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:

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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.

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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.

Homemade Naan Bread

I'm one of those people who thinks that just about any foodstuff can be improved by wrapping it in bread or pastry and, having a quantity of leftover coconut curry with pork still in the refrigerator to be eaten, I thought I'd try making my own naan bread to eat it with.

I've tried making naan once before with results that weren't wonderful. The product was tender and flexible only when it was fresh and hot; afterward it became somewhat stiff and brittle, like a flour tortilla that's gone stale. I can't remember exactly what I did but I'm fairly certain now I'd overcooked it. This time, though, the results were much better. I chose to adapt this recipe from Food Network for Indian Oven-Baked Flat Bread, liking it because it used plain yoghurt to add flavor and yeast for leavening, but I didn't mix by hand or bake the flatbread in quite the same way.

Ingredients

¾ cup tap water, warm but not uncomfortable to the touch
2 teaspoons granulated white sugar
1 packet (¼ oz.) active dry yeast
3 tablespoons plain yoghurt
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for handling and cooking the dough
1 teaspoon kosher salt
about 2½ cups all-purpose white flour
⅛ teaspoon double-acting baking powder

Directions

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a bread hook, whisk together the warm water, the packet of yeast and 1 tsp of the sugar to disperse the solids and allow to stand for 5-10 minutes until the mixture is light and bubbly. Then whisk in the yoghurt, the 2 tbsp of olive oil, the salt, the baking powder and the remaining white sugar. Add 2 cups of the flour and begin mixing with the bread hook, on the slowest speed at first until the flour is mostly incorporated and then up to medium speed as the dough begins to come together; it should be very sticky at this point.

Now add more flour, a couple of tablespoons at a time, giving each portion time to be kneaded in and completely incorporated. When the dough begins to lose its stickiness and start to pull away cleanly from the sides of the bowl, knead the dough with the bread hook for 2-3 minutes longer and then stop. Remove the dough from the bowl--whose sides should be fairly clean now, not sticky--wipe the inside of it with olive oil, return the dough to the bowl, cover the bowl with cling wrap, and place it in a warm spot for about an hour to rise. (Lacking anything better, I create a "warm spot" by turning on my electric oven for about a minute and then turning it off and keeping the oven door closed. Some ovens have a "warm" setting but trust me, it will be far far too hot for rising bread.)

When the dough has risen to at least double its original bulk it's ready to roll out and cook. In a flat-bottomed 10" heavy frying pan or skillet--I use cast iron--place about a tablespoon of olive oil to heat on medium. While the oil heats up, pinch off a ball of dough about the size of a tennis ball and flatten it with your hands on a well-floured wooden board, using as much flour as needed to keep it from sticking either to your hands or to the board. Then flour up a wooden rolling pin and roll out the flattened dough, turning the pin in all directions and applying more flour to prevent sticking, until you've rolled it out into a disc about 8" in diameter and perhaps ⅜" thick. Now lay the disc in the hot, oiled skillet--the oil should be hot enough to flow freely but not smoking hot--and cook the disc of dough for 60 seconds. It will bubble up in places as it heat, irregularly and quite dramatically at times; let it. Confirm that the dough is done by lifting up one edge slightly with a thin spatula; the surface should be browned in spots but still mostly pale. Then flip the disc over and cook it for 60 seconds longer. Again, it may bubble up during cooking but leave it be. Finally remove the cooked flatbread to a plate, add a little fresh olive oil to the skillet, and roll out another ball as before. Continue until all of the dough is used up.

The naan bread is of course best piping hot and tender, but after they've had some time to cool it can be stored in a large plastic ziploc bag.

Welcome to Monophylos Mageiros

"Mageiros" is an Attic Greek word meaning "cook" or "butcher"; also, it was an available name on both Blogger and Tumblr! I decided to set up shop on Blogger instead of Tumblr, though, because Blogger seems a bit better adapted to posts that might be both heavy on text and require a bit more formatting than Tumblr's simpler format likes.

Anyway, since cooking and baking are a major part of my life and I'm always trying to stretch the bounds of what I'm capable of doing, I thought that my friends and acquaintances might be interested to see what I've been working on. I've dabbled with many different things a little and I love a challenge; sometimes that results in failures both amusing and infuriating, such as my less than successful attempts to make completely vegan black bean hamburger patties. But failures can be as fun to read about as successes, so I'll not be shying away from describing both here.

In any case, welcome to my little cooking corner.