Behemoth

Dagnabit, I'm hungry now. You bastard, you. ← ha! well, look at it this way: you and i could just go BUY one, rather than having to approximate the experience in our home kitchens. p.s. everyone: don't think that i think what i described up there is definitive. if you have better ideas/modifications/more specific recommendations/reasons i'm wrong, have at it! Yeah, no sympathy from this end of the country. I might post a photo of all my raw meat (picked it up today.) It is a beautiful thing. Oh, we found the Wishniak soda! It is expensive but I think we are going for it. And I made one change. This isn't really a philly thing, but I decided to make Tiramisu for dessert. It is italian in any case, and I think the tastykake idea would be funnier with people who know what it's supposed to be. For these kids it is basically sheet cake with cheap ice cream , which is the same thing they get at every department function. (Plus I make a truly kick-ass tiramisu.) I'm also making the wooder ice, so not all is lost

Perfect. Thanks!

So -- what do I need to know about roasting pork to make it "Philly Style". Anybody?

I have Reinharts American Pie..is that the dough you are using? I have thought about making that one. ← No, I am using the Neopolitain dough recipe from Bread Baker's Apprentice, page 207.

I think the idea is that rolling smushes the bubbles. With a rustic dough you are usually doing everything possible to not deflate it, hence turning rather than kneading etc. The toppings cause the middle of the pizza to stay flat & relatively tender, but the bubbles that puff up along the perimeter are wonderfully flavorful, sorta crisp-chewy like good bread should be. God I love pizza. Not a big deep dish person. I may live in the midwest now, but spiritually I am a philly chick through and through (um, with some other stuff mixed in... )

vengroff -- try to hand-stretch the way PR describes next time you get a chance. The giant bubbles you get around the perimeter are the best part of the pizza IMO (and usually I am not a big fan of crusts.) Me, I want to try your l'ancienne recipe next time. I've been using PR's neopolitan pizza dough recipe so far.

In a celebratory mood, I made a "make A. happy" dinner: Burger with fontina, sweet/hot tomato chutney, red onions and mustard on whole grain bun. Real Tiramisu -- delicious but deadly. A was indeed happy. I won't need to eat for the rest of the week.

That makes sense. Do people like the French bread better than the Campagne? 'Cause I'm really liking the Campagne. I bought a bunch of wheat germ & brown rice at the health food store today. As soon as my whitebread eatin' spouse (and he's German, can you believe it?) travels in 2 weeks, I am trying out all th whole grain stuff

It is a recipe from Peter Reinhardt's Bread Baker's Apprentice. The ingredients are flour, water, salt and yeast. It is the technique that makes the difference...and also makes it damned hard to type up and PM you. If you buy one bread book in your life, make it this one. Seriously, it is life changing. (Check out the thread in Pastry and Baking to see pics -- note that 6 months ago I had never baked a loaf, ever.) edit: looking through the thread I just realized that the first time I baked out of that book was on February 15. So starting basically from zero, 2.5 months later I am doing this: Have I sold it enough?? Sorry, don't mean to show off, but I can hardly believe it myself.

I am usually very restrained (and I generaly have trouble getting through one normal sized entree) but I have some pathological inability to order a reasonable amount of food at a tapas bar. It's all little dishes, right? The solution is to drag a bunch of people with me, ones who know me well enough to know they should just sit back and let me order for the whole table. It's probably a genetic Lebanese mezza-induced thing...no one ever leaves hungry.

Wow. That is so weird it is actually impressive.

I see an new source of side income: "Hathor's Infused Oils and Housemade Botox". Did you use the green part of the fennel, or the bulb? (I have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm just curious.)

No no, also made the Ciabatta. And pizza! (See the pizza cook off thread for pics )

Oh cool, that recipe is pretty similar to what I did. I guess if you live around the mediterranean long enough the food instinct is just in the air. It seemed like such a natural substitution

You can't make this stuff up, you know. Click on "pizza" on the top row, then on "Bestseller" to see some amazing ingredients. They've changed them a bit since I was in Hamburg, but I see the "honig-senf-dill sauce" is still available. I usually politely suggest a decent imbiss lahmajun. What I particularly love is they name them after American cities that make absolutely no sense. e.g., for some reason the Arizona comes with gyros, tatziki and onion Oh, and the curry chicken & pineapple one is the "Kentucky".

Thanks! Maybe when we move to germany we can have you over for dinner The earl grey flavored chocolate sounds right up my alley. But then again, just about every meal you've ever posted has. Now I am playing cook-off catch-up: Yesterday I made a modified light version of moussaka. For late lunch today I made Margherita pizza, and even more bread. (Pics are on the cook-off pages, I won't take up any more bandwidth here.)

There was a place in philly that did a great prosciutto and egg pizza. They also did my favorite Margherita. Around here you just can't get a real pizza. Okay. I am going to bite the bullet and post my results. It's a bit of a cheat because I usually make a double batch of Peter Reinhardt dough that I keep in the freezer. These were my last two disks. Looking at the above pizzas, I think I want to try a new recipe. Reinhardt's dough has great flavor, and so far it has been my favorite, but it ends up stretching amost absurdly thin. If I want to be sure to get it off the peel intact I have to work super fast and use tons of semolina. For today I didn't feel like dealing with it, so I just used parchament paper. My oven just does not go past 500 F I figured if I did the pizzas after baking my ciabatta the stone would be nice and hot. I don't think it made much of a difference though. For toppings, I had some leftover mozzarella, plum tomatoes and a ton of basil so the decision was made for me. I often drape prosciutto over the top, but today I didn't have any. The one version I had in Germay and england that I actually liked is marinara, tuna, oil cured black olives, no cheese. Maybe I will do one of those next time. Anyway, here is today's effort: The dough. Hand stretched, it is practically translucent in some spots. It never actually tears, but I think it is maybe too thin. It is only about 10 inches across. Waiting for the Ciabatta to finish. The oven is set to 500 but it really is at 450. At least it is consistently 50 degrees off. Ciabatta out of the oven. Temp cranked up to 550. I put the toppings on as I wait: (I use Marcella Hazan's Margherita toppings recipe: plum tomatos cooked briefly in olive oil. Mozzarella and a little parm. She adds the cheese later but I've found in my oven it doesn't make much of a difference.) First one out of the oven. Scatter some basil leaves, sprinkle with olive oil and you're good to go. Bottom view. Notice how you can see the tomato through the middle. It still holds together but I really want to try a thicker verision: (Ignore the dirty-seeming thumbnail. I was peeling artichokes all weekend ) Well, that makes two cook-offs I've participated in

Yeah yeah yeah, Usually I go for the Margherita kind, but there is no way I'm posting a photo after you, man Maybe I will provide an example of a few wonderful German versions, such as, for example, tunafish with hard boiled eggs and sweet mustard sauce, chicken with sweet indian curry sauce pizza, or the ever popular ham, pineapple and corn niblets The only problem is, somone would actually have to eat the thing.

I've very late to the game here, but I tried a little experiment. I am not usually a huge fan of mousakka, I find it a little too heavy. So I gave it a Lebanese twist: instead of bechamel, I used a thickened yogurt sauce. It came out very well! Here is the smaller of the two pans, the other was still in the oven and we were getting very hungry: (No real recipe: I used ground beef in the red sauce because that's what I had. I think it would be even better with lamb.) I loved chufi's idea of doing individual eggplant halves. I went the light route and baked the eggplant cut side down on an oiled pan for about 20 minutes. The white sauce was a little sauteed garlic & parsley, yogurt thickened with an egg to keep it from curdling, topped finally with some goat cheese and a little parmesan. I was really very surprised at how well it came out Next up, pizza.

Thanks! I used the pain de campagne formula. What else would you use? L'Ancienne? Or some sort of sourdough?

A typical Lebanese snack would be to toss the drained sardines with lemon juice, a mashed garlic clove, a little salt and olive oil, and eat with pita bread. Very nice with a cold beer on a hot summer night.

I think the French version already exists.

Wow, Percy. Now I really want some oysters... Yesterday we had a little dinner party. one of the guests had her weight watchers weigh in the next day, so I tried to be accomodating: - Salumi lomo and moroccan black olives on the table with aperatifs - tomato fennel soup from the Les Halles cookbook, with epi loaves from the Bread Baker's apprentice cookbook (see below pic). - Marcella's roast chicken with lemon (well, two of them) - Braised artichokes with potatoes - Rhubarb compote with either whipped cream or lowfat yogurt - Espresso, with a square of Vahlrona dark chocolate with orange peel - We had a great wine, a 2003 Gruner Veltliner. Once we ran out of that, we cracked open some Portugese moscato which is an old favorite. Didn't take any pictures, except for the bread:

We had a small dinner party last night (in advance of the giant Philly bash next week). Made epis: Seth posted a link somewhere to a King Arthur Flour lesson on how to shape them -- i found it really useful. Do the holes on the surface of the one on the right mean the dough was overproofed? I have to say the flavor was phenomenal.

You candy field greens? Tell me more, please!