Wholewheat pizza!

You might remember my excited experiments with pizza in the past. Recently I discovered how easy it is to get fresh yeast in Delhi and since then my pizza making has gone to a whole new level. For starters, please ditch the false lore that states pizzas require sauce and cheese. They don't. No, really. Second, also toss out the idea that they need to be round. Ever since my pizza revolution, as I like to call it, I've been making them all the time in my rectangular baking pans and putting all sorts of things on them. I've done potatoes+cheese+onions, random pasta sauce+cheese, potatoes+sausage+cheese, random veggies+cheese and my most recent favourite, blanched spinach, potatoes, onions and eggs. That's right, no sauce, no cheese. Of course all these things get eaten so fast I rarely get pictures, so here's one I took this morning of reheated lunch, terribly lit in the direct sunlight from my kitchen window and gently speckled by the shadow of the mesh.

Pizza from scratch!

It took two tries to get this right, and I'd say it still needs work, but I'm SO EXCITED! =) I've been wanting to try pizza dough forever, especially since people tell me it's easy. (Apparently not for me.) So I scooted over to, yup, you guessed it, smitten kitchen, and dug this one out. The first time I tried it I made my usual overestimating-the-power-of-ingredient-mapping error, and tried to have a slow rise in the fridge. Guess what happened? I came home and it was a rock hard, ice-cold ball. Took me over two hours to get it pliable, and of course it didn't rise at all.

The second time I left the dough to rise outside, after activating the yeast. It worked much better, only it took a good 2 and a half hours. The dough was not very pliable; in fact I think it might need more water here in Hyderabad. I don't know how it is supposed to turn out relative to bread dough, but it was a lot harder and tougher.

My second big problem was that I neither have a pizza stone nor a big oven. Never fear, I improvised a pizza stone by using the back a steel plate (good South Indian kitchen) that I heated in the oven, and then oiled with caution to prevent sticking. I needed to roll the dough out really thin though, but the end result was fabulous!

Oatmeal Bread

After the challah I decided I was feeling brave enough to try for real bread, and surfing the interwebs I found this. Valour might as well be out and out, and since I miss Fairway so much, I decided to try. The result is this luscious, dense almost cake-like bread, that is DIVINE toasted. I never managed to wait the required 40 min, and put butter on it out of the oven so it melts, and then there's strawberry jam too... *drool*

However, it's a little sweet for other uses, so next time I might omit the sugar and add more salt. I also use wholewheat flour and desi yeast so my results might not be what she intended. It is scrumptious though. The first time I made it, I didn't activate the yeast, and so the dough didn't rise, and I had to leave it overnight. The second time, I activated it too early, so the yeast rose on it's own, and then the dough didn't rise too much.

The next time I think I will activate it a bit and let it rise overnight in the fridge or something like that, to see if it puffs up much.

Bananananana bread. Again

Now I know I've posted a Banana Bread recipe already, but hey, when Deb's got a recipe up, I have to try it. And boy was it worth it.

I had these bananas left over from the GM, that were black on the outside. I mean, I know I'm OCD about bananas, but even my mother wouldn't have eaten these. I also didn't have bourbon in the house, but the smell of the cinnamon and the bananas made me think of Old Monk, and would you know it, there is one way to make Old Monk taste good. I don't have a loaf pan, as previously discussed, so I baked it in my borosil lasagna pan. Worked. Turned out skinny as hell, but hey, so what.

Heads up, don't look closely at the pictures of the batter. Seriously. I had to toss most of them they made me nauseous.

Challah bread

When I went to diners on the Upper West Side, especially, EJ's on 81st and Amsterdam, They used to make Challah French toast. I always wondered what it was. One day our water was a cute jewish boy who bantered a lot, and he talked me into trying challah. I loved it. He also taught me to pronounce it heh. I had no idea why it was special etc, but I had to learn to make it. So when Israeli friend offered to teach me to bake I said yespleasechallah! With a little help from Peter Reinhardt.