Gino's Way East

I am so happy right now. The deep dish pizzas came out so well, so delicious, so right; this recipe is a keeper.

I could hardly wait to bake them yesterday. After slowly fermenting in the refrigerator for a day, the dough smelled amazing and was full of life. I decided to make a veggie pizza and a sausage patty/mushroom (my favorite). If you haven't been to Gino's East, you probably haven't seen a continuous patty of sausage on top of a pizza, and if you aren't familiar with Chicago deep dish style pizza, you're probably wondering from some of the pictures where the cheese is. Assembly goes like this: crust, mozzarella, mozzarella, more mozzarella, toppings, then sauce, and finally a little grated Romano cheese. As it bakes, some cheese may find its way through the sauce, and the toppings will start peeking through.

My pizza pans are thin gauge stainless steel, 12" round by 2" tall cake pans. It took about 50 minutes at 350 to bake the pizzas through, a pretty long time to wait for pizza. I might try a higher temperature next time, but I'd hate to burn that beautiful crust. The pizza itself brought back a flood of memories, and on this frigid Pittsburgh night I was glad to be inside with a roaring fire, a glass of beer and a slice of the best. Here's the full recipe.

Chicago Deep Dish Pizza

For each 12" deep dish pan:
Crust:
1 cup luke warm water
1 package yeast
1/3 cup corn oil with about 2 tsp extra virgin olive oil mixed in
1 tsp annatto seeds (optional)
1 T sugar
1 tsp cream of tartar
1 lb bread flour

For the golden crust effect, I heated the oil with the annatto seeds over low heat for about 10 minutes. Let it cool before proceeding.

In a bowl, put water, then yeast, oil, cream of tartar, and sugar. Mix with hand until yeast dissolves. Then start adding the flour a little at a time, using one hand as a dough hook to mix the ingredients. Continue adding flour until the dough is still soft, but not sticky. Turn onto a lightly floured surface, sprinkle with a little flour, and knead it for 10 minutes. Ten full minutes of fold, push, turn, repeat. Sprinkle with a little flour if it gets sticky. Do this, and you will have smooth, elastic dough with a fine structure. It's worth the workout.

Oil the surface of your ball of dough lightly, and place it into a clean, lightly oiled bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit out at room temperature for about an hour. It will just about double in volume. You can go two ways with it from here. What I did is probably closer to the way they do it in the high volume restaurant. Punch down the dough and roll it out to about 15" round. Lay it into your lightly oiled pan and pinch the sides up to form a nice thick crust. Sprinkle in about half a pound of mozzarella, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge for a day. Alternatively, you can put your slightly risen dough, in its plastic wrapped bowl, into the fridge and let it ferment for at least half a day. The extra long, slow fermentation develops a wonderful flavor in the crust that cannot be done in a hurry. If you don't mind sacrificing taste, go ahead and bake it right away.

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Sauce:
1 28 oz can plum tomatoes (San Marzano if ya got'em)
a pinch each of oregano and basil
about a tablespoon of salt (to taste)
fresh ground black pepper
(I'd probably put in a little garlic salt)

Remove about 1/4 c of the sauce from the can of tomatoes, then pour the rest into a bowl and with your fingers or a potato masher, crush the tomatoes into pieces smaller than a quarter. Add your seasoning, beginning with a teaspoon of salt and tasting frequently. It should be pretty salty but not overpowering.

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Toppings:
Sweet Italian sausage
sliced black olives
sliced mushrooms
diced green pepper
grated Pecorino Romano cheese

For patty-style sausage, press one pound of Italian sausage (minus casing) into a 10" skillet and cook it over medium heat until it just starts to brown. Slip it onto a plate, invert the skillet over the plate and flip the patty over into the pan. Cook the other side until it just starts to brown, and slide it onto your pizza (on top of the cheese, of course.)

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Half an hour before baking time, preheat the oven to 350, take the pan (or dough) out of the fridge and get it ready for assembly. Remove the wrap and tidy up the crust if need be. Sprinkle in about a pound more cheese. Add your toppings, sausage first if using, and then ladle on the sauce. Sprinkle on a nice dose of romano and put into the oven for about 45-55 minutes. The cheese should be well melted, the sauce should be bubbling, and the crust should be a deep golden brown.

Enjoy!

Sweet Home Chicago

Seeing the Bears go to the Super Bowl this year has me in a nostalgic kind of mood. I miss some things about Chicago like the lake front, the Art Institute, shopping downtown , and mostly the food. Italian beef sandwiches, Chicago-style hot dogs and deep dish pizza don't make it too far outside of Chicagoland (except for Uno's, which are everywhere now and have all the charm of TGI Friday's.) I'm going to do something about it, if only on an extremely local scale.

This weekend, I'm attempting Gino's East deep dish pizza, with the signature golden crust and patty sausage topping. In my searching I came across a food blog and a forum on ChefTalk that both go into the gritty details of Gino's crust. Corn meal? Food coloring? Rise overnight? So many variables, so many guesses. I followed what is claimed to be the real crust recipe, and it is rising in my fridge until baking time tomorrow to get a nice fermented taste.

I tried something to color the crust yellow that none of these other bloggers did, and that was achiote (annatto) oil. It's commonly used in Latin American food to give yellow color to rice and pastry dough, and it's made simply by heating annatto seeds with oil. It has no aroma and as far as I can tell, no taste. I took 1/3 cup of the corn oil needed for the dough and heated it with 1 tsp of annatto seeds over low heat for about 10 minutes. After this time, it seemed like the seeds had given as much color as they were going to give. In retrospect, 2 tsp of seeds wouldn't have been too much as my dough came out kind of pale. The yellow tint in the crust is purely a psychological weapon, but I feel it's important.

One last thing I think I'll change is the cheese quantity. One pound just doesn't seem like enough for a 12 inch pie. We'll see.

Culture Shock

Two things today: first a sourdough update, then yogurt.

There are signs that a starter will give you indicating that it has died, gone off, or is otherwise useless. In the case of mine, it was showing me no activity at all for several days, and there was a grim cesspool of hooch on top. I had to know what this meant, though, and the only way I could test this was to make some dough. I cheated a little bit, though, and I added a pinch of yeast to the sponge before mixing in the rest of the flour and water. After mixing in the ingredients, I had the most supple, smooth, elastic dough I've ever worked with. It was beautiful. I got excited and let it rise in a warm place for a few hours. I came back to such a sad sight, words cannot describe it. Instead of a nicely risen, puffy loaf of dough, I had a pool of goo. I didn't worry too much, though. Yes, my starter was dead, but was I on the right track with the taste? I baked that pile of goo into a nice, crusty, albeit flat, loaf of some very tasty sourdough with a delicate crumb. It went very well with a butternut squash ginger soup that took no time at all to cook.

I call that a partial success. However, I need to start again with the starter, and this time I will pay more attention to its needs and wants. Acidity is key in developing the yeast, but it must be well balanced and timely. I'll get that going soon.

In the meantime, I've become slightly infatuated with Greek yogurt, and since it's a pricey infatuation, and since I'm getting into an Indian cooking marathon mood again in which yogurt will play a key part, I need to learn how to make yogurt. I tried it once before in the times before this blog came to be, so I don't mind exploring and sharing.

My first attempt went from memory, and it failed on all counts. The milk was not scalded at a high enough temperature and wasn't held a that temperature for long enough. The incubation time was too long, and the temperature was again too low. After some reading, this is what I did, and what you should do if you need a pile of yogurt brewing in your house.

Homemade Yogurt

1 quart fresh milk (whole, 2%, skim)
2 T store-bought yogurt

Equipment:
A double boiler or one pan that fits in another
A candy thermometer
A warm, 125 deg F place for incubation

Place the milk in the top portion of the double boiler. I used a stainless bowl that I set over a pan of simmering water. Bring some water in the bottom section to a boil and watch the temperature of your milk. When it gets to 200 deg F, reduce your boil and maintain 200 for five minutes. This will change the proteins in the milk so that they will link together when the bacteria begin to act on the milk.

Cool the milk down to 120 deg F by setting the bowl or pan in a bowl of cold water. Watch it carefully so that it doesn't cool down much below 120. Take a cup of this milk and whisk in the yogurt. Stir this mixture back into the warm milk and cover the container. Alternatively, you can pour this into individual size jars or other small, lidded containers. Cover whatever container you're using and put it into your warm place. The ideal temperature is between 122 and 130 deg F. I had my gas oven set to 135 with the door ajar, and I was able to get 128. Keep the milk there for 3 1/2-4 hours, and you will get yogurt. It won't be super thick, but it will set and noticeably yogurt-like in appearance and taste. Pop it right into the fridge and it will keep there for a week. Save a couple tablespoons of this batch for your next batch.

To make the yogurt nice and thick like Greek yogurt, line a bowl with triple-layered cheesecloth or a cloth napkin, pour the yogurt into the bowl, and tie the four corners of the cloth up. Hang this over the bowl (to catch the whey) for a few hours and you will have a strained, thick yogurt. The longer you hang, up to a day, the thicker it will be, and when almost all of the whey is out of the yogurt, it is basically cheese. In the middle-east, they call it labneh, and it makes a great spread with toasted pita if you pour olive oil on top of the cheese and sprinkle it with torn mint.

Too many words, not enough pictures. I'll get some up soon.

Return of the Yellow Cloud

I whipped up a little Indian chickpea dish last night, and although every crevice of my apartment has been penetrated by the aromatics and spices, I had a good time with it. I forgot how much fun it is to grind spices and layer complex flavors to bring out the best in a simple ingredient.

Carrot Cake

I've had many mediocre versions of carrot cake in restaurants over the past ten years, and none of them have come close to my mom's Joy of Cooking version. It turns out that hers is the only reason why carrot cake is my favorite. Without that recipe this weekend, I had to go to the internet. The recipe I found is from the web, and I made it last night and made a lot of people happy.

Super Moist Carrot Cake

2 c all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (or allspice and nutmeg)
4 eggs
1 1/2 c vegetable oil (I used 1 1/4)
2 c white sugar
2 3/4 c shredded or grated carrots (I did mine in the food processor)
1 (8 oz) can crushed pineapple, drained
3/4 c chopped walnuts
1 c flaked coconut plus a little more for sprinkling on top

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 9" x 13" pan, or two 8 1/2" cake pans.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and spices. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the sugar, oil and eggs together to mix well. Beat in the flour mixture little by little. Stir in the shredded carrots, crushed pineapple, chopped nuts and flaked coconut. Pour into pan(s). Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until the centers no longer look liquid and jiggly. A toothpick should come out clean and dry. With two cakes you can make a nice two layer cake. Allow to cool before frosting with:

Cream Cheese Icing (based on Joy of Cooking recipe)

1 8 oz package cream cheese
3 T milk
1 1/2 c powdered sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract

Sift together the sugar and cinnamon. Set aside. In a medium bowl, cream together the milk and cream cheese until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add a touch more milk if necessary, but be careful: The only thing you can do to make the icing thicker is to add more cheese. Beat in the vanilla. Add the sugar a little at a time and stir until it is smooth.

Sourdough, End of Week 1

Those first few days of making the sourdough starters were magical, and then things got much less active and worrisome in a hurry. The fast start version is now a stagnant mass of brownish gray sludge with a pool of brown "hooch" on top. It smells decidedly funky and more pungent, even sweeter, than its cool start cousin. On day 7, I've decided to drop in half a teaspoon of honey to feed the yeast a little bit, and it will sit in the fridge until tonight. I plan to take half a cup out and prepare a sponge for sourdough pancakes tomorrow morning.

The cool start version has a sour smell and seems slightly more active, but the days of glorious foam and bubbles are over. Last night I took out a cup, nearly the entire thing, to begin a sponge for making sourdough French bread later on today. I then put in a cup each of flour and water and let it sit out on the 70 degree countertop overnight. It now looks like the fast start, slightly less gray with some slightly less-brown hooch on top. I gave this one a half teaspoon of honey as well and put it into the fridge.

The sponge for the bread has been sitting in the warm oven (around 80 degrees) overnight with 4 c flour and 1 1/2 c water plus 2 tsp each sugar and salt. The result? Practically nothing interesting to report so far. A few bubbles, that's it. I'm giving it until mid-afternoon and then I'm baking a loaf one way or another (with the addition of yeast if necessary.)

I'm going to do some more reading and see if this is all normal behavior. In the meantime, in my next post I'll just tell you that I've come across maybe the moistest carrot cake recipe ever.

Something in the Air, Day 3

The slow start sourdough starter bubbled up nicely over the forty-eight hours I had it in my closet. I covered it with a moist towel to let it breathe, and hopefully let some wild yeast into the mix. I have a feeling, though, that all this action is due to whatever funkiness lives in the buckwheat. Buckwheat funkitude.

I fed it some white flour just like the other one, and it's now in the fridge awaiting its call to action for a loaf of bread this weekend.

Aebleskivers

Who would have thought that pancakes could be so much fun? Aebleskivers (apple slices) are a Danish version made in a special pan that forms little rounded mounds of tasty cakes. The can be filled, and are sometimes topped with powdered sugar. The trick comes in turning them over, and toothpicks, skewers or knitting needles seem to be the tools of choice.

These were the dessert of the hour for New Year's Eve (see Sausage Fest '06, below). Against my better judgment, and paying no mind to the presence of not only the sausage-laden pasta dinner, but also about a pound of cheese in my belly from a fondue dinner the night before, I packed away at least a dozen of these babies. If you go by the power eating done on this night, one recipe serves four.

The recipe came with the pan, but the filling was all Matt. He took two apples cut into bits, sprinkled a spoon of brown sugar and some spices over them, and sauteed them in butter until they softened up a little. We teamed up to make the pancakes, I with the batter and he with the filling in a mad dash to prevent uneven cooking or worse. The cast iron was seasoned to perfection, though, and all went smooth as butta.

Great Grandma's Danish Aebleskiver
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups buttermilk
3 eggs-separated
Optional: Apple slices or other fruit filling

Sift together flour, salt and baking soda. Add buttermilk and egg
yolks. Beat egg whites until light and fluffy forming soft peaks.
Gently fold egg whites into batter.

Cook in Aebleskiver pan over medium heat. Grease each cup and use
toothpick to flip after 1 to 1.5 minutes. Fill 2/3 full for plain or
1/3 add fruit and 1/3 more.

Optional: Sprinkle with confectioner's sugar.

Makes about 40-45.

Something in the Air, Day 2

Only half a day into the sourdough experiment, I'm seeing a lot of action and I'm convinced it's going to work. The mass has gained a half cup in volume: The bottom third looks the same, then there's a layer of "hooch" (a liquid that smells like the beginnings of beer), topped with two thirds of the batter looking nice and airy, bubbling off some potent gases. I've stirred it down; I'll feed it tonight and then put it into the refrigerator until I need to bake with it.

The only question is, what's doing all the work in this starter? Is it the bacteria, or is it the yeast? My sourdough colleague across town says 3 days at 65 degrees will let the yeast do the talking and keep bacteria activity to a minimum. Even though my starter smells yeasty, I'm starting a second batch and putting it into a cool closet for a few days to compare the activity and smell.

Something in the Air

I've just made up a sourdough starter based on the simple concept of flour + water = starter. I'm hoping to harness whatever wild strains of yeast are floating in the Pittsburgh air and in the flour I chose.

1/3 c white flour
1/3 c buckwheat flour
2/3 c water

Just plain white flour seemed boring, and I have some buckwheat kicking around in the cabinet. The batter's slightly gooey and takes up about 1 cup of volume. The color is brownish gray and smells like flour. I have it sitting on top of my furnace to stay warm; we'll see what happens.

Sausage Fest '06

With all the meat I've got now, there was no question that pork would figure into the New Year's Eve meal somehow. What better way to ring in the new year than with homemade Italian sausage in a rich red sauce. The sausage recipe is pretty much straight from Alton Brown, minus the parsley and without casings. It had a great fennel aroma and peppery bite. The sauce was a team effort that came out nice and thick, with a good dose of onion, garlic, herbs and sausage.