’ll want to preheat your stone for at least an hour before trying to bake on it. At home, you will probably just want to set your oven to the highest setting it will allow. My oven goes to 550 and produces decent results, but higher would be better. Commercial American ovens are usually run around 600-650, sometimes higher depending on the style of pie. Wood-fired dome ovens are usually kept at ambient temperatures of about 800 degrees, though the floor remains much cooler.

You will often see recipes telling you to bake at a more conservative 450 or even 400, but this won’t create a blisteringly hot surface to crisp up your crust properly, and will necessitate too much time in the oven, making sauce, dough and, especially, cheese very unhappy.

The other piece of equipment I’d encourage you to invest in is a small peel, which is the flat shovel you use to slide the pies on and off the stone. Aluminum ones are easier to care for, and perhaps to use to a novice. They don’t perform as well as wood, but you can get into trouble more easily with wood as I’ll explain later. You can find a cheap, generic peel at any restaurant supply for about twenty bucks, or you could get one here. You can use a cookie sheet as a peel as well, or even an upside-down jelly-roll pan, but the operation of raw pie to stone will never be easier than with a peel.

Shaping a pie

No, we do not start out tossing the dough in the air, cool your jets. A pizza at home, a nice 10-12” pie should come from a piece of dough that’s around 6-7 ounces. If you’re metric, this would be about 200g. The previous post tells you how to get the dough ready. After its 24 hours in the fridge, here’s how to proceed.

Handle it carefully. You will deflate it eventually, but you want it to happen evenly. Dunk the dough in bench flour on each side, and tap it gently in the air to dust off excess.

Working on a smooth surface (like marble or formica), dimple the dough evenly with your fingertips all over, but avoid the very center. You generally avoid pushing the center because as the circular movements happen, then center of the dough gets stretched whether you press on it or not. Press on it from the beginning, and the dough becomes unevenly thin in the center.

At this point, you could punt with a rolling pin, and pinch up the sides a little to make an edge to your crust. But if you want to go pro…

Some people- in italy and here- will continue to pat with their fingers and stretch at the sides until the dough has reached the desired diameter. Some people “scratch” pies. This means placing your hands flat on the dough, side by side in a quasi pyramid shape. Holding one hand still (your left if you’re right-handed), gently providing a grip on the dough, move the other hand away and ever-so-slightly down, stretching that quadrant of dough. If you move your scratching hand in a continuous circular motion, you will be able to rotate the dough between stretching by lifting your static hand and lowering it again when you’ve rotated the dough sufficiently.

That’s a terrible description, but that’s all I got. I promise there will be photos and videos soon, we just need to migrate out of this drupal wilderness.

After a revolution or two of scratching, lay the dough over one hand on the counter. Make a fist, but then hinge your fingers slightly forward again. That’s how you want to have both hands for the next step. Lift the dough up off the counter with your not-quite-fists and gently stretch it by moving your fists apart. Almost simultaneously, spin the dough slightly across your hands so you’re turning and stretching in a continuous motion. Be mindful of places where the dough is thicker or thinner. Even is important.

This is the point at which you would throw the dough in the air, allowing centrifugal force to stretch the pie for you.

Now you’re headed for the peel, and I could write a whole article on the topic of what to put on the peel. Some people say there absolutely must be cornmeal on the peel. Some people say whole wheat flour. Some people say as little as possible, and I agree with them. When I’m eating pizza, I don’t like my tongue encountering a bunch of foreign nibs along the bottom. At the same time, too much flour and you will be eating raw flour on the surface of your pizza - also not enjoyable.

Here’s the issue, though. The moment the sauce goes on the pizza, the pizza wants to stick to the peel. The best way to avoid this is to work quickly, which isn’t much comfort when you’re new at something. There is a trick, though, to come in a minute.

So, just as a safety, put your peel or cookie sheet on top of your pizza stone and make sure that you’ll be able to fit your pizza on it. If the stone is smaller, take a pencil and just scratch some reference lines on it.

Next, lightly dust your peel with flour and arrange the dough over it. Put about a half a cup of sauce - ish, judge as you go - and starting from the center gently press a ladle or the bowl of a deep spoon to the top of the dough and swirl a vortex out to the sides of the pie creating an even layer of sauce.

Quickly scatter the cheese over the pie, though not too much, you should still be able to see sauce, and then tear a few basil leaves over the top. There’s your margherita.

Now take the handle of the peel and gently flick it to one side or the other. Ideally, the peel will move but the pie will stay more or less still. If it doesn’t, here’s what to do: get your face up close to the pie, pick up one edge just slightly, and blow air underneath it. A giant, crazy air bubble will move around between the dough and the peel. Once it’s traveled around, pick up an edge to dispel it, and you’re ready for the oven. (You can accomplish the same thing by lifting one edge of the pie somewhat high and quickly flicking it back down, but it’s not as easy.)

Place the edge of the peel on the far corner of your stone. Very gently begin shaking the peel back and forth, walking the dough off of the peel and onto the stone. Go slowly and forgive yourself if your first pie bunches up here or there. Once it’s on the stone, it’s there, so don’t try to adjust it. That stone is hot and you will burn yourself.

Once you’ve got it in, get the oven door closed ASAP- you’re losing heat. After six minutes, take a peek. If you’re not browning evenly, reach in with the peel and spin her around. If it looks even, leave it, until the top of the pie is golden and the bottom is well browned.

Give yourself a few minutes between pies, since the stone will need some time to heat up. All in all, in a home oven at 550, I’d plan on 8-10 minutes for your pie. I guess next time we’ll have to cover sauce.

Listening: The birds. The movers come tomorrow, so I’m enjoying it while I can.

Chat excerpt between Secret Agent Gnocchi and Dr Ravioli:

G: are you busy that weekend, Joe can come up to visit
R: that would be great to have Joe up, I don’t have anything planned
G: cool I’ll let him know
R: I don’t remember him cooking last time he was here
G: sweetie we can’t force our friends to cook for us every time they visit
R: maniacal laughter yea, but can we force them to cook at least every other time?

This is too much. The Mid America CropLife Association- a lobby group for GMO producers among other things; the worst kind, in other words- sent this around last week:

Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to have an “organic” garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the Obama’s[sic] and their guests. While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder. As a result, we sent a letter encouraging them to consider using crop protection products and to recognize the importance of agriculture to the entire U.S. economy.

So here’s the deal, people, you know how this works. Here’s the online petition:

Um, click here.

And if you’d be so kind, please click here and email the first lady, letting her know that she’s a rockstar and we love not only the garden, but her finger in the eye of agribusiness.

Listening: “The Psychic” The Crash Test Dummies God Shuffled His Feet

I just realized that facebook has been getting better info than you guys. The photos will remain there for the time being, but anyone can view them, whether you’re on facebook or not.

But here’s the roundup for today:

Ravioli

At 9AM I had a kilo of flour on the counter and 600g of eggs. I’m all metric since I have been working with my buddy Anna, who doesn’t know a pound from a… a… cubit, I dunno, she only knows metric, so I can adapt. I had big USDA jumbo eggs, which weigh just over 2 oz (60g), so there were probably about ten of them, though USDA large eggs would be more like 12, since they normally weigh in at 1.75oz (50g). All this is out of the shell, btw. I just lost some respect for a very highly regarded cookbook when I realized today that all its recipes listed “whole eggs” and the weights were for shell-on eggs. Stupid…

Note that I am referring to the sizes as “USDA Large” or whatever. There is a reason. Their size is legally graded into Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large and Jumbo, and although their size has nothing to do with quality, you should be aware that these sizes mean something specific. If you make a cake with large eggs that called for jumbo, as some do, you may not be happy with the results.

Anyway, once the pasta was all kneaded up (which hurt since I kind of overdid my workout yesterday), I had the filling ingredients all laid out, so I mixed up the filling. Speaking of kneading, I think the problems some of you have been emailing me about have come from under-kneading. When in doubt, keep kneading. I may grow to regret this statement, but I would say it is nearly impossible to over-knead by hand. Someday I will post a more comprehensive Pasta Opus than what is already here.

Back to the filling. For once, I even wrote down what I put in it:

4 cups shucked AND peeled favas (this is from ten pounds of whole favas)
2 lbs Ricotta, pref sheep’s milk
1 cup Pecorino Romano (or sardo), grated
1 cup Parmiggiano Reggiano (or Grana Padano), grated
1-2 tbsn Chopped fresh mint
To taste Salt, Black Pepper and Nutmeg
3 jumbo eggs
1 or 2 jumbo egg yolks

(I know it seems weird that I can’t tell you exactly how many eggs I used, but I was in the zone and had to pick through the compost to guess how many, either way won’t hurt it.)

This amount of filling and pasta will easily make 120 ravioli. And let me tell you, the pastry bag (or the freezer bag with the corner snipped off) is the way to go. I just saw that at a restaurant a few weeks ago and decided to try it… it even beats the 1 tablespoon ice cream scoop.

Bread

I’m making a Sicilian bread called mafalda, which is made from white flour and semolina flour, and it is the dough for the famous “Eyes of St Lucy” bread. In case you sat that religion class out, St Lucy is the patron saint of the eyes, and of Siracusa, Sicily. When she refused to marry a pagan that her parents had arranged for her to wed, he outed her as a Christian to the romans. When the local magistrate bade her to offer a sacrifice to the emperor, she basically flipped him off- in a very christlike way- and she was sentenced to work in a brothel. As if this wasn’t enough, when they came to get her, they stabbed her in the throat and drug her through the town with a team of oxen, before finally gouging out the eyes of a fifteen year old girl.

Oh, it gets better. Christian iconographers of the time then decided to depict her carrying her eyes before her on a plate, which led to the famous spiraled bread, the eyes of St Lucy, the most morbid bread ever conceived. (Pictures to come.)

There’s also a long tradition of sweet-and-savory in Sicilian cooking, including in bread, and perking away in the fridge is a biga for black pepper rolls…mmmmmmmm.

OK, I’m exhausted, more to come.

Listening: “This Is Hip” Johnny Lee Hooker, from some compilation, but a great track.

Stop the presses for this headline in the NY Times today:

U.S. Food Safety No Longer Improving

Holy crap, I’m amazed.

You can read Captain Obvious’s assessment yourself, but my favorite moment was when

Dr. Tim Jones, state epidemiologist in Tennessee, said that many of the easy improvements in the nation’s food-safety system had been made.
“You can only tell people so much to wash their cutting boards and wash their hands,” Dr. Jones said. “I think we’re running out of things to do to make dramatic improvements.”

As if that’s the problem. How about not processing 40% of anything in one place? So that way, when the company succumbs to profit over civic duty- with a healthy dose of help from the USDA- not everybody in the world has to stop eating pistachios (or peanuts or tomatoes or spinach)?

Listening: Depeche Mode “Personal Jesus” Violator
That’s how I roll.

Since Drupal hates me and I can’t upload photos, I’ll let facebook deal with it.

Here’s some photos of the pregame, courtesy of Santa Monica farmer’s market.

Easter 2009 is just around the corner, and with vendors lined up, we move forward with the menu as follows (not much has changed):

Pani Pasquali
Easter Breads and Pies

This year, our guest of honor is making Casatiello, a traditional Neapolitan savory bread. I am making a Triccia ai Racine Secche, a braided egg bread that straddles sweet and salty, like so much Sicilian food. And a Pizza Chena, or “Ham Pie” in the cilentano style, with fresh basket cheese and smoked ham. Plus, time permitting, I will make Mrs La Puma’s pepper and anise seed rolls… mmmmmmmmmmm.

Ravioli di Fave
Fava Ravioli with Sheep’s Milk Ricotta

A little departure from the Sicilian method here to something a little more mainstream, but sheep’s milk ricotta is really something else.

Gamba D’agnello Cacio e Uova
Leg of Lamb with Eggs and Cheese

Just like we had last year. Good, but no goat.

Pastiera Napoletana
Neapolitan Easter Grain Pie

Again, from Anna, who will show me what-for in the grain pie department.

Granita di Limone
Eureka Lemon Granita

But what lemons… thank you Robin!

Agnellini Pasquali
Marzipan Easter Lambs

On the fence about this, but I’m going to take a stab at a couple of simple ones. Work my way up to making my own plaster molds…

Today I was up in Sicily-like Simi Valley, visiting Robin and Terry and Stella and Lola and Frodo. Relax, Frodo is a chao-corgi mix. Lola is a very stately older retriever mix and Stella is my doll: a bright, peppy young Blue Heeler. (Robin and Terry are Homo Sapiens.)

We dug around in the garden for a while looking for dinner. Since we decided on making Swiss chard ravioli, we had to dig up the makings of caponata, so we had something to snack on.

But the boogie prize goes to the six and a half pounds of gorgeous favas that we thinned out of Robin’s winter cover crop. A close second are the bowls full of softball-sized lemons and red, succulent morri, Sicilian blood oranges.

Robin’s garden is a little bit mad scientist, with rows this way and that, but also patches of this here and a thatch of that there, making it nearly impossible to step anywhere without killing a seedling, but coming up with a beautiful, biodiverse garden that is the envy of… well, of me, at least.

One step closer to fava ravioli…