Chris Hennes

Well, now I can say that at least it is possible to make a delicious pizza with artichokes on it -- so whatever the reason it's not on menus, artichoke pizza can be excellent. I made two slightly different takes on it for dinner tonight. I started with the Serious Eats recipe for Carciofi alla romana. Then I crumbled/shredded the artichokes and the contents of the pot together (with a few samples to ensure quality, of course!). For one pizza I made a bechamel and just used the artichokes as a topping along with some feta, and for the other I made a sort of "artichoke cream" like @weinoo suggested and used that as the sauce. Here's the first: And the second (I swear it's different, but it basically looked the same after baking): They were both delicious, but I think I'd give a slight edge to the first: the bechamel is the Modernist variant, which has a really excellent texture as a pizza sauce.

That's really interesting about the lack of artichoke pizza on all those menus. I wonder why not? It just doesn't seem that outlandish to me to want to put artichokes on pizza. I mean, grilled artichokes are a thing, so it's not like there's a problem with high heat. And as you suggest, I'm making white pie, not a tomato sauce variety, so it's not a disagreement with tomatoes stopping it. Too much liquid?

I categorically reject the notion that I should only seek a "better use" for these artichokes. Maybe if they were some rare, exotic plant that might make sense, but that's not the case. I have some artichokes. I want to put them on pizza. That pot of @weinoo's certainly looks good, and I bet I could turn its contents into a pizza topping .

Nah, I have two fresh ones to use up from this week's Imperfect Foods order.

When using artichokes as a pizza topping, how do you prepare them? I haven't decided whether to make Neapolitan or grilled pizza, but it will be something that cooks hot and fast. Can I basically make Carciofi alla Romana and put it on pizza? Or should I do something else?

In today's episode: Today I got an unusual email apology -- apparently I had ordered yellow onions, and they had to substitute white. And the limes are back. And the size of baseballs:

Well, @dtremit really did get all the limes, because there were none for me this week... but I did get some stuff: The site said they had lots of leafy greens with frost damage because of the weather in TX... I don't know about any frost damage, but this is a 2600g cabbage: They had to use the larger box size for our order this week, and that thing was the culprit. Fortunately, I love cabbage.

I'm just crap at tossing pizza. I will keep practicing :).

The middle of that pizza was paper-thin (to the point of translucency), so that definitely couldn't have gone thinner. I could have stretched the edges out -- I don't usually roll, I'd guess it would be fine, but I haven't tried it.

After another day in the fridge, here's the second half of that dough: That's broccolini (brocolette? whatever we are calling it...) tossed with black pepper, red pepper flakes, and lemon zest. One of my favorites.

Yeah, for sure - I had a good six hours to work with.

Normally I am pretty good at planning ahead for pizza, but this afternoon I decided that what sounded really good for dinner tonight was... well, pizza. So no poolish, no aging, in fact no refrigeration at all: It was still pretty decent, but I do prefer the flavor of a more aged dough. Topping are just canned crushed tomatoes, chopped fresh tomatoes, and one of those vacuum-packed things of fresh mozzarella.

It's a little outside of Nashville, but Loveless Cafe is quite good -- really great biscuits.

I betcha that number's more like 99%, or even 99.9%. There is a lot of mediocre pizza in the world, even in NYC . Someone making a home pie who actually gives a damn is going to beat almost all of it, even if they don't quite hit the absolute highs of the best places.

Our Imperfect order was cancelled last week (no surprise there, everything was cancelled last week), and delayed by a day this week. But what a haul... The leeks are enormous, the greens look great (including the watercress, in those packages in the back), and check out this fractal beauty: I've never even seen romanesco in the stores here. I'm loaded on brassicas at the moment... I hear Plenty (or maybe Six Seasons...) calling my name...

The library's been closed for a few days due to the snow: today is the first day we've been open since last Saturday. There's still plenty of snow on the ground here, and it's cold by Oklahoma standards, so I made croissants and pain au chocolate for everyone who came in to work today:

And second, another take on those figure-eight Danishes, this time with an apricot filling: Still working on that icing... too stiff this time.

We're snowed in here, so once the electric company told us the danger of rolling blackouts was over for the day, I started baking. First off, cream puffs filled with vanilla ice cream (a cross between Bo Friberg's and Rose Levy Beranbaum's recipes). I barely got a photo off before they were absconded with...

I posted a little while ago looking for help forming a figure-eight danish. I hedged my bets that day and only used half the dough. Well, the danishes worked out great (thanks to everyone's help here), so the other evening I pulled the other half out of the fridge, rolled it out pretty thin, sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar, and made a kind of cinnamon-roll-esque pastry (I was going for a kouign amann sort of thing): Maybe not kouign amann, but spectacularly delicious.

It's cold here today (I mean, by Oklahoma standards... it's actually below freezing at the moment), but the refrigeration-required stuff still came in that mylar pubble pouch. Bummer. On the plus side, since I suspected that might be the case I took the opportunity to buy a bunch of refrigerated stuff, on the theory that I won't do it again for a while. So today's haul is a little unusual for me: Some mahi mahi, some chicken thighs, a package of Impossible, a couple of bagged salads, and some sort of bowl thing that you heat up (lunch for my wife, I presume). I don't know how I ended up with tomatoes (I would never order those), so I'll have to check my order to see if I accidentally left them on there, or what. The only really imperfect thing is this squash: I don't know if it was dropped, or had a run-in with someone's boot, or what, but I basically just discarded the top half (and changed dinner plans for tonight to use up the other half!). I also got a couple of other unusual-for-me items: I don't know what the heck "Purple Prairie Barley" is, but it's a grain: I can put it in bread, anyway.

One of my favorite cocktails is the Rubicon, though you'll have to drink a lot of them to use up a 5' bush!

For today's order we decided to see if they would omit the insulated packaging here during the winter, at least for items that really didn't need it. Well... no. That is two tiny bagged salads sitting on an ice pack that weighed more than they did, and all wrapped up in a bubblewrap and mylar pouch that would have been large enough for my entire order and then some. That pouch was just sitting on the bottom, under all of the non-refrigerated items: Which included a shallot that was nearly as large as the onions:

Great idea, so I stole it: I made Julia's potato leek soup for dinner last night. Thanks!

Also, makes me hungry for mole verde! I might give that recipe a go.

This week's Imperfect box: One of the heads of garlic was rotten through, and the potato is the size of a small sedan. Otherwise it all looks pretty good.