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Chris Hennes

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Everything posted by Chris Hennes

  1. With the artisan crust I'm leaving a deliberate rim that's about 1/2" of uncompressed dough: I sauce up to that (with the occasional sloppy spoon work resulting in the getting on the rim in a few places). When it rises, the untouched part of the rim expands to the outer edge of the pizza, pulling some of the sauced portion up with it as it puffs up.
  2. Last time I made the Barbecue Chicken pizza, I used the Brazilian thin crust. This time I went for the artisan crust: Other changes: I made a lightly-smoked rotisserie chicken instead of cooking it sous vide, I used shallots instead of red onions (I'm out of red onions), and I left off the cilantro (because I'm lazy). I think actually that pickled red onions would be great here, added after baking. And I could have applied even more smoke to the chicken, it's still getting a little lost in the sauce.
  3. Direct Artisan Crust, Aged One Day One of my best pizzas to date -- this is getting pretty close to optimal flavor and texture for this style of pizza, in my opinion. No Modernist innovations, just the Direct Artisan dough with a one day cold proof. Baked convection at 480°F for six minutes on a pizza steel that had been preheated for an hour.
  4. Amatriciana Sauce (KM p. 113) This is a straightforward variation on their "New York/Artisan Pizza Tomato Sauce" -- you just add sauteed guanciale (or pancetta, or bacon) at the first step, the proceed as normal. I really love the base sauce, so no surprise that I also loved this one. It's intensely-flavored, I think they are right to suggest using it to make a cheese pizza, since most toppings won't stand up to it. The sauce was excellent with pizza cheese on a Direct Artisan crust.
  5. Since I was making bread today I took the opportunity afforded by the hot oven to properly re-heat my leftover al taglio pizza from yesterday, and adjust the topping to be more to my taste. I added significantly more of the thickened jus sauce (just drizzled over before baking), and also added more of the arugula and green goddess topping. While I did enjoy yesterday's entry, this one's proportions were better, IMO (I also like the crispy edge bits you get when you reheat single slices...).
  6. Rotisserie Chicken Pizza (KM p. 317) I normally stay out of the pizza taxonomy battle: if you want to call a thing "pizza", go to town. But I do maintain a sort of internal "is this pizza?" rating scale, and I have to say, this "pizza" does not meet my criteria. This is an open-faced chicken sandwich. It tastes pretty good, and has some nice touches, but in my book this isn't a pizza. I'll let you all decide for yourselves, given the following specs: This is a thick crust, Al Taglio pizza There is 40g of cheese for a 12"x16" pizza (the normal amount in MP is 200g) There is 50g of thickened chicken jus (a.k.a. gravy) as pizza sauce, 100% of which is applied by tossing the chicken in it (the normal amount is 300g) Post-baking the pizza is topped with a salad (it's supposed to be frisee dressed in Green Goddess dressing, but I couldn't get frisee so I used arugula) Here's what that amount of cheese looks like on the crust: And here is the pizza after baking, but before the salad is applied: Finally, here's a finished slice (that's crispy chicken skin on top, which was a nice touch): I'm not arguing that it was bad tasting: I think it needed more gravy sauce, but was otherwise a pretty good open-faced chicken sandwich.
  7. OK, last go at the pressure-caramelized rye inclusion. The dough is now three days old, normally the point at which I've gone too far, and it's started to get worse, not better. But not today! This was actually far and away the best of the three rye-inclusion pizzas. Part of that was the added age, which flavor-wise really worked well with the inclusion. But part of it was that this time I really did make a simpler pizza: basically just a pizza marinara, with a few extra dollops of ricotta (but not that much, it was still mostly marinara). For the sauce I used an heirloom tomato sent through a food mill on the largest holes, seasoned with 1% salt (in the book this is the "Raw Tomato Sauce"). Some sliced garlic, a spiral of olive oil, and into a hotter oven, cranked all the way up to 550°F. I normally don't go that high for artisan crust, I don't like how quickly the cheese browns. But of course in this case I didn't have to worry about it, I could focus entirely on ensuring the crust got to the doneness I prefer. That more than anything was probably the secret to tonight's success. The flavor and texture of the crust were excellent, and worked well with the sauce, which was flavorful but still left room for the crust to be a real part of the equation. So once again, bad scientist! ... I changed too many variables... but the pizza was very good.
  8. Take two on the pressure caramelized rye berry inclusion: this time being more patient, and more gentle. This gave me a significantly puffier rim, and a much better showcase for the inclusion. It's still not an inclusion I'll try again, but really only because in pizza form an inclusion like this is really lost unless you have a huge puffy rim, and I don't always, or even usually, want a rim quite that large. Maybe in a thick crust pizza it would make better sense. I know I said I'd make a simpler pizza to showcase the flavor... I lied. Along with the rye berries, I had also pressure caramelized several other things (may as well fill up the pressure cooker), including brussels sprouts. So tonight's pizza was a white pizza with ricotta and pizza cheese, topped with pressure-caramelized brussels sprouts. Which are delicious.
  9. Artisan Dough with Pressure-Caramelized Rye Berries Continuing on with randomly-selected inclusions, tonight I made the Modernist Artisan dough and added my favorite inclusion from Modernist Bread: pressure-caramelized rye berries. I omitted the olive oil from the dough, since the rye is cooked with a significant quantity of butter and I figured that was enough fat to cover it. The whole rye berries made the dough quite a bit more difficult to work with, since they decreased the integrity of the dough during stretching. In bread this is a non-issue, but in a medium-crust pizza like this it required more care than usual to avoid tearing the dough. Pizza also has enough textural variation already that the pop of the rye berries got a bit lost: you had the flavor, but not really the texture. I'll give it another go tomorrow night and see if I can do a simpler pizza (tonight's had the raw cherry tomato sauce, pizza cheese, and roasted red bell peppers).
  10. Compleat Wheat New York Square Again playing around with inclusions. This is based on their "compleat wheat" method from Modernist Bread, where you reconstruct a "whole wheat" flour by adding in the correct ratios of wheat germ and wheat bran to white flour: the advantage being that you can toast the germ and bran, and then soak them in water, while meanwhile mixing a white flour dough to medium gluten formation. You add the bran and germ as an inclusion into the dough at that point and basically have the texture of a white bread, with the flavor of whole wheat. Actually, better than most whole wheat I've had, since the bran is toasted. The pizza is otherwise pretty normal, and everything worked well: I enjoyed the additional flavor in the crust here. I wouldn't want it all the time, but as an occasional change I think it's a winner.
  11. Waffle Pizza Yes, really... this is a real recipe from Modernist Pizza. It's basically a Detroit-style pizza, baked in a waffle iron. The texture was not my favorite, I thought it had too much chew, but it was delicious.
  12. Tonight's pizza was a naturally-leavened Modernist Artisan dough -- you just replace the poolish with levain and omit the yeast. It worked well, but I think I prefer the commercial yeast version.
  13. OK - poppy seeds and brussels sprouts is not a particularly great combination.
  14. Tonight I started playing around with dough inclusions. I'm not sure these will ever be a good fit in the thinner crust styles, so I started with the standard New York Square, and added white and black sesame seeds and poppy seeds. Toppings are the Quick New York sauce, pizza cheese, brussels sprouts, and Roth blue cheese.
  15. For the really high hydration doughs I use high speed. It looks insane, but I find that anything lower and it just sort of stretches the dough around a bit and it never balls up.
  16. Modernist New York crust, back to the original scaling (because I wanted a thicker crust today), topped with whatever I had in the fridge. In this case, brussels sprouts, roast pork, and padron peppers.
  17. Modernist Hawaiian Pizza (KM p. 313) Obviously if you are morally opposed to pineapple on pizza this isn't one for you. That said, while Hawaiian is not my favorite pizza, I'll eat it if you put it in front of me, and this is far and away the best Hawaiian pizza I've had. First, it calls for fresh pineapple, and has you grill it, which is far superior to the canned variety. Second, the 14" pizza only has 40g of pineapple on it, so it's not dumped on in huge quantities. Third, instead of ham or Canadian bacon, the recipe calls for a braised banana-leaf-wrapped pork shoulder. I cheated there and cooked mine sous vide, but I used a Red Wattle shoulder from Heritage Foods, which is spectacular. Which is good, because there is a LOT of pork shoulder on the pizza: 120g. Last, the NY-style dough subs half the water with pineapple juice. In a crust as thin as this one it is a pretty subtle effect, but I was surprised to find that it worked. I admit that I am almost shocked to say that I will probably make this again.
  18. One in Ten is Spicy Pizza (KM p. 327) The name is in reference to the Padrón peppers, which are mostly mild, but occasionally fairly spicy. One in ten was about the ratio that I encountered on this pizza, so that much is reasonable. The pizza itself is a thin crust topped with garlic confit aioli, pizza cheese, blistered peppers, almonds, and manchego curls. Yes: aioli as a pizza sauce. And not some ultra stable Modernist variant, just plain aioli. Unsurprisingly, what you end up with is a pool of olive oil, since the sauce breaks about ten seconds after it hits the oven. For the first pizza I was diligent and used the exact quantity of sauce the recipe calls for. That was crazy. So for the second I just gave the crust a very thin skim coat. Really, I don't know the point, I could have just brushed it with olive oil and garlic confit. So while the flavors all worked and taste-wise it was pretty good, the very, very oily texture was a big problem.
  19. LloydPans 16x12 (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)
  20. Modernist high-hydration al taglio dough with poolish Their normal al taglio dough uses levain as a flavoring agent: this variant replaces the levain with poolish, but is otherwise identical. It's a nicely textured thick-crust pizza that I served with crushed cherry tomato sauce and buffalo-milk mozzarella. Not as good as the levain version, but still a good dough.
  21. Bolognese Pizza (Take Two) Well, now I feel doubly bad about the meatball incident. This pizza was really quite delicious! I used the direct high-hydration al taglio dough, and baked it with a pretty thick layer of bolognese on top. As I found out with previous attempts at this type of dough, their recommended bake times for a home convection oven are bonkers. I baked for 11 minutes at 480°F (rather than the 20 the recipe calls for), and got this: I let it cool, then hit it with just a bit of cheese and some red pepper flakes, and reheated per the book's instructions (3 minutes): Bolognese is an unconventional pizza sauce, but all told I was very happy with the result. It lacks the brightness of the less-cooked tomato sauces, but makes up for it with a serious umami punch from the combination of the pork and the powdered mushrooms. On a frigid winter evening this hearty pizza hit all the right notes.
  22. Bolognese Pizza (KM. p. 274) Another one that's not really a full recipe, just an idea for a sauce and topping combination. Its failure was entirely my fault, due to shear laziness. I used commercial meatballs. Bad cook! BAD! I don't remember the brand, something that Imperfect Foods has a lot of the time so they were an easy option. But they weren't really meatballs, they were really Italian sausage, left uncased and rolled into balls. The texture and flavor were wrong, I didn't care for them in this application. I did make the bolognese sauce per the recipe in the book, and though it's got much more tomato that my normal bolognese, it was still delicious (in fact, I've served it on pasta the past two nights). The cheese is pizza cheese, and I put this on the Direct New York Square crust, which is fine, but not my favorite.
  23. Pizza Rossa (Take Two) OK, I made two changes (bad scientist!) First, instead of microplaning the parmesan, I shredded it much more coarsely (not shaved, still shredded): this made the pizza much easier to manage. Second, instead of the artisan crust I used a Neapolitan crust: the one I've been the happiest with is the most basic, not the high hydration, or Modernist variants. And of course I then baked it in the Ooni: Finished pie: I was happy with the way the crust turned out, both flavor- and texture-wise, it was better than the anemic crust on the previous artisan pie: I probably let the cheese brown a little more, but the combination of the larger shreds, and the fundamentally different thermodynamics of the Ooni results in what I felt was a properly cooked crust and properly cooked cheese. However... I did not find these changes to result in a transformation into something that I would rave about. I enjoyed it, but I'm not going to start waxing rhapsodical about it, and I was still totally done with it after three slices. It therefore remains true so far that I prefer pizza with sauce on it. To each their own. Fortunately, I always make two pizzas when I'm making Neapolitan, so the situation was easily remedied: The sauce is hand-crushed grape tomatoes, 1% salt, and a splash of olive oil, topped with air-dried fresh mozzarella. Not exactly my roundest pizza 🤷‍♂️
  24. That's what I did, which made the pizza very hard to work with: the fluffy parm did NOT want to stay on the pizza during loading! I actually had to assemble it twice 🙄...the cheese went everywhere the first time.
  25. Direct Focaccia I'm always a little suspicious of direct dough: I know many of you are enamored of it, but I always find the flavor somewhat lackluster. But, I was traveling all weekend and when I got home I looked at the state of the fridge, and the trumpet mushrooms in it, and decided I needed to do something with them. So I made the direct variant of the MP Focaccia. Putting sauteed trumpet and shiitake mushrooms on there is a little like cheating though: of course it was delicious!! Actually, I underbaked the dough a bit here. I figured it would have the same problems I found with their NY Square and Detroit doughs, so I pulled it well ahead of schedule, and that turned out to be a mistake. Toppings here are sea salt, rosemary, sauteed mushrooms (a la Dave Arnold), and Asiago cheese. No real rhyme or reason, that's just what was in the fridge.
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