Thousand Island Dressing, Completely from Scratch

I mentioned in my previous post that I've been reducing the amount of starch in my daily diet and that's meant eating a lot more salad. There's a lot to be said for salad: so long as you don't mind paying the extra money for boxed or bagged salad greens, preparing a big heaping helping of salad for a meal is a matter of a few minutes. And, heck, slicing up a head of romaine lettuce into small pieces isn't exactly time-consuming either, though the pre-prepared salad greens tend to keep quite a bit longer. But salad is nothing without some sort of dressing, even if it's just a bit of olive oil and vinegar.

Normally I've relied on bottled salad dressings though my experience with store-bought dressings has been decidedly mixed. Vinaigrettes and Italian dressings tend to be safer buys, although many of them contain thickeners and stabilizers such as xanthan gum that impart a somewhat unpleasant tacky or mucilaginous quality to the dressing. Creamy dressings, especially ranch dressing, are far less trustworthy for multiple reasons. I love the idea of a creamy dressing far more than I like the usual execution. Almost every ranch dressing I've ever tasted, for instance, has had a nasty aftertaste. Also--and I admit this is perhaps a purely personal preference--a creamy dressing should still be somewhat fluid. It should flow over the lettuce, not glop onto it in big, quivering blobs. (I'm sure there's a bit of design to making dressings so thick and mayonnaise-like: it's harder to pour on just a little bit of them.) Furthermore, creamy dressings are I've noticed far more likely to be loaded with sugar. Especially prone to oversweetening is a dressing that I genuinely like when it's done well: Thousand Island.

It's easy to fake up a sort of Thousand Island dressing with off-the-shelf mayonnaise, ketchup, and pickle relish, but...really, you can do better than that. Here's my recipe. As usual I must acknowledge that it's largely based off recipes from another source: Alton Brown's "Good Eats" recipe for mayonnaise, used with little modification, and a Food Network Thousand Island recipe, from which I departed more freely.

---

Ingredients

1 large egg
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon mustard powder
a pinch of white sugar
2 teaspoons lemon juice (as usual I just use the bottled stuff)
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 cup canola oil
1 clove garlic
¼ cup sriracha sauce
3 tablespoons ketchup
¼ cup finely chopped pickled cucumbers and daikon (these were homemade)
2 tablespoons of the pickling brine
black pepper

Directions

Crack the egg and separate the yolk from the white. (I use the method of carefully transferring the yolk between the two halves of the broken shell, letting the white spill out over the edges. You can catch the unused white and freeze it for later use but in this case I confess I flushed it.) Transfer the yolk to a small bowl and add the salt, the mustard powder, a small pinch of sugar (probably you can omit this altogether), 1 tsp of lemon juice and 1½ tsp of vinegar. With a small wire whisk mix the ingredient thoroughly until a smooth paste is obtained.

Place the cup of oil in a container that allows for easy dispensing of small amounts; a measuring cup with a spout is a good choice. (Alton Brown uses a squeeze bottle and that probably is better.) Start whisking the mixture in the bowl vigorously and start dribbling the oil into it in a very thin stream at first, with a careful eye to make sure that a large amount of unmixed oil never persists before being whisked in. After maybe a quarter of the oil is added it's safer to pour a bit faster but when the oil is half gone stop. Add the remaining 1 tsp of lemon juice and 1½ tsp of vinegar, whisk these in well, then resume whisking in the oil until it's all added. You should have now a bowl of mayonnaise, light yellow in color, smooth and homogeneous, somewhat more fluid than commercial mayonnaise perhaps but still thick and rich.

Smash the clove of garlic against a cutting board with the flat side of a chef's knife and then mince the pulp as finely as possible before scooping it into the bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients: the diced pickles, the hot sauce, the ketchup, and a few grinds of black pepper. Whisk these in thoroughly. At this point you can consider the dressing done if you like a thicker salad dressing but, if you wish to have a more fluid dressing, whisk in the pickling brine a little at a time until you achieve the desired consistency.

---

The resulting dressing is so much more flavorful than anything you'll get from a bottle; the hot sauce gives it a sharp tang that brings out the other flavors. Probably the ketchup can be replaced with the same quantity of plain tomato sauce for an even lower-carb dressing (but I used what I had immediately to hand.) Obviously commercial pickles or dill relish may be conveniently substituted for the chopped homemade pickles.

Complete Failure: Making Low-Carb Bread with Gram Flour

My diet has tended to extreme starchiness over the years; I can consume massive quantities of pasta and bread in the course of a day and I've been known to eat a flour tortilla with nothing on it but a little butter. As a result I am overweight. Hence I've been striving to reduce the amount of starch in my diet, not necessarily in any sort of extreme Atkins-ish way and certainly not by going over to an exclusive diet of beef and bacon as some foolish persons do, but rather by choosing dishes that don't require a lot of starch in the first place: salads instead of sandwiches, vegetables as a side dish instead of pasta.

Still, it's hard to live with less bread; I'm one of those persons for whom almost any foodstuff is improved by placing it between two pieces of bread or wrapping it in a flour tortilla. (Flour, always, never corn. Corn tortillas are mealy and gross.) When the Atkins craze was at its height there were a couple of brands of sandwich bread advertising themselves as "low-carb"; both were expensive and both were not very good to eat and in any case neither is sold in the markets here any more, now that the fad is dead. There's one brand of low-carb tortilla that's not awful and can still be found but again it's expensive and in any case, while tortillas are nice, they're just not as tempting and versatile as a loaf of bread.

How hard could it be, I've thought, to make low-carb bread? One can shave a few grams of starch per serving off by using a whole-grain cereal flour; using coarse rye flour, for example, is somewhat higher in fiber and lower in starch than whole wheat flour. But other flours made from legumes or from "pseudo-cereals" such as quinoa are even lower in starch. They're widely used in gluten-free baking, in which I have next to no interest, and in any case "gluten-free" and "low-carb" are two different goals. Gluten-free flour mixes tend to rely heavily on rice and potato flours which are just as starchy as wheat flour. My hope was to come up with some mixture of a high-protein non-wheat flour, such as soy flour, with enough gluten flour to hold the bread together in a semi-normal fashion.

I've found that the easiest and cheapest of these flours to get locally is gram flour, which goes by a bunch of other names; it's a fine meal made from ground-up chickpeas. At a nearby international grocery store I can get it in four-pound bags for a little more than a dollar per pound, which isn't bad and much much cheaper than buying those horribly overpriced little sacks of Bob's Red Mill flours. I've found gram flour of two sorts at that market, a coarser whole-grain variety and an extra-fine variety called besan flour. I've tried both in bread recipes. Neither worked.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time giving recipes that resulted in utter failure but I'll describe generally my approach to trying to use these flours if only so some reader will know what not to do in future. My hope was that a mixture of the gram flour with wheat gluten flour in an approximately 6:1 to 8:1 ratio could be used directly to replace wheat flour in a bread recipe.

I tried this first with a very simple white bread recipe that's given me excellent results in the past when made with wheat flour; basically it's just warm water, salt, yeast, and flour. For this I tried the coarse gram flour. The resulting dough was completely intractable and abominably sticky; attempting to knead it in my stand mixer with the bread hook only plastered the stuff against the sides of the bowl and no real kneading action ever took place, even with the addition of more gluten flour in an attempt to make the dough more cohesive. Worse, it scarcely rose on standing in a warm oven. I suspect I know why: in the absence of any added sugar to a bread dough the source of sugar for the yeast's fermentation comes from the starch in the flour, slowly broken down by amylases produced by the yeast. But the low-starch gram and gluten flours didn't give the yeast enough to work with so the resulting dough never rose.

Therefore for my second try I thought I might have a better chance with a bread recipe with added sugar to encourage the yeast to rise. Furthermore I hypothesized that the fine-ground besan flour would yield a more tractable dough than the coarse gram flour I had tried earlier. This time I chose to modify a recipe intended for a rye bread. Most rye bread recipes I've encountered add brown sugar or molasses (or both), partly for flavor but also because the denser, stickier rye doughs seem to need a bit more help in rising. The results? Only very slightly better. The dough had at least enough tenacity that it stayed more or less in a mass that the dough hook could actually work on instead of just getting mashed against the sides of the bowl to stay there, but it showed an incredible ability to swallow up many cups of the besan flour without much diminishing in stickiness. An ordinary wheat flour dough will undergo a rather sharp change in consistency as more flour is kneaded into it, losing its stickiness and pulling away from the sides of the bowl rather than tending to cling, and forming into a ball that can be handled easily. This besan flour dough never behaved that way. Adding more and yet more besan flour, with a little sprinkling of gluten flour as well in the hope it would help, did gradually lessen the stickiness of the dough but even at best it still clung tenaciously to the bowl. Eventually in frustration I scooped it out with a spatula and into a bread pan as though it were a very thick and heavy "batter bread" and let it rise. To my surprise it actually did rise a bit but by no more than about half of its original volume--really you want it to double. The resulting bread was actually somewhat bready in texture, if very dense, but then I realized that making bread with chickpea flour was doomed to fail for a much more fundamental reason: the loaf tasted foul. The optimistic description on the Bob's Red Mill bag talks of its "nutty flavor" and there was some nuttiness there but also a very unpleasant earthy taste. The mouth feel of the bread was all wrong, too; it seemed to cling to and coat the tongue like clay. In any case, just as inedible as the previous loaf.

I suspect my mate Misha is correct. She pointed out before I started on these gram flour experiments that thousands of well-paid professionals have worked on the problem of making an edible low-carb bread and failed miserably. What hope did I have?

Pickled Button Mushrooms

In the last few weeks, inspired by Alton Brown and the "American Pickle" episode of his show Good Eats, I've been making a number of experiments in pickling, starting with making pickles out of sliced zucchini (a Brown suggestion.) Since then I've been expanding my range and here I present one of my recent successes, pickled crimini mushrooms.

This recipe is loosely based off a recipe in the text Putting Food By of Hertzberg, Greene, and Vaughan. Really the chief idea I borrowed from that book was the technique of parcooking the mushrooms before pickling them. In a previous attempt I simply used raw mushrooms the way I might use raw carrots or zucchini and the results were far inferior.

---

Ingredients

1 pound button mushrooms
½ cup lemon juice
1 cup malt vinegar
2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon white sugar
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 bay leaf
a large pinch of black peppercorns
1 clove garlic
water as needed

Directions

Place the mushrooms in a large saucepan, pour the lemon juice over them, and add enough water to cover the mushrooms completely. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. After 5 minutes remove the mushrooms from heat and drain them. Meanwhile, in another saucepan, combined the vinegar, 1 cup water, the salt, the sugar, and all the seasonings; bring this mixture to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for 5 minutes. Transfer the mushrooms to a jar or other suitable container and pour the hot brine over the mushrooms, which should be completely submerged. If they are not, add just enough boiling water to cover them. Cover the jar and allow it to cool for a while at room temperature before moving the jar to the refrigerator. Within a day or two the mushrooms will be nicely firm and pickled.

---

The pickled mushrooms can be eaten straight of course but they're also good sliced into a salad. When I do this again I may use something other than malt vinegar, however; its taste is rather strong and perhaps a milder vinegar, such as rice wine vinegar, would be more suitable.

DIY Ginger Ale

This recipe I owe to an acquaintance of mine, Claymore Highfield, who a few weeks ago extolled the qualities of homemade ginger ale on his FurAffinity page. I've been wanting to try to make my own ginger ale for a long while now and Claymore's post came at a happy time: I'd recently bought about a half-pound of fresh ginger root for cooking; the other ingredients called for were also at hand in my refrigerator; I had a clean two-liter soda bottle on hand already; and I was bored. So I tried his recipe out and was mostly pleased with the results. As you can see the resulting drink was very turbid but had a very pleasing ginger "kick" to it. Drinking a homemade ginger ale like this makes you realize just how little ginger flavor there is in commercial ginger ales.

Here I will quote Claymore's recipe verbatim. I did make only a very slight alteration which I will note below.

---

Claymore Highfield's Old Time Ginger Ale

Gotta tell ya, I find commercial ginger ales pretty tame. Even the ones that provide that snappy ginger taste have undesirable flavour components or an overall synthetic/processed taste that just doesn't work for me. What to do? Well, take matters into my own hooves, of course!

The process is simple, the ingredients are inexpensive and readily available, the results are refreshing and intensely gingery. If you like a robust soda pop that you simply can't get by mixing chemically syrup with bubbly water, give this one a try!

You'll need:

½ cup ginger, freshly grated
1 cup granulated white (table) sugar
⅓ cup lemon juice. (I used bottled lemon and lime juices out of laziness.)
⅛ cup lime juice
¼ teaspoon bread yeast
1½ quarts water

You will also need a saucepan, a pitcher, whisk, and an empty, CLEAN, 2-liter soda bottle.

Place the water in a saucepan on the stove and bring it to a slow boil while you grate and juice the ginger and citrus, then add everything but the yeast to the water. Allow the mix to slow boil for about 5 minutes, and TASTE the mixture periodically. Does it seem strong? Good! It's supposed to, but your palate is your guide -- you may prefer more or less sugar, so add water or sugar to adjust. More lemon or lime juice? Be my guest!

Once the taste is balanced, take the pan off the heat and allow it to cool, covered, to 80 degrees on your thermometer. No thermometer? No problem. The liquid should be cool enough to drizzle onto your wrist with a feeling of warmth but NO discomfort. Now, strain the liquid into a CLEAN pitcher or other suitable container with a pouring spout, then whisk in the yeast until it's thoroughly dispersed. (I used an ordinary wire strainer.) Pour the liquid into the soda bottle, which will not be completely filled, then TIGHTLY cap the bottle. Set the bottle out of direct light in a warm (70F-78F is ideal) area for 24 hours.

At the end of this time, your soda bottle will now feel as though it's tightly filled -- just like the ones that come from the store, only your soda is NATURALLY carbonated! Put the bottle in the refrigerator for another 24 hours, and then ENJOY! :D 

---

The only changes I made were these: I chopped the ginger root, rather than grating it, because I found that the fibrous nature of the ginger root clogged my box grater rapidly so it was easier to use a chef's knife rather; I used bottled lemon and lime juice even though Claymore says not to; and I added a pinch of salt to the formula. It's well known that a small amount of salt tends to emphasize flavors. Otherwise I followed the directions just as shown.

The resulting beverage had a lovely ginger taste but, as you can see, had a lot of suspended matter in it. Party this is because the chopped-up ginger upon boiling is going to break down a bit and produce particles too small to be stoppe by a coarse wire-mesh strainer. Also the yeast itself produces a sediment of dead cells as the fermentation progresses. Possibly one can produce a clear ginger ale by adding a coagulating agent such as gelatine, as is often done in brewing beer.

Another thing I noticed was that, even in the refrigerator, fermentation still continued at a slow place. Even after three or four days there was a noticeable buildup of gas pressure in the bottle. Also I suspect the drink came to have a small amount of alcohol in it after a few days of storage in this way. I don't consider this to be a bad thing.

Anyway, this is definitely a keeper. I'm trying this again, soon, though I think I'll be looking for a glass bottle to conduct the fermentation in rather than using a pop bottle.

Semi-Failure: Salt Rising Bread

Not an unqualified success, as you can see.

I've had a long-time fascination with bread recipes that are leavened not with commercial yeast but with homemade "starters", of which there are many kinds. Perhaps six to eight times I've attempted to bake such breads and at no time have I ever been entirely happy with the results, with perhaps one exception.

Making a starter completely from scratch is a bit like culturing microbes, only in the kitchen. A growth medium is prepared and incubated, usually at elevated temperature, for a day or more until naturally occurring yeasts or bacteria are seen to have colonized the medium; then it's added to the bread dough in place of commercial yeast. From what I've seen there are two main classes of bread starter: the sourdough starter, incubated at room temperature or somewhat above, which contains both yeast and Lactobacillus that gives the bread its characteristic lactic-acid sourness; and the more fascinating "salt-rising" starter, incubated at a higher temperature, which tends to suppress the growth of yeasts and favors the growth of such bacteria as Clostridium perfringens. These give salt-rising breads a unique cheesy aroma and taste.

I've tried a number of salt-rising starter recipes from different sources. The recipes from The Joy of Cooking (1975 edition, of course, the last good edition) use a large amount of salt in the starter, which I thought was necessary to help suppress yeast growth. Indeed I thought that's why it's called "salt-rising". Apparently I'm wrong, though; in any case I've come across salt-rising starter recipes using no salt. Instead, "salt-rising" probably refers to an old Appalachian practice of using lumps of rock salt, heated and then set aside to cool slowly, to keep the starter hot enough to incubate the bacterial culture. This is the chief difficulty with salt-rising starters: they need to be kept at a fairly constant 100 °F for a day or more. In earlier experiments I tried using an electric oven set on "warm" but with the door propped open so that the oven can't get very hot inside; this did not work well at all and was horribly wasteful of heat in any case. Then I tried an improved water-bath, incubating the starter in a container immersed in water kept warm in a saucepan over the stove. This gave better results. Here in a different apartment, however, I found out by accident that if I leave the oven closed and off but with the light inside left on, it will in about an hour reach a steady temperature of 95-100 °F. I can't promise though that this will be true of every oven.

The recipe I used here is slightly modified from Bernard Clayton Jr.'s The Complete Book of Breads (1973) but, since things started going wrong rather early, I'm not going to give a set of ingredients and directions. Instead I'm going to tell a little story about what happens when a recipe goes awry.

1. The starter itself was made by mixing ½ cup of whole milk, scalded first in a saucepan, with 2 heaping tablespoons of stone-ground polenta. I'm not sure if "stone-ground" is necessary but I suspect that it might be, since you're relying on naturally occurring bacteria to grow and these are less likely to be found in a more highly processed corn meal. In any case, I put the mixture in a small bowl, covered it with cling wrap, and put it in the 95-100 °F oven for about twelve hours. At the end of this time the mixture was frothy and had a strong yoghurt-like smell--just what you want.

2. When using a starter, the next step is to use it in preparing a "sponge", which is a fairly fluid batter containing only a fraction, perhaps half at most, of the total amount of flour to be used in the recipe. This mixture is allowed to sit in a warm place until it's very light and bubbly, and only then is more flour added. So in the bowl of my stand mixer I combined 2 cups of boiling water with 1 teaspoon of white sugar, 1 teaspoon of kosher salt and 1 teaspoon of baking soda (an odd ingredient for a naturally-risen bread but that what's in the recipe), then added ⅓ cup of gluten flour and 2 cups of all-purpose flour (the original recipe calls for 2½ cups of bread flour.) This was supposed to produce a smooth batter. This did not happen. Instead I got, well, bread dough--rather sticky still but definitely not fluid at all, not suitable for preparing a sponge.

3. In desperation I added about ⅓ cup of warm water and started mixing vigorously, but really once a dough forms you can't really thin it back down to a batter by adding liquid. All I did was make the dough stickier and even less tractable. In any case, I gave up on trying to make it fluid, and just added the still-warm starter, kneading it in as best I could, then covered the bowl and placed it back in the 95-100 °F oven for about two hours. If things had gone correctly, I should have gotten a very light and frothy sponge. Instead I got a modestly risen dough.

4. Back under the stand mixer I added about five tablespoons of softened lard--yes, I do keep lard on hand--and kneaded it in with the bread hook. The original recipe at this point calls now for kneading in "the rest of the flour" for a total of about seven to eight cups. Instead I added barely more than another cup of all-purpose flour before the dough lost its stickiness, for a total of maybe four cups. The original recipe was supposed to yield enough dough for two loaves; instead I had enough for one. So I tossed it into a loaf pan--well greased with cooking oil and sprinkled with corn meal--to rise in the warm oven.

5. I was expecting that the dough wouldn't even rise much. That's how most of my starter-risen breads have done: the dough rises a little but runs out of puff well before doubling in volume, then bakes into a hopelessly dense and heavy loaf. This time, though, I was surprised to see that the dough doubled in volume within an hour. Might as well bake it, right? I did, at 375 °F for about 40 minutes, which maybe wasn't enough. As you can see in this picture the loaf split in two during baking and was still dense and doughy in the center when I sliced into it after thorough cooling. But I still got a few decent slices off the ends, not too heavy and with a subtle but still distinct cheesy flavor.

I probably will try this recipe again but use either more liquid than called for, or using not more than a cup of flour at the start to make the sponge.

Rye Hot Dog Buns

Over the past several years I've gotten better at making breads of all sort but there's one sort of bread that I haven't been so wonderful at making and that's the hot dog bun. It's not the bread per se that's the problem really; it's the reliable shaping of the bread into a good form for a bun. It seems simple enough to roll out the dough into a cylinder and then bake it but it seems like I'm always getting one of two results: either I don't roll it out thin enough and the dough spreads out into a flattened shape, or (in trying to avoid this) I roll it out too thin and get something too skinny to hold a sausage well.

For this batch, however, I borrowed a trick from an online recipe. Instead of rolling out cylinders of dough and then spacing them out on a cookie sheet, why not lay them next to each other so that when they rise and then bake they grow together, like a tray of brown-and-serve rolls? Packing them close will keep them from flattening out too much and they'll pull apart easily enough when they're done. And, as you can see from the photos, that's just what happened. I'm pretty pleased with the results even though I was in a rush toward the end and could have done better at rolling them out evenly before baking.

As usual the recipe is a modification of an online recipe that looked promising, in this case Adam Gertler's "Rye Split Top Hot Dog Buns", but with a simplified procedure, more rye, and a magic ingredient that I have found makes my home baking far more reliable.

---

Ingredients

¾ cup whole milk (cold is OK)
3 tablespoons butter (again, cold is OK)
3 tablespoons honey
½ a medium-sized yellow onion
1 packet (¼ oz.) active dry yeast
¾ warm tap water
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 tablespoon whole caraway seeds
⅓ cup gluten flour
1½ cups whole-grain rye flour
about 2 cups all-purpose white flour
cooking oil (generally I use either canola or soybean oil)
corn meal

Directions

In the mixing bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a bread hook place the milk, the butter, and the honey. Chop the ½ onion finely while heating a teaspoon or two of vegetable oil on medium-low in a small frying pan. Cook the chopped onion for about five minutes until it is thoroughly translucent and soft, then scrape it all into mixing bowl and mix on medium speed for 1 minute to disperse everything. Then whisk in the yeast and allow the mixture to stand for about 15 minutes, whence it should start to be forming bubbles from the action of the yeast.

Add the warm water, kosher salt, the caraway seeds, the gluten flour, the rye flour, and 1 cup of white flour. (Gluten flour or "vital wheat gluten" as it's sometimes sold is rather costly stuff but you only need a little at a time and even a small quantity vastly improves the texture of baked goods, especially when using flours such as rye flour that do not develop gluten of their own on kneading.) Start mixing with the bread hook on low speed, increasing to medium as the flours are incorporated. When well mixed the dough will still be very sticky at this point. (Even when diluted with wheat flours, rye flour tends to produce sticky doughs.) Add more white flour, a couple of tablespoons at a time, giving each portion plenty of time to be kneaded in, stopping when the dough ceases to stick to the sides of the bowl and to the bread hook. Finally leave the dough to knead at medium speed for another 5 minutes. At the end of this time the dough will be only slightly sticky, leaving the sides of the bowl fairly clean. Remove the dough from the mixing bowl, wipe the sides of the bowl down with cooking oil, place the dough back in, cover the bowl with cling wrap, and place in a warm spot to rise to at least double its bulk, which should take about an hour.

When the dough is risen, take it out of the bowl and divide it as best as possible into eight portions. Roll out each portion with the hands into a roughly cylindrical rope about 8" long and perhaps 1" wide. Lay the rolls of dough onto a baking sheet that's been wiped with cooking oil and then sprinkled with a thin, even layer of corn meal, leaving about a half-inch between each roll. When they're all in, cover up the baking sheet loosely with cling wrap and allow to rise again for about 30 minutes, after which time the rolls should be about double their original height and grown together. Pop the sheet into a 375 °F oven for ten minutes, then give the sheet a half-turn in the oven and bake for about ten minutes longer or until the tops of the rolls are golden brown. Remove the rolls from the oven, allow them to cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes, then transfer them to a wire cooling rack for at least 30 minutes before cutting into one. Serve with a Polish sausage and plenty of spicy mustard.

Homemade pizza: bacon, chicken, barbecue sauce

One thing that I've managed to get reasonably good at making from scratch in the last couple years is my own pizza. Any simple white bread recipe can be used to make the dough for the crust; a decent tomato sauce takes a couple hours to make. Even so, it's not quite a routine thing. My mate and I still, I'm a little ashamed to say, buy pizza from the freezer compartment.

Today, though, with a long weekend day to occupy myself and some thawed-out chicken thighs to be used up, I made a different sort of pizza from what I usually make: barbecue chicken pizza with bacon, using a homemade sauce. Well, sort of homemade. Basically it's gussied-up ketchup that I threw this and that spice and flavoring into until it tasted OK:

---

Ingredients

1½ cups generic tomato ketchup
4 tablespoons brown sugar
4 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon mustard powder
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
several grinds of black pepper
1 teaspoon liquid smoke

Directions

Heat all these ingredients together in a saucepan at a very slow boil for perhaps ten minutes. That's it.

---

Beyond that, there's not much to say about making the pizza itself. I've used a bunch of different recipes to make crusts, most frequently the basic white bread recipes out of the 1975 edition (i.e. the last good edition) of The Joy of Cooking or out of The Fannie Farmer Baking Book. This time, though, because I was going to make the dough and then refrigerate it overnight before use, I employed Alton Brown's crust recipe from the "Flat is Beautiful" episode of Good Eats, except using ordinary active dry yeast bloomed in the warm water instead of the "instant" yeast he recommends. (Honestly I don't see what the point of "instant" yeast is. It's more expensive and you save maybe five minutes of times at most.) Brown divides his recipe of dough in half but I split it in three instead. Smaller pizzas mean less guilt upon eating a whole half of one.

The topping is simply bacon cut up small and browned, whence chicken thigh meat--I buy boneless and skinless thighs from the freezer compartment--is cut up fairly small, salted and peppered, and then thoroughly cooked along with the bacon before all the excess fat is drained off. Roll out the dough thin, apply a couple of tablespoons of barbecue sauce with a ladle, cover it with shredded mozzarella cheese, add some of the bacon and chicken along with some freshly chopped onion, bake the result until the edges of the crust are just starting to brown (about 19 minutes), and you've got a tasty pizza.