Lessons on patience, and pizza.

Regardless of how intimidated I have been with yeast, pizza dough was one of the first things I tried when I started cooking. I must have been about 17 or 18 years old, when I was either trying to impress a boy my freshman year of college or trying to prove to my mother that I could handle myself once I moved out of her roof. It just doesn't get any easier than pizza, or rather, pizza just has that quality of making amateur cooks feel welcome. How could you ever mess pizza up? The very first recipe I used was from my mom's Betty Crocker cookbook from 1979, but since then, I've gathered that pizza dough recipes are pretty standard: about a cup of warm water for a tablespoon of dry active yeast; stir in a teaspoon of sugar and a tablespoon of oil and wait about five minutes until foamy. Add about two-plus cups of all-purpose flour, teaspoon of salt, and if desired, other add-ins (ground white pepper, dried rosemary, paprika.) Mix, then knead until it forms a smooth, elastic, cohesive ball. Cover with saran wrap and a towel and let rise. Piece of cake, right?

Well, for this impatient cook over here, not really. After I leave the dough to rise for the first hour, I'm usually pretty hungry. So, I roll the dough out, place it onto a pizza tray and go to town with fixings. 20 minutes later, I'm enjoying a pretty satisfying meal.

What I've been learning lately is the superior quality, airyness and texture of a pizza dough that was let to rise for a significantly longer amount of time. If one has the will to wait, the results can be marvelous. (This lesson of patience, though it started with pizza dough, has permeated onto other facets of my life, so let's see what happens, no?)

For reasons involving this month's Communion, I am playing with pizza dough and rehearsing several versions for a flatbread dish. I took the old tried-and-true Betty Crocker recipe and a newer one from the Bon Appétit Cookbook. They were pretty much the same, except Bon Appétit asked for olive oil, instead of vegetable oil. I let both batches rise for one hour; punched dough several times, and let rise for another hour; rolled out onto pizza stone, and let rise for another hour. Though I rolled the dough pretty thin, it rose to an airy thinness, and I was delighted with my efforts to wait.

I wanted seafood based toppings, and since I had two kinds of dough rising, I decided to rehearse two visions of flatbread:

One, a sautée of fennel, red onion, shallot, garlic, parsley, with sardines and lemon zest. Over medium heat, sautée thinly sliced onions, shallots and garlic in olive oil and a 1/4 of a stick of butter. When translucent, add about half of a fennel bulb, sliced. Season with salt, pepper, a bit of dried oregano and a dash of red wine vinegar. Reduce heat to low and stir occasionally until fennel is soft.



The other, a Pissaladiére-esque slow sautée of onions, garlic, butter, thyme, rosemary with anchovies. In a 475 degree oven, place an oven-safe sautée pan with half a stick of butter until melted. Add thinly sliced onions, along with several springs of rosemary, thyme, bay leaf. Sprinkle salt and pepper, and a dash of olive oil. Return pan to the oven and stir every once in a while for about an hour. In the end, the onions are soft and translucent, but still holding their ringed shape.



The crusts were rolled out and placed onto baking surfaces to raise for an hour longer. The fennel sautée was spread onto the Betty Crocker dough. On went canned sardines with some of their oil, a sprinkle of chopped fresh parsley and some grated lemon zest. The Pissaladiére was spread onto the Bon Appétit dough along with canned anchovies. (Note to remove the stalks of thyme and rosemary before.) Both went into a 425 oven and took about the same amount of time, around 15 minutes, until the crust had a golden hint.

Let the flatbread rest when out of the oven, and sprinkle chopped thyme onto the Pissaladiére, and chopped parsley onto the sardine flatbread. Here is where my impatience took a hold of me again: Once the flatbread was out of the oven, I dug right in. I was wolfing down my first slice when I realized: shouldn't I take a picture before it's all gone?



Bad, bad cook (and photographer.) Good eater, tho.

going back to bread and back to childhood

I remember when my mother would make bread when I was growing up. She would make these "buns" (and would call them so, in all its Anglo pronunciation) that were perfect for sliders. She mostly made them of whole wheat and with lots of oat bran, but sometimes they would be sweet, glazed with butter and sprinkled with sugar, como un pan dulce.
I remember when she would make a table with the buns, ham, cheese, mayo and other fixings, inviting us to make our own snack. She was one of those mothers who, despite having a really protective streak and watchful eye, never really over-mothered us. We (my siblings and I) would not have anyone to blame but ourselves if our laundry was not done, or if we didn't have a snack at school, since she did teach us how to use the washer and would provide everything we needed to make lunch. But I digress. Back to the buns, I would make myself two or three small sandwiches, filled with jamón, tomato and mustard. When I'd unpack my lunchbox at school I noticed two things:
1- the other kids who ate sandwiches had square white bread.
1.1- the other kids eating white bread would blatantly make fun of my weird looking bun and call my family 'poor' for my mother having to bake us bread.
2- the rest of the kids' lunches were made of masa: arepas o empanadas, staples of venezuelan street-food breakfasts.
I gotta admit I felt self-conscious and conflicted because I wished I was eating either the white bread or the empanada, for either way, I would have escaped the scrutiny of my peers. But I wouldn't have wanted my mother to stop baking because I liked it when she did: my sister and I would help her roll of small pieces of dough onto a tray to let them rise and she'd let us eat the bread right out of the oven. I know now that baking was one of my mother's most intimate ways to show us her love. (Kudos to my mom for not stopping baking despite us telling her that her buns made us social outcasts.) I don't really remember when I finally got over the shame of bringing homemade bread to school, but I'm sure there is more here to unpack that merits a session with a therapist, not on a blog entry. But the two things that are clear for me here are that, one, bread has huge emotional associations for me, and two, kids are cruel.

Despite having been raised by a pretty dexterous cook and baker (my momma,) I've always felt iffy about baking because it's more of an exact science, with less room to maneuver in case of a screw-up. But in the last few months I've been playing with quick-rise breads, no yeast necessary, loads of butter, aromatic and a final consistency that dances between being bread and cake. I've played with zucchini (since i had lots leftover after making the zucchini white bean stew), banana, carrot. I've been overall pretty pleased with the results, although I have taken note of colleagues' comments on the effects of over-kneading and over-baking.

My challenge this week was a sweet, yet savory, nutty bread that we could serve with the cheese course for this week's Communion. I got this recipe off the Bon Appétit Cookbook: Walnut-Raisin bread. Despite using yeast (which made me a little nervous) it was super easy to make, and delicious: it calls for wheat and rye flour, oat bran, cocoa, toasted walnuts, raisins, butter, milk and honey. After a couple of hours for the dough to rise, it took 45 minutes in a 400 degree oven, and voilá! Soon the whole house was permeated with that baking scent, bringing me back the memories of my childhood.
After I cut two slices of the slightly black/brown bread, I took notice of that homemade feel that commercial breads will never attain. It reminded me again of those buns my mom used to make, with their dense consistency and grainy texture. I made myself a ham, tomato and mustard sandwich, like the ones I fixed myself when I was a child, and felt myself getting filled by nostalgia and regret. Nostalgia, for I missed being on the receiving end of such a loving gesture; regret, for ever having felt shame for eating a sandwich that was so good.