Superbowl Pizza

ri100mi — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:59:00 +0000

Yesterday, before the Superbowl I cooked up a couple of pizzas that were made from scratch. I found a decent looking recipe in the Fearless Chef cookbook that seemed easy enough. I made the dough in the morning, punched it down early in the afternoon and then let it rise again right before rolling it. I almost messed up the recipe because it called for activating the yeast in a half cup of apple juice- which we did not have. I substituted 1/2 cup of water instead, but when I mixed the wet ingredients into the dry, things seemed a little odd…there wasn’t enough liquid. I went back and read over the recipe and noticed that I was supposed to add 3/4 cups of water and the 1/2 cup of apple juice. I added the additional water, but that made it too wet but another

tablespoon of flour helped that out. The recipe also calls for 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, but I substituted 1 cup of whole wheat, so that probably accounted for some of my problems as well. The sauce also came from the same book and was very simple- onion, garlic, red wine, oregano, and canned crushed tomatoes (really good sauce!). I cooked one of the pizzas in a cast iron skillet and one on a cookie sheet at 500 degrees- I was supposed to use the grill, but it ran out of gas. The skillet pizza had some of our homemade sausage on it and Naragansett Creamery mozzarella. The cookie sheet pizza featured artichokes and the mozzarella. I think the final results came out in a tie- I liked the skillet pizza and Ingrid liked the cookie sheet version. Neither came out crispy on the bottom, but were good nonetheless. The sausage tasted good, but was a little dry and grainy…so we’ll have to hone those down during the Sausage Session, Act II.

-Josh

Tagged: Pizza, Sausage

Sausage Session, Act I

ri100mi — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:18:00 +0000

…go ahead, you can have a field day with this post! …so tonight we had our first foray into making our own sausage. Ingrid had received a meat grinder attachment for her mixer a while ago and we vowed to make use of it as a sort of little new year’s resolution. Last weekend we decided that we’ll try to make some sausage…Ingrid found a recipe in the Joy of Cooking that looked feasible…the hard part was obtaining the casings. I tried a couple of places up on Atwells Street in Providence who both directed me to the supermarket. I needed some other stuff anyways, so I headed over to Eastside Marketplace in Providence and talked to the butcher. He gladly gave me some casings, gratis! Newly armed with some casings, we decided that we should first try a test batch of sausage in patty form to see how they tasted. We ground one pound of pork, one pound of veal and a little bit of pork fatback we got at the Farmer’s Market. For spices we added some sage, thyme, nutmeg and for a little more filler, some breadcrumbs. The patties cooked up nicely, but were a little dry, so for the “official” sausage run we subtracted a little breadcrumbs, added some more fatback and a little Worcestershire sauce…we’ll give you an update on how they cook up!

Grinding the meat…

Loading the casings…

Filling the casings…Ingrid had to stand on a stool to operate the plunger…

We have a lot of sausage!

Final product…two of the links burst when twisting the casings…

-Josh

Tagged: Sausage

Rhode Island 100 mile » Sausage

Superbowl Pizza

Sausage Session, Act I