Pizza

(Both recipes this week came from “Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook”.)

This week I decided it was time to do some savory baking. Pizza crust it was!

This pizza crust started with flour, sugar, salt and yeast. Water was added and this dough was allowed to rise until doubled in size. Once it had risen, it was punched down and then allowed to rise one more time.

Meanwhile, I worked on the tomato sauce for the pizza. I used my hands to squish two cans of whole peeled tomatoes in a bowl and added in some dried oregano. This went into a pot on the stove and was supposed to simmer for fifty minutes to thicken.

After the second rise, the dough was cut in half and one half was wrapped in plastic wrap and left at room temperature:

The oven was preheated and a baking stone was placed in the bottom of the oven.

The other half of my dough was allowed to sit for five minutes, and then it was shaped into a round. My dough was being cranky with me; parts of it would stretch beautifully and part of it would rip almost immediately. I finally got a good shape formed and placed it on a cookie sheet that was sprinkled with cornmeal.

My tomato sauce never thickened up. The recipe indicated that I should have cooked the tomatoes in a skillet, but I don’t have a skillet large enough to accommodate 56 ounces of tomatoes. I cooked mine in a large stockpot with the lid on. Maybe I should have left the lid off. I dunno. I ended up with more of a tomato juice than tomato sauce. It would have to do:

Once the sauce was down, I placed some sliced fresh mozzarella on the pizza:

On top of the mozzarella, I added pepperoni, chopped red peppers, chopped onions and Parmesan cheese:

The pizza was supposed to be slid off the cookie sheet (or pizza peel, if you’re lucky enough to have one of those) directly onto the baking stone. I couldn’t for the life of me get my pizza to slid off the cookie sheet, so I just put the cookie sheet on top of the baking stone. I probably would have ended up with a crunchier dough if I’d put the pizza right on the stone, but I was pretty happy with my results:

While the first pizza baked, the process was repeated with the second round of dough.

On Thursday, I decided to attack something a little different and make almond macaroons. I’ve been obsessed with macaroons since eating a Framboise-flavored one from Pistacia Vera a few months ago. There’s a recipe for French Almond Macaroons in Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook and it didn’t look too scary, so I went for it.

The recipe started with two ounces of almonds being ground into a fine powder. This was mixed with confectioner’s sugar. In the bowl of my KitchenAid stand mixer, I whisked egg whites until they were foamy, then added a pinch of salt and granulated sugar and whisked until the mixture reached soft peaks. Half of the sugar/almond mixture was sprinkled over the eggs and folded until just combined. I then added a little vanilla and the remaining sugar/almond mixture and folded again until just combined:

This mixture was transferred to a pastry bag. Martha suggests that one should dip a one and a half inch round cookie cutter in flour and then mark circles on parchment paper-lined cookie sheets to use as a stencil. I tried this, but apparently used a cookie cutter that was quite a bit larger than one and a half inches. My first round of macaroons went on My Precious looking a little like this:

And of course, once they’d baked for twenty minutes, they came out looking like this:

Epic fail. Luckily, I realized as I was piping those macaroons that they were going to be way too big. So I free-handed the rest of my macaroons and the second batch looked much better:

So I ruined most of my vanilla macaroons. Luckily, I’d planned to make chocolate ones as well, so at least I had some more ingredients to work with. I whipped up a chocolate batter that was almost identical to the vanilla, except that two tablespoons of cocoa powder were mixed in with the sugar/almond mixture:

These ones came out much better:

The chocolate ones came out much better than the vanilla ones. I ground the almonds a little finer for the chocolate which I think made a big difference as far as texture is concerned. And the vanilla ones had an almost popcorn-y flavor, which was strange. I definitely want to make these again. I’m planning to experiment with different flavors. I think a mint macaroon might just be incredible.

Next week I’m planning to bake a Strawberry Pie especially for my grandmother and some sugar cookies for my dad for Father’s Day. I need to make a trip to Sur La Table to pick up some cookie cutters that are right up his alley…