cooking @ home

Archive for the ‘Baking’ Category

For some time now I’ve been wanting to try my hand at baking. Ok, let me go back a bit. I don’t mean baking from scratch. I’m also not talking the other extreme of baking from a 100% premade box of Pillsbury or Duncan Hines or whatever. Somewhere in between.

You see, I already know from making cakes from a mix, that I’m bad at it. They taste good, but they look homemade. Ok, they look worse than homemade. Maybe it’s the frosting part that I don’t have down. I just know my cakes of the past tend to look something like that Salvador Dali painting where the watches are melted on tree limbs. When it comes to cookies from scratch things get weirder still. The easiest recipe I will botch totally. The more difficult cookie recipes come out fantastic. But I digress.

I wanted to “play” with doughs, that’s what I’ve been trying to say. Phillo, and puff, and pizza dough, and make my own raviolis (from premade sheets) and likewise my own fried dumplings or potstickers. For some reason, where I live, the supermarkets here don’t carry much of this. After going to five different markets I finally found one that carries pizza dough — as you saw in my recipe here — and another that carries puff pastry. Looks like the ravioli and wonton wrappers I’ll be making myself from scratch, and the philo dough is going to have to await my next trip into Center City Philly when I can get to a higher-scale food store.

In any event, after much searching I found frozen premade puff pastry. And, as usual — after a look at the basic directions and a couple of example recipes on the box — I proceed to totally ignore everything and went at it my own way. I always like a “get the lay of the land then walk somewhere” approach to my cooking. Especially if I’ve never done anything like it before. Let me understand the basics and a nuance or two, now dive in, get my hands into it and see what happens. If things go badly wrong, I’ll stop and do more basic research; if things go slightly wrong, that’s part of the game. And natch if things go great, that’s part of the game too — you just end up getting a high score for a newbie.

With that in mind, some jelly and some cream cheese in the fridge I went to work. In the next recipe you’ll see the progression. Meanwhile enjoy this one.

Fruit and Cream Cheese Triangles
©2007 Harry Kenney

ingredients:

One puffed pastry sheet
Strawberry preserves
Apricot preserves
Cream cheese
Egg and water for wash
Confectioners (powdered) sugar

Toss some flour on the cutting board or surface you’re using very lightly. Using a pizza cutter, slice the dough into nine squares, and then slice each square diagonally so you end up with 18 triangles.

Give two triangles a little egg wash. In one triangle place a teaspoon of preserves, atop it, a teaspoon of cream cheese. Take the second triangle, slightly pull it on all sides so it becomes wider than the first one, place atop to form the second side. Press down on the edges and with a fork crimp (notch) down all the sides. Put the fork lightly though the top of each mintart to create a hole for steam to escape from.

In an oven preheated to 350°F put the nine triangles on a cookie sheet preferably covered with parchment paper. Bake for 16-18 minutes until golden brown. Cover with confectioner’s sugar while still warm.

A few minor mistakes and one or two interesting things I came up with for this dish. Let’s get right to it.

First I put the entire pound of lasagna noodles in, only to find out I only needed maybe 1/4 to 1/5 of the box. Now I guess I’ll do something weird or slice them down or something, as I have 3/4 a box of cooked noodles now sitting in the refrigerator. Had I known, I would have chosen to use just what I needed. Live and learn.

I haven’t cooked everything. Not by a longshot. There are plenty of areas I still look forward to trying or conquering. I have a ton of casserole dishes (you know, the white ceramic kind) and some newer “tins” for cupcakes or brownies. What I don’t have is a lasagna pan for the simple good reason I never made it before. So when I fished the noodles out, I realized they were too large to fit what contained I did have. No biggie, this. I just set them up on the cutting board atop each other and halfed them.

My messiest mistake was not judging how high the layers would go. I grabbed this one casserole dish out and started, and immediately saw this was way too low (it was maybe 1 inch possibly 1-1/2 inches high. So then I got out my deepest one at 3 inches and had to transfer over noodles drenched in sauce over to the new dish without making much of a mess.

That’s pretty much it. Everything pretty much went off without a hitch. Ah, and I had one nice discovery I made as well …

It became apparent early that all those slices of eggplant, were I to precook them in a pan, even in my largest 13 inch frying pan, were going to take two to three rotations to get them all done. At four to five minutes per side, that was going to take a half hour and be very inefficient. Since I had to use the oven anyway, it only made sense to do them on a cookie sheet instead. The bonus was, while the eggplant slices were in the oven, the noodle sheets were boiling at the same time. Plus they would get done at about the same time too. Worked out great.

Eggplant Lasagna
©2007 Harry Kenney

ingredients:

eggplant, 2.5-3 pounds
1/4 box/pound lasagna noodles
8 oz. shredded mozerella or mixed Italian cheeses
1/2 cup parmagen
3 lb jar spaghetti sauce (or use your own homemade sauce)
2 eggs
1 cup Italian breadcrumbs
salt
pepper
garlic powder

Get water boilling for lasagna noodles. Meanwhile, slice eggplant into thin 1/4 inch slices. Salt and pepper on each side of slices. Add additonal garlic and parmesan cheese to Italian bread crumbs and mix. Dip each eggplant slice in egg wash then cover with breadcrumbs. Arrange on pre-greased (I used butter spray) baking sheet. Place in preheated oven at 350 for five minutes. Flip each slice once, and go for another five minutes.

As you’re putting the eggplant in the oven, place the noodles in boiling water and cook until til al dente. This is one of those rare times, when after draining the noodles you actually should put cold water on them, since you are both going to need to arrange them by hand and since they are going to get another cook in the oven.

Get out your lasagna pan or any sizable casserole dish — in my case (see photo) a deep oval casserole dish 11 x 8.5 x 3. Begin to layer: First place enough sauce to lighly cover the bottom, then overlapping sheets of lasagna noodles, slices of eggplant, cheeses (meaning the shredded and the parm, then more sauce. Continue the pattern. Make sure your uppermost or last layer is noodles, then sauce then cheeses.

If you have a long, wide pan, you might want to keep the oven at the current 350. Or if you have a shorter, deeper dish as I did, set oven for 375 for 35 minutes, covering with aluminum foil. At the 35 minute mark, remove the and bake another 10-12 minutes to get a nice crust on top. Makes 8-10 servings.

Some things I put off trying (for a while) having convinced myself that the item, the recipe, the dish is too intimidating. Oddly pizza was one of them. I know, silly — such a simple thing too! I think I know what it is. Failing something complicated seems fine, but failing something simple seems wrong. Thing is often the simplest things are the most difficult. No shame there. Plus, some of my best successes began as failures the first time out. Long story short, at long last I’ve gotten to make homemade pizza. And you know what? Don’t you put it off like I did. You’re missing out on some fun and some good stuff here!

I’ve tried a few homemade chinese dishes, all worked out. Already have my steak quesadilla recipe up as well. And now pizza. Am I going to stop doing take-out now? Heck no. Am I going to stop buying DiGiorno’s? Nope, there’s still that occasional late-night pizza urge that hits me after the store has closed and when I just don’t want to do much work. Besides, I don’t know about you, but I like to be treated or pampered once in a while, and having someone else do the cooking for me is just grreat. And the second best is sticking pre-made in the oven. Especially the delcious self-rising frozen pizzas of today!

That said, being able to do some of your favorite dishes that you normally get delivered or hat you run out and pick-up is a very “liberating” experience. Not only is it nice to say “hey, I can do that as well as they can” (and sometimes better) … but when you get to “home make” your take-out favories, it gives you tons more freedom. What does that mean?

It means you can give yourself more of what you like — with Chinese or pizza, more meat or more toppings. You can control the degree of spiciness — as with homemade quesadillas. Or, as with pizza, you can give yourself greater variety than what’s otherwise normally available. I must have no less than 25 pizza places covering where I live. Not a single one has ham and pineapple as toppings! Definitely none of them venture anywhere near the realm of the “dessert pizza”. (We’ll get to that again in a future recipe.) But making them myself, the sky’s the limit as to what I want, how I want it, how much of it I want!

That said, some tips and then the simple recipe. First off, almost everyone makes the mistake of putting on too much pizza sauce. A little goes a long way. Place some down on the dough. Move it all around with your tablespoon or big spoon or whatever you’re using. Looks like it needs more? Chances are it doesn’t. (Like everything else, practice makes perfect. You’ll figure out if it’s enough or not).

Next tip: Dough doesn’t have to be round. It’s tough, especially at first to make a round pizza. Don’t get hung up on how the overall shape looks. Homemade remember. No Jeffrey Steingarten or Ted Allen around to judge you on “shape concaveness” or whatever other ridiculous element. So, just chill out. This is meant to be one of the more fun things you’ll ever cook!

Also, keep in mind that pizza dough can be forgiving — up to a point. If you go too thin and make a hole (check out the one photograph above) you can even rip off a piece elsewhere and sort of “plug” the hole. That said, over kneeding or using a baking pin or recombining from scratch into a new ball — anything major such as that — will make for too tough of a crust.

One last tip for now. Either: get frozen pizza dough at the market, or buy some from your local pizza place (yes, some sell it) or, make it your own from scratch (seriously) — but whatever you do don’t use that Pilsbury silly puddy thing they sell. It doesn’t behave like normal dough. It has a mind of it’s own and it is stubborn. It also tastes more like a pretzel than a pizza.

Ok, not one but two pizza recipes here. Same recipe, different toppings. Try your own creations!

Homemade Pizza
©2007 Harry Kenney

ingredients:

Pizza dough
Spaghetti or tomato sauce
Bag of shredded mozzarella or Italian mixed cheeses
parmesan
garlic
basil
oregano

Follow the instructions if frozen dough, for mine, it said take out, put in bowl and let sit at room temperature for six hours. I did. But I also put a bit of olive oil all around it. And since I didn’t want any flying insects or dust or whatever, I also placed a paper towel on top of the bowl and got some string to hold it loosely there so it had a “breathable” lid. From there, six hours later, again, followed the instructions, stretching the dough out.

I find putting some spice down right on the dough before adding spaghetti sauce works great. For me, I sprinkle some garlic powder, dried oregano and dried basil on the dough. Plus a light dusting of parmesan. Then put down the sauce and then the shredded cheese and finally the toppiings.

Pepperoni and Jack Pizza

My local convenicnce store, Wawa, has a fresh snack section where one of the items they sell is this plastic cup or glass thing with two crackers in it, tons of sliced pepperoni and some monterey jack cubes. So I used those to make up the first pizza. More spices on top, into the oven.

Pineapple and Pork Roll Pizza

I wasn’t going to use the sliced boiled ham, too thin. I did have some premium ham in the freezer but that was frozen. Ah, Taylor’s Pork Roll next to the bacon and eggs in the fridge. Dunno what it is, it’s a cross between ham and sausage, basically smoked ham and spices. Think Canadian bacon with a definite sausage edge instead of a ham taste. A can of Dole Pineapple rings, cut into chunks. And then the spices on top and bake.

My instructions said 350F for 14 minutes and then turned out perfect. Out of one clump of dough (see photos) I got two pizzas, thin crusted. The pepperoni one I got eight slices out of it. The pineapple and “ham” one, I got six. Your mileage may vary.