meansoybean

Today’s organic basket contained a pumpkin! It’s a good size, measuring about 6 inches in diameter. What will it become… a pie? muffins? something savory? I’m not sure yet, but if I find a no-rolling-required, very simple (read: no fail) crust recipe I wouldn’t say no to a making a pie.

I also got turnips, leeks, French onions, roquette, leafy cabbage and lettuce. I can’t believe there are only three baskets left! I’m crossing my fingers for more winter squash… I love em all!

Half-way through the month and I find this survey?
Geez, am I out of the loop. Copy, paste, repeat!

So we’ve covered the important tools needed to make awesome pizza in part 1, now we can move onto the fun part!

Unless you’ve lived under a rock, you’ve heard of Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread recipe. I was, admittedly, a year late in joining the craze but after a year of doing it his way, I got tired of making bread one loaf at a time. There had to be a better way. Enter Zoë François and Jeff Hertzberg’s book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The authors are big proponents of pizza stones and peels, prompting me to come up with alternative solutions. Now, thanks to them, I’ve always got a big batch of dough in the fridge, waiting for a piece to be torn off to be made into something delicious.

Delicious like pizza! So why go for a frozen pizza, store-bought pizza crusts or settling on ordering in a lame-ass vegetarian pizza with no cheese? Nothing beats fresh, out-of-the-oven, made-to-measure pizza pies. So what you’ll need is their basic recipe, as follows:

3 cups lukewarm water
1 1/2 tablespoons granulated yeast
1 1/2 tablespoons kosher or other coarse salt
6 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
Cornmeal for the pizza peel

Combine the water, salt and yeast. No need to dissolve all the way. Mix in the flour well, ensuring no dry spots. Let rise at room temperature for 2 to 5 hours, then into the fridge for two weeks. Tear off as needed.

Now you’re ready to start cooking. Put your stone/griddle in the cold oven and preheat for about 20 minutes at 450°F. Then go ahead and cut off a piece of dough. The size depends on how big a pizza you want to end up with, and how thick you like your crust. To give you an idea, for a thin-crust 9 inch pizza, I use a lump that’s almost the size of a tennis ball, maybe a tiny bit less.

Flour the dough in your hands just a little and start to shape the dough into a small disc. You can then put it down on your lightly floured and cornmealed surface and use the rolling pin to flatten it out. (I like to slowly stretch out the disc in my hands first, rotating around the edge so as not to overstretch and create holes/rips). If you want to stretch your dough a bit more but aren’t easily able to with the rolling pin, over turn a bowl with a smooth bottom and rest it on top. Let gravity do the work while you prep the next pizza crust.

As you can see, I’ve got some stainless steel bowls that are perfect for the job.

For the toppings, it’s really to your liking, or what you have in the fridge. This is what I use, in this order:
• a thin layer of tomato paste, unless I have leftover pasta sauce
• Yves pepperoni slices
• Earth Island’s Vegan Gourmet cheese, sliced thin
• a mixture of chopped onions, chopped mushrooms & peppers lightly coated in olive oil
• black olives, sliced

Once you’ve layed out all of the toppings, load up your peel and slide the pizza onto the stone/griddle. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Here is a picture just after being placed in the oven. When ready the pizza should be nicely browned in spots and the cheese will be melty. Just remove from the oven, slice and serve. Enjoy!

It sounds like a lot of work, but with prepared dough, it only really takes 15 minutes of prep plus baking time. Trust me, it’s totally worth it!

So let’s just say you’re on a pizza kick and want to eat it every night for dinner after a horrible day at the office. Most people would probably direct you to the frozen pizzas, or ordering in. Maybe the more DIY people would tell you to cut corners buy getting a store-bought crust. But I say there’s nothing like making it from scratch, and it’s totally possible to do this on a daily basis. And I’m going to tell you how, you lucky person… but first we need to start with the basics.

Don’t be tricked into getting stoned…
Unless you have a fire oven in your backyard, you’re going to have to use your conventional oven. But no fear, you too can enjoy yummy pizza — right in your own home. A lot of sources will tell you to get a pizza stone. I don’t know about you, but I was very reluctant in buying one. A properly thick one would have cost a lot, and you have to be very careful with them, lest they crack. Also, I have a lot of stuff in my kitchen and thought a stone wouldn’t be any much use other than in the oven. That’s when it hit me… a cast iron griddle! How’s that for versatility?

So I promptly got a Lodge cast iron griddle that’s primarily used as a pizza stone in the oven (flat side, of course). I also use it on the stove-top, mainly for weekend pancakes. I wasn’t sure it would work, because I couldn’t find anyone else who had done this, but I’m so glad I took the plunge. As a stone, it’s perfect and I highly recommend taking this route. The greatness of cast iron cookware is unmatched, really.

Did somebody say Super Peel?!
Another handy tool is a pizza peel. I had read that they’re a bit tricky, needing cornmeal or flour as “lubrication” between dough and peel-surface. I was up for the challenge, but couldn’t find a thin peel in my area, no matter how hard I tried. But then I heard about the Super Peel. On a trip across the border I manage to snag one of these babies. Let me tell you, this thing is so amazing. I’m happy I got it as a gift for myself. You don’t need any “lube”, just slide it under your pizza, walk it over to the oven and slide onto your cast iron griddle. There are no spills and no wonky pizza crusts!

Other things you’ll need are a rolling pin, which is pretty standard. I have a simple bamboo “stick” one with no handles. I also like to roll the crusts out on a silicone mat. I don’t have a fancy Silpat. But a clean countertop will do nicely as well.

Come back tomorrow for part two, ya hear? In this last part I’ll be talking about making the pizza, dough and all!

I visited with some acquaintances yesterday, an elderly professor and her daughter, both of whom I had not seen in over a decade. Due to the social distance involved, I did not want to make a fuss about my veganism in advance. But after a half-hour of ‘catching up’ in the sitting room, it was time to move to the dinner table; and time for that dreaded moment where I would be forced to admit to my nutritional perversion.

Being in polite company, the hosts took in the news without flinching. The usual queries followed thereupon (no butter, huh? ..and no eggs, either?), and I did my best to respond simply and without pretension. Past interactions of this nature have taught me to tread carefully when explaining my dietary choices to avowed carnivores. I have encountered a whole spectrum of reactions, ranging from veiled hostility to bitter defensiveness.

This time around was a new one, though: after some fashionable references to nutritional fads in the news, one of the hosts asked me point blank whether I would feed my babies a vegan diet, too.

Now, bear in mind that although I’m a svelte, virile, heterosexual in a committed relationship, I don’t have any babies — as of yet — and no plans to acquire said babies in any imaginable term.

But there was no time for such considerations, as the question was merely rhetorical, a lead-in for the real query: had I heard about “those two people who starved their baby in Florida”?

I had indeed heard something about a case like this, but lacking the relevant details, and not wanting to upset my hosts further, decided to plead ignorance and broached a new subject to dislodge the uncomfortable silence. Noblesse oblige — I had expected this sort of unpleasantness from the outset and somehow managed to repress my rage at the time — but today the incident bothers me.

* * *

It turns out there’s been a whole “vegan baby-killer” meme going around over the past few years. The media were quite pleased to blow the stories way out of proportion, and the blogospheric echo chamber strove to keep up, so many references abound.

Now, granted, a small percentage of any constituency is bound to fuck up in life, and vegan parents are surely no exception. The two cases that appear to have been at the source of the meme are muddled at best, and I wouldn’t comment on them anyway without further research. Much has been spewed about the subject already.

I’ve gotten accustomed to being questioned in detail about my lifestyle almost every time I meet someone new (unless they’re cool, which is a rare occurrence). But with this kind of b.s. clearly making its imprint on the average person, I can only imagine how difficult it must be for the majority-responsible vegan parents out there, especially as health-related reasoning is partly what led me to veganism in the first place (ultimate sustainability being numero uno on this Norwegian’s grand list of priorities).

Well, until next time — stay angry.