Chris Hennes

This one is straight out of Reinhart's American Pie: in the section he calls "Third-generation Neo-Neapolitan Pizza" he has a recipe for Onion Marmalade, Walnuts, and Blue Cheese pizza. I was a bit worried that the onions would be too sweet, but actually it ended up well-balanced, and quite delicious. This is the Bayley Hazen blue again, and I toasted the walnuts separately since this is a grilled pizza and the toppings don't get a lot of heat once they are on the pie.

Just dropping in to second this recipe recommendation -- I've brought many scones into work and this recipe gets the best reviews by far. It's a bit of a different technique for incorporating the berries, but it works really well.

So you're saying I should come twice?

Still making grilled pizza, and probably will be for a few months now: I think I've got the "grilled" part dialed in pretty well now, so I'm back to mucking around with the toppings. Normally when I am putting blue cheese on pizza I use Gorgonzola, but for tonight's I used Bayley Hazen. Wow. It's an amazing cheese no matter how it's served, and on pizza (accompanied by kalamata olives and toasted walnuts) it was fantastic. I put it on last, so it was probably on the heat for about a minute, which was perfect. It was just melting, but didn't disappear into the crust the way that sometimes blue cheese can if you give it too much time.

No, I really mean it: I'm happy to wave from across the room. I have to work with the public in my day job, I am sticking to a my-household-only social distancing scheme outside of that, and it doesn't look like that's going to be ending anytime soon, if the last couple days' numbers are any indicator. Regarding the price, I hadn't heard anything about the beverage pairing changing, but especially under the circumstances I'm happy to pay whatever Rob needs to charge to keep paying the bills.

Well, it sounds like Rob has managed to get Bulrush back open, but only for very limited seatings. I'm still game for a "gathering" of sorts (I'm happy to wave at y'all from across the room, anyway), though I think at this point this has turned into a road trip, since I'm not anticipating doing anymore flying this year. @Alex have you talked to Rob about our getting seats on that day under his new seating scheme?

Tonight's toppings are a medley of the contents of my fridge. I had a bunch of little Pyrex bowls of leftovers from the week: olives, capers, and tomatoes. Plus rosemary from the monster in my front yard, and ricotta. The sauce is crushed tomatoes, Dubonnet Rouge, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, dried oregano, and olive oil. This was cooked for 90 seconds on the first side over high heat, then turned onto the low heat side and cooked for four more minutes. It was probably slightly overdone for my preference, but still quite good. The texture was excellent.

Until this year I'd never made an actual grilled pizza, just pan pizza cooked on the grill. But right now I'm working on my actual grilled pizza technique, and tonight's result was the best so far (I mean, you'd hope I was actually getting better at it, but alas that is not always the case!). I'm using the Modernist Bread recipe for Modernist Neapolitan Pizza Dough, and cooking on a two-level fire. I like a bit of char on the crust, but it's easy to overdo it, so that's where my focus is right now. I didn't time it, but I think this was probably about 90 seconds on the high heat side, and then flipped over onto the low heat and topped, and cooked for maybe 3-4 minutes longer. The crust was exactly what I wanted: crisp in the middle and pillowy-soft at the edges, with well-developed flavor and enough structure to hold together despite a liberal hand with the tomato sauce.

Back to actual normal-person grilled pizza now. This one turned out better than my last: the crust was nice and crispy, with a bit of charring but not overkill.

I got my copy a week ago or so, and my spores are here (I went with the ones they sell at Modernist Pantry)... now I just have to decide where to start. I guess a long-grain rice koji to start, and then turn it into Amazake as the next step? That seems like a reasonable starting place to me.

Actually, none of my recipes for cornbread call for resting the batter after the baking powder has been hydrated, so I'm only guessing here that it's a shortcut to skip the step of making a corn mush. My collection is by no means exhaustive, but I checked CIA's Professional Chef, Stitt's Southern Table, Joy of Cooking, Hensperger's The Bread Bible, the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion, and Cook's Illustrated's Cookbook. So apparently you and I don't share any cornbread recipes in common!

Another grilled pizza, though this time in a pan - a pizza inspired by Reinhart's Perfect Pan Pizza book, with mozzarella and cheddar under crushed tomatoes, chopped grape tomatoes, black pepper, and red pepper flakes. Made thin enough that the crust is crispy most of the way through except at the very edges.

Well, it looks like summer is here for real this time, so I'm back out at the grill for tonight's pizza. I've actually never made a grilled pizza: I normally make a pan pizza, and just cook it on the grill. Tonight I decided to give an actual grilled pizza a try. I have a bit of work to do on the timing, but overall it was satisfactory.

Working on my next cooking video: these are Dorie Greenspan's Bittersweet Brownies from Baking from My Home To Yours. I made them with a Guittard 70%, which is fabulous.

Well, we're a long way from the holidays, but since cooking has become part of my day job now, I thought I'd share my latest creation. This is the Fresh Fruit and Nut Quickbread from Bittman's How to Bake Everything:

I do, but it's for flavor, not moisture management. I have not found mushrooms to give off much water when cooking on pizza.

It's sort of funny to me, I made that recipe (including preserving my own tuna) when that cookbook first came out, and it was really excellent, to the point where the ideas in it sort of infiltrated my culinary repertoire. I've been making similar pasta dishes ever since, without ever re-visiting the original recipe, and over time it turns out I've dropped several ingredients. Tonight I went back to the original, and it is terrific. I used a non-home-canned tuna this time (the Wild Planet stuff) and was really pleased with the results.

Tonight, two more takes on Cacio e Pepe. I should note that all of these are using the same cheese: a Pecorino Gran Riserva di Grotta, which is superb. So, having basically two ingredients in the topping, the taste on all of these is great, it's just the texture and technical complexity that set them apart from one another. Tonight's first pizza is Marc Vetri's recipe from Mastering Pizza. You make a blank 10" crust, top it with 70g of crushed ice, and bake it as usual. What comes out of the oven is (supposed to be) a shallow pool of water in the middle of a raised rim, into which you sprinkle ~50g of Romano. You shake it about to get the cheese to melt, then slice and add another 20g of Romano and plenty of black pepper. Of course, the trick here is really being a master of your crust, and getting the middle to be even enough that the water distributes evenly over it. Then, you need to make sure you cook it the exact right length of time to give enough water to melt the cheese, but not so much that the pizza is soggy. Then you need to get it out of the oven without spilling any of that starchy water, since you can't really replace it. So, let's say I'm not quite ready to go work in Vetri's kitchen just yet, because I failed on all counts. I wound up with a pretty soggy crust, unevenly distributed sauce, and a pizza that was too cold for my tastes. The fact that what came out was edible is more a testament to the versatility of pizza than to my skills as a chef, or to the quality of the recipe. This thing is finicky to get right, and though I'm sure it works if you practice enough, I don't really want Cacio e Pepe for dinner every night. OK, my next idea was to make a modernist-style cheese sauce using the Melty Cheese Calculator. This was 50g water and 50g cheese, plus 2.5g sodium citrate and copious amounts of black pepper. Spread on the crust and baked, then topped with another 20g of Romano. I was worried that the baked Romano would have the wrong taste for this dish, but it wasn't an issue. Really, the only problem here is that I don't think that cheese sauce is the right texture for pizza. As my wife points out, it's a little too queso-y. So this one isn't really worth trying again either, especially considering that I was very happy with the béchamel-based version from last night. Trying to get the pure flavor of the cheese and pepper seems like a good idea, but in the context of pizza the added creaminess of the béchamel and toasted-butter flavors from its roux worked better than the pure-cheese hit you get from Modernist cheese sauces.

I'm not usually a huge white pizza fan, but after my last success I thought I'd poke at it a bit more, so tonight I made two different white pies. The first was a béchamel topped with ricotta, olives, rosemary, and red pepper flakes. It was pretty good, I'd make it again: The second was based on the flavors of the famous Cacio e Pepe. I wanted to make sure to preserve the creaminess of the pasta dish, so I incorporated a portion of Pecorino Romano into the béchamel and added a significant quantity of black pepper. I sprinkled it with mozzarella essentially to prevent it from drying out in the oven (and because I figured it would look nicer), then hit it with another batch of Romano and pepper after taking it out of the oven. This was excellent: the sauce stayed creamy (it's the Modernist béchamel) and the flavors of the Romano and pepper really popped. I have two more iterations on this pizza I want to try. One is Vetri's crushed ice method, and the other is to make a sodium citrate-based cheese sauce instead of a béchamel.

It's normally four days in a row because that's how much dough I make at a time. Then I make Sichuan or Mexican for a couple of days, then back to pizza . I am trying to get better at it, and the only way to do that is to practice. Truly, I suffer for my art.

The commercial-yeast pizzas are about 10" diameter. The sourdough are 12", and anything I make in the big pizza pan is 14"

Green bell peppers, onions, and jalapeños, given a quick sauté and then put on the same crust as last night, crushed tomatoes, and low-moisture mozzarella.

It's a holiday here today, so clearly that calls for pizza. This one is the Modernist Neapolitan crust, crushed tomatoes, a crap ton of rosemary because the plant is getting out of control, the last of the eggplant/olive mixture from Friday night, and feta. It's rainy and cool here, so cooked in my oven.

Another "grilled" pizza today, though as usual not what you normally think of for grilled pizza, since I made it in a pan. The dough is a sourdough at the end of its useful life, so not much rise but a lot of flavor. The sauce is just crushed tomatoes, topped with low-moisture mozzarella and chunks of soppressata (not homemade this time, alas). Finally, topped with baby arugula when it was done cooking, left to wilt for a minute or two before serving.

This is another one directly out of American Pie: Three Cheese Pizza with Roasted Eggplant, Tomato, and Lemon. Which is kind of an odd name for a topping whose flavor is much more heavily olive than it is eggplant. I mean, yes, there's an eggplant in there, but there's also a quarter pound of olives on each pizza! You roast the eggplant, tomato, olives, and an onion, along with the zest and juice of a few lemons, then sprinkle the resulting stuff on a pizza with three cheeses (I used mozzarella, feta, and parmesan). This is put on a sourdough crust and baked. The result is delicious, but I'd say very much about the olives and the lemon, with a tip of the hat to the tomatoes.