mikey_a

Like many things, the musk sticks of today are soft and limp compared to those available in my primary school tuckshop in the '60s. I have fond memories of rolling them between sticky palms while sucking on one end - the result: a pointy "musk pencil". Endless fun when you're six.

The "breadiness" of my dough seems to depend on how much kneading I impose on it and how thick its rolled. The method is: combine 320ml tepid Water 2 tsp dried yeast 1 tsp honey and wait 'till it froths up add it to a well in the middle of: 1lb bread flour (ours is 16% protein - a bit harder than US) 1 tsp salt add about 20ml of flavourfull olive oil mix with a dough-hook equipped device (mine's a kenwood but any'll do) until it sticks together and becomes uniform in colour/texture (~5mins). cover the bowl with cling-wrap. at this point I begin pre-heating the oven. I have 3 pizza stones, top, middle and bottom. pre-heat (non fan-forced) on my sloooow blanco takes more than 1.5 hrs so be patient. after a couple of hours your dough will be puffy and damp. divide into 3 or 4 (depending on thickness), roll out (tapered rolling pin is easiest for circles) and bung onto 3 (or 4) semolina dusted pizza trays. allow to rest/rise while you prepare the toppings. with my oven flat-out at 250C I leave the pizzas for about 5mins on their trays and then shuffle them off (with pizza peel) straight onto the pizza stone to crisp their little bottoms. 6-8 mins later they're nice and brown and ready to shovel professionally out onto a cooling rack. my favourite topping is fine-sliced potato with anchovies (torn-up) and garlic my 6yo daughter favours broccoli!!! (+cheese tomato and garlic) and mrs mikey's preference is for ham and pineapple (we're australian after all....) sideline - my friend's mother-in-law is an old italian nonna who was in the resistance during the war. she is a black-dressing, sombre person who weeps often in the course of a day. when told that australians often put pineapple on pizza she at first smiled and then broke into hitherto unseen laughter. welcome to the new-er world.

Mexicali Rose certainly used to be very good, it was the first non-TacoBill mex I'd experienced and I was very impressed. Pollo Mole was something I'd previously only read about. Chocolate and chilli with chicken - who'd have thought! We've since made it ourselves a couple of times thanks to a friend who found a place to buy bottled mole sauce (probably that spanish grocer in Fitzroy). The first experience in the kitchen was doubly memorable owing to the jar's unique "press-on" lid. I ended up wearing a considerable amount of mole after a wrestle involving a (thankfully blunt) knife. If you look carefully you can just see a brown stain up the left arm of that shirt!

We're soon to start building a new house so I'm in the process of choosing cookers and tops right now. I've used both gas and electric ovens and I'd have to say that electric works better for me - more even coverage and more stable temperature. Electric cooktops on the other hand are extremely frustrating devices. I do a fair bit of baking (bread,cakes,biscuits) and need something that'll go flat out to about 260C for pizza night. Our current rented house has a BLANCO. The oven's fine but the matching gas cooktop is lacking at the high (wokburner) end. The oven's only shortcoming is that it takes a long (30-45min) time to heat up if you're using the elements, which I do for pizza. Fan/convection for general stuff is much quicker. I'm now looking seriously at ILVE. I've used their cooktop before and the unit I'm considering is 800mm wide with an electric hotplate between 4 gas burners. The extra width really makes a difference with big pans (+wok) and the elec plate is a bonus for long-simmering. Shinboners, have a look at www.ilve.com.au (a rather slow Flash-driven site). I think the top is from the Maxi series. And pop back to Elite Appliances for a closer look at the ILVEs good luck, Michael