Chris Hennes

This is a repeat of last night's pizza, but the dough has one more day of cold-proofing (well, and I reduced the amount of sausage and added green peppers): The crust had a great flavor, but its texture was a bit chewier than last nights (I think... obviously I am not doing a literal side-by-side comparison). I preferred last night's, by a narrow margin.

They enjoyed the flavor combination of that white clam pizza, but resented the underseasoned and overbaked crust. They've actually included a recipe for their take on the white clam pie in the books (I probably won't make that one, the other pizza eater in the house doesn't care for mollusks).

Yes, they are completely different. In MP they have six different "Neapolitan" doughs, including the "official" AVPN recipe, a high-hydration Modernist version, an "emergency" direct dough, and a poolish-based dough. And that's not counting the flavor variations, etc. that appear later in the books.

Assembly Recipe Sausage and Cheese Thin-Crust Pizza (KM p. 191) This is composed of their standard thin-crust pizza dough (today's was cold-proofed for a couple of hours then allowed to come to room temp before baking), their Thin-Crust Pizza Tomato Sauce (100% crushed tomatoes, 25% tomato puree, 1% dried oregano, 1.25% salt), low-moisture mozzarella, and Italian sausage (they provide a recipe, but I used a commercial product). Here's that sauce: I was worried that the oregano would be overwhelming at 1% (which is way more than I put in when I'm just eyeballing it, it turns out), but it wasn't offensive, it was just very present. All the ingredients prepped for two pizzas: It looked to me like it was going to be pretty low on sauce (and it is) but the proportion actually worked great on the finished pizza, so I guess one point to MP. The dough can be shaped a number of ways, I rolled mine: Sauced: Topped: In the oven at 480°F (home oven, convection) for about five minutes: It holds shape pretty well: Minimal gel layer: Let's be honest, this is a sort of hard-to-screw-up pizza. I used good ingredients, and the proportions were good, so of course it was delicious! The crust was pretty crispy, but I'm definitely looking forward both to tomorrow's (which will have an extra day of cold proofing), as well as trying the Modernist variant of this dough, which has polydextrose in it to increase the crispness.

I've started a "Cooking with" topic here.

Modernist Pizza (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) is finally here; it's time to start cooking from it (other discussion about the book can be found in this topic). Overall they say the book contains something like 1100 recipes, though I don't know how they are counting the usual Modernist-style parametric recipes and their combinatorial-ness. At any rate, it's huge. I am currently baking in a fairly standard home convection oven, with a pizza steel, so I thought I'd start with pizzas that are best baked at the temperatures that oven can reach (550°F). The very first "assembly" recipe they offer in their "Classics" chapter is for a "Thin Crust Sausage and Cheese Pizza", so that's where I'm kicking things off. The primary recipe for this dough starts with a poolish: The dough is pretty normal except for the inclusion of cornmeal at about 10%. It's mixed to full gluten formation, bench-rested for 20 minutes, then divided and balled. I'm using 200g portions to make 13-inch pizzas (smaller than the norm for this style, but all that will fit in my oven comfortably). This can be proofed at room temperature for 2-3 hours, or cold-proofed for a day. I'm doing some of each:

Quoth MB: ”Of all the pizzas we tried in New Haven, we liked Modern’s plain and mozzarella pies the best.” …so maybe not a full throated endorsement, but not so far off.

That review was pretty brutal, EMP is probably fortunate that the Times isn't doing star ratings right now: no way that describes a four star restaurant. I admit that I had planned on giving this menu a try, but I think it's off the list now. I prefer vegetables to be allowed to be vegetables, not forced into some kind of meat stand-in role.

Oh yes! Chapter 2 is a delight. Most of their ire is directed at New Haven, but Old Forge is in for a drubbing as well. I’m just finishing up that chapter now, it’s a lot of fun.

Best sentence so far: “At the end of our tour, we could conclude only that some styles are so deeply flawed that even the supposedly best-executed examples are terrible.” (vol. 1 p.113)

Yes, I did, just a quick one.

I've made the chocolate & cherry sourdough many times: it's a fan favorite at my office. I don't really treat it any differently than any other sourdough in terms of rise time, proof time, etc., and it bakes the same. Any protruding cherries and bits of chocolate do tend to burn, but actually no one has yet complained about them, I supposed they just let the bits fall off and don't eat them. You could get fancy and do a sort of "bread-in-a-shirt" thing to prevent it, but I haven't tried it.

I totally forgot I had this shipped to work!

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Surprise, surprise, my friend Loren and I are back to making chocolate chip cookies...

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I suppose it doesn't count as baking (in fact, not baking is the whole point!), but it certainly was sweet... my colleague and I just produced a video on food safety aspects of raw cookie dough: Having done three takes of that last scene, I don't really want to eat any more raw cookie dough for quite some time now!

My colleague Loren and I have started a new video series where we goof around with cookie recipes (all in the name of science, of course)... we just published one about white vs. brown sugar: Our colleagues at the branch love this series, we have been baking a TON of cookies!

It was a pawpaw pate de fruit, if I remember correctly. The combination worked very well, and the ham is spectacular.

We had the chance to dine at Bulrush last night: the meal was excellent, as usual. Earlier this week @gfron1 posted a photo of a Red Wattle country ham he’s been curing, so I was especially hoping that would be on the menu. I was not disappointed! Blue room at Angad Arts this time, completing our collection:

For me this is our fundamental difference: I cannot possibly name what I like "best". I make Neapolitan(-ish... home oven limited for now...) most often, but it's not at all uncommon for me to use other styles. I have maybe a half dozen crust recipes I alternate between. Sometimes I add stuff to the tomato sauce, sometimes not (well, almost always black papper, I suppose). I change up cheeses, I change up toppings, and I like to experiment (sometimes resulting in... disappointment). I intend to use Modernist Pizza as a framework to focus a concerted effort to become well-versed in making Pizza in the broadest sense, however they choose to define it. I have spent the last several years baking extensively from Modernist Bread. Despite having baked quite a lot of bread before it, I have learned a ton, both from things where I think they got it right, and in things I think they got wrong. I can only hope that MP does to my pizza skills what MB has done for my bread.

The PR material says this book has 1000 recipes in it (or something like that)... so I sense a LOT of practice/repetition in my future .

I suppose it goes without saying that I've preordered my copy . I own their other three cookbooks and use them all the time, particularly Modernist Bread, so I've definitely been waiting for this one.

After several years of development, Modernist Pizza is finally available for pre-order, with an October 5, 2021 release date. (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) Edit 10/1/2021 -- The "Cooking with Myhrvold's Modernist Pizza" discussion can be found here. This topic focuses on other aspects of the book.

It uses mixed units in the US: for larger quantities both grams and whatever the traditional US measurement would be (cups, pounds, etc.). And it uses simplified Chinese.