Make Friends with your Baker

Word Dan on bringing out the baker in all those dedicated to the delicious. It's all about sustainability these days and while urban delicacies such as squirrel and pigeon can satisfy your needs, they are best suited for hungry lumbermen deep in the woods and crack bums from a neighborhood near you.

Back to the bread. Being a slave to the corporate world and all, I'm all about building strategic relationships. I like to leave some things to the pros, and focus on my strengths. Tempted to drop some econ. terms on you like comparative advantage, I'll sum it up to this: bakers do it best, and can offer me much of the pleasure of hand made dough without the sloppiness and white stains that often come with it...

Having a talk with a baker I visit regularly, he mentioned that he could make one big, freshly risen pizza dough, clear bag and all (see Dan's post on making bread) for the low low price of 2.50.

After some careful research, I decided to do two things that were foreign to me: Grill a pizza with fresh dough & incorporate raw eggs and letting them cook through right on the pizza. Being completely inept at laying out pizza dough, my creation looked straight up retarded. Fortunately the delicious factor more than made up for my less than optimal form on this one.

Here are the participants in this dish:
Pizza dough
Pizza sauce (canned does just fine)
An onion, cut up real fine with a sharp ass knife*
3 big ham slices
4 Huevos (Mexican for eggs)
Parmesan, cut into petals
Basil leaves

*No joke, read all the techniques about cutting an onion and not crying you want, the sharper your knife, the less you damage the onion and release all the delicious juices that are meant to stay inside, and most of all: the less you cry

For starters, the dough. Most of the work is done for you if you buy fresh dough, but you still have the opportunity to fuck this up, so listen up.
Let it get to room temperature if you are freshly busting it out of the fridge. Lay down some flour and work it to get it spread out. Tossing it in the air Italian style, I found out, is much harder than it looks on TV. So here's my advice. Hold it from the top with one hand, and slightly pull down with the other. Keep rotating the dough with both hands, stretching from the bottom. Think of a rapper cranking his wheel. For extra steez, mean mug a bit. Drive slow homie.



Before going any further, get your grill ready. One side real high, the other on low. As it's heating up, toss your onions and cook them down in butter and or oil to desired softness.

Make sure your grill is real clean and wipe some olive oil on the high side. Toss that doughy goodness right on there. In about a minute, you should have a slightly bubbly, golden on the bottom pizza dough. Pull it off.



Lay the dough down on a cutting board, COOKED SIDE UP. Mash your knuckle into the four key areas where you will eventually put the eggs, forming a slight divot to ensure less runniness. Toss on the sauce, ham and onions, in that specific order on top of the COOKED SIDE OF THE PIZZA. Don't make me tell you which side again.



Crack the eggs on there. The onions will absorb what the eggs release and from there, a match made in heaven. Lightly top with Parmesan and basil. Put in on the low heat side, as far away from high heat as possible and close the lid. The BBQ should know what to do from there. The eggs and dough should cook in roughly the same amount of time, less than ten minutes I'd say.

And there we have it. If all of Ottawa were to try this, I'd give Pizza Pizza one week before it's looking to refinance its loans and ignoring calls from creditors.

-Dave, Dedicated to Delicious

make dough. make bread.

A close friend and associate of mine has often mused over his ideal living situation. A personal oasis based on his love of seclusion (disdain for humanity) and appreciation for natures bounty (fueled by rampant conspiracy theories involving evil corporate conglomerates hijacking our blood stream by tainting our food with chemical laced corn and soy).

Whilst taking some time to indulge ourselves in the fantasy of living in an 'off the grid ' setting, involving solar panels, a well, many fruit trees and a few farm animals to supply your food (think Thoreau but with salt and butter) I decided to find ways in which I could draw myself away from convenient so-called necessities that support companies with values that disagree with my own.

I tried hunting in the city but squirrels are quick and rats are fucking gross. The pigeon I did catch wouldn't stop convulsing and i lost my nerve and ran away. I set up a rain barrel to collect water but no sooner did the clouds part then the chemical cocktail contained in my resevoir turned putrid and eroded the barrel.

Feeling glum and out of ideas, I turned to my instinctual passion for cuisine. A fairly staple item that is bought and consumed in most households is bread. Its convenient, nutritious, filling, and if you have two pieces and you stuff shit in the middle then you have a sandwich (see: food of the gods). I have minor training in how to prepare bread but my knowledge was of a more traditional sort and involved planning a few days ahead and appropriating natural yeast by fermenting flour over a few days. I'm trying to shed the grid here not be a maurder so I enlisted a baker friend and have compiled what I deem to be the easiest and most delicious "generic" bread recipe I could. It involves about 9 minutes of labour, and takes a total of two hours between resting and baking. This procedure will yield you two fair sized loaves that will see any household through a hungry week.

Youll need:

1125 grams (app. 7 cups) of flour (go all A.P if your into wonder bread, rock 25% whole wheat if you want nutrition

30 g salt (1.5 tbsp iodized table salt)

22g (1.5 tbsp) white sugar or honey

87 g (slightly under a quarter cup) butter

30 g (3 tbsp) instant active yeast

600-900 ml water (it varies depending on relative humidity where you are as flour is a diarrhetic)

So now youve got your business together, youre gonna start combing. Take a little flour and the (cold) butter and put it in the a food processor just long enough to incorporate (10-20 seconds) add this back in with the rest of the flour and then combine all your dry ingreidnts in a big dutty bowl good for mixin (see: popcorn bowl). Make a well in the centre and add about 200-300 ml of water. Stir your fingers around gradually incorporating flour into the mix. As it gets real thick add a little more water, about 50 ml at a time.

Continue mixing and lessen the amount of water you add until you've brought everthing together. It will be stiff in the sense that you can't draw a finger through it, but it should still be sort of slouchy. It will also be fairly sticky. Essentially when it looks like dough it is. I implore you to trust your instinct on this one. Holler at me if it doesn't turn out. But it will. Once you've reached this stage let the dough rest for 5-10 minutes with a damp cloth over top.

After its been allowed to rest (presumably you blazed in the meantime, or cracked a beer so you should be feeling chill) dump it onto a lightly floured work surface, preferably a clean one. Now you begin to knead. Essentially your going to fold from the back to the front, and then do a quarter turn. Continue this process well keeping your hands well floured and the work surface lightly floured. Its good to go light with the flour because you dont want large quantities of unincorporated flour getting in yo' bread. That's bullshit.

After about 7-10 minutes you'll notice your dough acquire a light sheen, s well as appearing to stretch over itself on the surface (literally stretch marks will appear). Stop kneading, start resting. the dough. drop it back into your bowl and either lay a damp cloth over the bowl or put the whole thing in a clear garbage bag and tie it off. Its gonna party for about an hour, during this time the yeast will consume the sugar and produce gas which will cause the dough to expand. Simultaneously the gluten will relax. Leave it for about an hour till it doubles in size. Don't fuck with it, don't poke it. Don't even think about it. What dough?

After a successful chill period you'll be so close to done that a little bit of stoke is allowed. Not too much yet you haven't really done anything. Grab the dough out of the bowl and squeeze the shit out of it. You'll feel all the air popping out. Take your reduced size ball and divide it into two or three depending on how big of loaves you want (consider that it will double in size). form them into loaf-y shapes. I chose something traditional called a 'boule' but i'm gnarly. Just make it loaf-like and don't over think it. For a laugh shape it like a dong. Send me the pictures. Let the loaves rest for another 30 min under a damp cloth.

If your a bit fancy you can egg wash it and it will come out shiny. I put a few slashes in the top cause it looks good and lets it rise better. About a quarter inch with a sharp ass knife will do (If you don't have a sharp ass knife then get one. Stop reading this and get one now. Nothing you'll ever read on here matters with a dull ass knife).

Let it bake on a lightly oiled tray at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes. Rotate half way through to get an even cook cause if your oven is like mine then it sucks. You'll know it's done because a)It looks done b) it smells done c) it doesn't feel super heavy for its size and d) when you tap the bottom it sounds hollow. Let it rest for at least a half hour. The bread is still cooking inside so get your greedy little fingers out of there. In the meantime go churn your own butter or collect honey from a beehive, these are necessary accouterments to your freshly baked bread. To store launch it in a freezer bag and let it chill in the fridge, slice as necessary or freeze half if your slow with the bread consumption.

I know this seem kind of heavy to a novice cook but its really not that hard at all. Expect to suck the first time, by the second time you'll do alright and by try number three you'll be a fucking master of the ghetto loaf. The excellent thing about this is if you bake on a sunday it will rock you all the way to the next sunday. Get a little routine going and start shopping for mountain cabins.