slkinsey

I think this is one of the few fish recipes where it is not taboo to grate some cheese over it. I mean, you're certainly not going to be obscuring any delicate flavors! Personally, though, I like pecorino rather than parmigiano with this one.

For bread and pizza baking: Measure the floor of your oven, go to your local purveyor of building stone and buy a 1" thick piece of soapstone that is sized to leave a ~1" - .5" gap all the way around on your oven floor. This will provide much better results than a pizza stone -- especially dramatic oven spring.

My experience exactly. Thanks. Yea... my recipe calls for a minimal amount of olive oil. One thing fat does, besides tenderizing the dough, is "grease" between the strands of gluten and inhibit cross-linking between strands to a certain degree. From Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: It has been my experience that a small amount of oil does help to make a dough more extensible and easier to stretch/roll thin (this is over and above the effects of using high hydration, long fermentation and low gluten flour). I have never had any problems with the dough being too soft, but this may have very much to do with differences in the temperature of our ovens and the massiveness (i.e., heat-accumulating property) of our baking stones. I tend to preheat for around an hour on broil, and I have a huge soapstone (at least 100 lbs) on the floor of my gas oven. By that time, the stone is considerably warmer than 550F and is holding a ton of heat. My experience in Italy, BTW, is that pizza Napulitana is not necessarily all that thin or crisp. Roman-style pizza is often paper-thin and crispy, but I have often found the pizza in Napoli to be crisp on the bottom, but more puffy and soft in the middle, and in general thicker. Of the various formulations I was able to get from Neapolitan friends or by striking up conversations with pizzaioli there, many included a fair amount of olive oil. YMMV, of course, and desirable results may not be possible using a lot of oil in a home oven on a regular pizza stone.

My friends who run a trattoria/pizzeria in Italy sure must be doing a lot of things wrong, then...

In the beginning when God created bacon and sausage, pork was a formless meat and salt covered the face of the pork, while smoke from God swept over the face of the pork. Then God said, "Let there be bacon!"; and there was bacon. And God saw that the bacon was good; and God separated the smoked meat from the unsmoked meat. God called the smoked meat Bacon, and the unsmoked meat he called Pork Belly. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Do you eat honey? It is, after all, bee vomit.

For some reason or another, I've been thinking of throwing together a batch of goose fat biscuits for this...

Interesting... I have never particularly liked sourdough pizza. I feel that the sour flavor doesn't really go well with the other toppings.

The Bacon of Wrath The Bacon from the Smokehouse of Cortez East of Bacon Of Pork and Bacon Smokehouse Row

My pizza method (from an old Usenet post):

And let us not forget that other great American author, who wrote such things as: The Old Man and the Bacon The Bacon Also Sizzles A Farewell to Bacon (a sad, sad tale if ever there was one) For Whom the Bacon Fries The Bacon of Kilimanjaro (those Kilimanjarians sure know how to cure pork!) The Green Bacon of Africa (it's fermented!)

As I Lay Bacon A man after my own bacon, I see! I believe the Great Man himself was a porkophile, as evidenced by his titles: The Ham and the Fury If I Forget Thee, St. Louis Cut Intruder in the Butts Links in August Go Down, Chitlins Headcheese for a Nun and of course: Backbacon, Backbacon! And, of course, the Bacon Trilogy: The Bacon, The Rasher of Bacon, and The Pork Belly.

As I Lay Bacon A man after my own bacon, I see!

This one's for the Faulkner fans: My mother is a bacon. (Name that book!)

A bacon by any other name would taste just as good.

Bacon and eggs stalk our land like... two giant stalking things.

It is a far, far better bacon I eat than I have ever eaten. It is a far, far better slab of bacon I go to than I have ever known.

I have all the ones MatthewB mentioned. Peychaud is absolutely essential to a Sazerac -- a classic cocktail that deserves more attention. A good way to get to know the various bitters is a Charger: seltzer water over ice with a dash or two (or three) of bitters.

I know it's OT, but I just have to say: big ups to West Newton! Our first house was in West Newton. Strangely, I've been hearing of Newton more and more these days, and I never used to hear about it.

For what it's worth, Felonius, and for the record: I do agree that the City law is better than the State law, and there should be accomodations for situations like yours.

At @SQC, they turn over the bourbon-soaked vanilla beans to the pastry chef after they are used for one infusion. At home, I tend to just top up the bottle. Works perfectly well with regular red/white vermouth and Angostura bitters, too... if Vya and Fee Brothers isn't something that would get much use otherwise. For whatever it's worth, everyone I know who has tried it loves the drink, and @SQC promptly sold out of vanilla-infused bourbon. In fact, there is a gold mine's worth of manhattan-esque drinks to be made with infused liquors -- and ones that can be made much cheaper than vanilla-infused Maker's Mark. For example, infuse an applejack with dried apricots and use that instead of the vanilla bourbon. Garnish with a slice of applejack-soaked apricot. @SQC has a coffee bean-infused vodka they use to make a killer "coffee-tini." The list goes on...

Isn't this called a Perfect Manhattan (without the vanilla infusion)? It sounds great. Is the vanilla bourbon "too much" if you don't dilute it with regular bourbon? Do you use the vanilla bourbon for any other drinks? Yes, on all counts. Especially if you sweeten the vanilla bourbon a little when you make it (to make it more a dessert liquor). I came up with the drink at @SCQ one night when I got bored of drinking Manhattans. I knew they had house-infused liquors on the dessert menu, so I asked the bartender to give this formulation a whirl. I do it at home with a less-sweet infused bourbon than @SQC uses, but a little sweetness is good (I also went for "perfect style" to cut some of the sweetness). I do think using all infused bourbon would be too much, regardless of sweetness, as I think it's nice to have a whisper of the vanilla rather than a sledgehammer. Obviously, it's a riff on the natural vanilla flavors already present in bourbon. This is also good replacing the uninfused Maker's with a good vanilla vodka, which dries out the drink considerably and adds a different layer of vanilla flavor. At this point, though, it's pretty much a different drink.

The Samhattan: 1.5 oz Maker's Mark bourbon 1.5 oz vanilla-infused bourbon* .5 oz Vya sweet red vermouth .5 oz Vya extra dry white vermouth 1 dash Fee Brothers aromatic bitters Shake with cracked ice; strain into chilled cocktail glass and serve. Garnish with small piece of vanilla bean split 3/4 of the way down the middle. A variation is the Orange Dreamsicle Manhattan: replace .5 oz of vanilla-infused bourbon with orange peel-infused bourbon. Garnish with orange peel. *Make several small slits with a knife in 15 vanilla beans, place in a fifth of Maker's Mark and age ~3 months. Can add small amount of simple syrup.

Thanks for the reference, Jaz, I will have read that book again. Many child nutrition reference books, including the popular What To Expect series, recommend way too much fiber for small children. As I posted to this thread some time ago...

How about: "Offal King"? Or perhaps simply "The Fifth Quarter"? I can see it now... fried lamb sweetbread nuggets, tripa alla parmigiana heros...