Beer Pizza

Beer + Pizza is one of the classics, but what of pizza made with beer, rather than consumed with beer?  As a topping, beer lacks a certain something (mostly solidity).  However, as a part of the crust it performs quite well.

It happens not completely irregularly that beer is made in our house.  This is a bit of a hobby when living in the states but has assumed a new level of necessity since moving to Italy.  While wine is good, cheap and plentiful here the beer situation is more or less completely reversed.  There are microbreweries, but they are perhaps 30 years behind the states (and several hundred years behind the UK or, say, Belgium).  The teacher of the beer class in the Association of Italian Sommelier's course started out by reassuring the class that good beers really do exist, they just hadn't ever seen or tasted one.  The selection around Florence has never lead me to doubt his statements.

So, should we wish to have good beer, it is largely necessary to make our own.  Now, for those of you who don't habitually ferment alcoholic beverages at home, one of the side effects is a lot of yeast cells that don't end up in the finished product.  Usually, one makes a gift of them to the municipal sewer system, but you can extend their stay in your house by using them in bread, which usually ends up with even better texture than the results we get with a normal sponge (3 day) culture.  The only downside is the level of hops present in the lees can be pretty overpowering if you've just made, say, an IPA or some such thing.

The beer in question was a stout hopped like an IPA, so bitterness was going to be a part of the pizza.  The idea was to put together something that would balance that bitterness while including it as an intentional element -- the "ingredient of honor" even.  Normally (and this will strike some as heresy) I'm fairly anti red sauce on pizza.  I worked at several pizza places during school and grew to feel that the stuff was both deeply overused and a bit boring.  To go with this crust though, I wanted the robustness and sweet/tangy essence that a good red sauce brings to the table.  For toppings I ended up just using fresh mozzarella, sweet Italian sausage and bitter green olives with the pits removed.   One of the things I learned working in those pizza shops was that while lots of toppings can be fun, they really aren't necessary, or even especially desirable.  This simple setup played the nutty bitterness of the crust off the lightly sweet/sour savoriness of the sauce and while the cheese and sausage provided a base of unami/meaty/savory goodness the green olives added another salty note and referred back to the bitterness of the crust. 

Beer Pizza: (this assumes that you know how to make your own bread and that you happen to have the leavings from beer making sitting around).

Dough:  Take around a cup of the lees left over from racking your beer, add a cup of flour and let sit for a few hours (or overnight) to get the yeast started again.  (If necessary you can add more yeast, also, depending on how hoppy your beer is, you may want to use a lees/water mixture here).  Take your sponge and add another two cups of flour, two tablespoons of olive oil and a pinch of salt.  Kneed, then brush with olive oil and put in a covered bowl in a warm place to rise.  After it has risen dust your baking surface (cookie sheet, pizza stone, cast iron skillet, what ever you use...) with corn meal (polenta) and stretch out the dough.

Sauce:  Coarsely dice a small/medium onion and 3 (+/-) cloves of garlic.  Heat up some olive oil and saute the onion and garlic until the garlic is starting to turn golden and soft, then add a can of whole tomatoes -- including the juice -- a teaspoon or so of (entirely optional) tomato paste and the usual herbal suspects and simmer for at least 15 min. (or until quite thick, whichever is longer) breaking the tomatoes up as you go.  Spread thinly on the crust.

Shred/tear/slice your mozzarella and spread it (thinly), followed by the sausage and olives.  The toppings really don't need to be very thick -- so long as you have some of everything on most slices your fine.  Neapolitan pizza has even less than that.  Cheese spreads as it melts, you don't have to go overboard (though I admit it's pretty fun now and again, it just doesn't make a better pizza).  Stick your pizza in the oven and cook til the crust is golden brown.

Butter+sugar=awesome

infinite cookies

It's hard to go wrong with butter and sugar, especially when they're the main ingredients in your cookies. Now, it's true, that's not quite a fair portrayal of Swedish wedding cakes--there is the possibility that they have more flour than sugar, although it is a bit hard to tell (you'll soon understand why).

Swedish wedding cakes have been a traditional christmas favorite in the McGuire family for as along as I can remember--in fact, I'm told my parents have made them every year at Christmas since they were married in 1969. As kids, my brother and I always left a plate of cookies and a cup of glog for Santa on the coffee table by the fire place before going to bed on Christmas eve--and not surprisingly, they were always all gone in the morning (and I don't think the that's because the dogs ate them). Usually it is Mom that makes the cookies, but in recent years they have often become my responsibility when I go home for the holidays. Not always completely successfully I might add. My parent's current oven is notoriously complicated in its design--not only does it take forever and a day to heat up, it is also easy to put on the wrong setting. I believe it was the last time I was in charge of the cookie making at home that I managed to turn the oven on broil (or something) instead of bake and managed to pretty thoroughly burn the top of the Swedish wedding cakes before noticing something wasn't quite right.

The last two years, though, we've been in Italy for Christmas. And seeing as it wouldn't be Christmas without Swedish wedding cakes, I've taken to making them here. In fact, last year I think I made about 4 different batches--some for us, some to bring to a choir pot-luck, some to give to people. But no glog. This year, though, I only made two (just as well, you will probably think when you see how much butter they take). It turns out that finding powdered sugar in large quantities in Italy is a challenge. Unlike in the States, it does not come in boxes here. It comes in small packages with about enough for one dessert recipe, and it is almost always vanilla flavored. Luckily if you go the right grocery store, you can get a package with 200-250 grams. Not quite enough for one round of cookies, but close.

Below you will find the recipe--the gist of which is, get your 250 gram block of butter, toss it in a bowl, cream it with some sugar and flour, bake, then add more sugar. Don't let the absurd amount of butter deter you. These cookies are probably the best cookies ever. Period. I'm sure your doctor will understand your high blood pressure if bring him a few.

Pacman -- what happens when panettones fall

The recipe (directly copied and pasted from a file of McGuire family favorites sent to me by my mother--also includes the famous carrot cake with marsipan bunnies, sure to show up around July for my birthday, and Sherri Hennigan's raw apple cake):

Ingredients:

I cup unsalted butter, softened

½ cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ cup finely chopped pecans (I used walnuts because pecans don't really exist much if at all in Italy)

2 cups flour

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Cream butter and sugar

Add vanilla and nuts

Add flour. Mix well, with hands when necessary.

Roll into small balls.

Bake for 10-12 minutes at 375 degrees – until slightly brown on the bottom

While still hot, roll in powdered sugar and place on waxed paper to cool.

When cool, roll a second time in powdered sugar. (**Do NOT skimp on the sugar**, they should be well covered both times. Hence--it isn't in the end totally clear if you add more sugar or more flour)

Zucca Fettucini

We are deep in the season of zucca (any orange/yellow winter squash) over here, which is great -- it's cheap, tasty stuff that will last for a while in the fridge and the smallest piece you can get anyone to sell you will feed two for several days.  But -- and I hate to admit this -- I've been getting a little bit bored with zucca ravioli and browned sage butter.  Or rather, it's not that I'm tired of the flavor, but I feel a bit of a cheat doing the same thing too many times. 

The idea behind this sauce was to make something that played more directly to the savory side of zucca, letting its sweetness simply be there rather than highlighting it with a pinch of nutmeg as is often done in ravioli filling.  To establish a base of savory, unami goodness (and an excellently meaty funk) I started by frying diced guanciale with a bit of olive oil (cured pork cheek, the more intensely flavorful lowbrow cousin of pancetta) until most of the fat had rendered out.  In a quest to increase the savory I then browned the diced chunks of baked zucca (in the guanciale and olive oil) and put them aside.  The pan got deglazed with dry vermouth (any excuse to add wine, but the acidic note works to balance the cream and meat) before adding cooking cream to make the sauce.  When the pasta was just about done cooking the guanciale and zucca went back in the cream, along with a bit of pasta water, followed shortly by the drained (and intentionally undercooked) pasta.  Everything was then allowed to macerate on low heat for a bit to let the flavors really integrate. 

There had been an especially bountiful crop of crumbs from the last batch of bread, which were just calling out to be used in something.  To these crumbs I added a handful of chopped filberts (hazelnuts, depending on what part of the country you're from) some paprika and sea salt and toasted them in olive oil until quite crispy.  This became the garnish for this (and the next couple of nights) pasta.

The balance here is what really makes it work:  The savory creaminess of the guanciale and cream is primary, but sweetness of the zucca really comes through and both of these elements play off the crunchy/salty/spicy nut and breadcrumb mixture to create a varied but balanced dish. 

Cinghiale Ragu

still life with odori and knife

So our December guest has now flown back across the Atlantic to California, but before she left we made one last iconic Tuscan meal: Cinghiale Ragu with Pici.  This one is rather sentimental for me -- you see, I learned to read (English) on Asterix and Obelix (as well as Pogo, which could account for my somewhat idiosyncratic use of our fair language) the indomitable Gauls who were forever extolling the virtues of wild boar, aka cinghiale.  This is boar hunting season, so it's easy to find here.  Taste wise, cinghiale is to pork as buffalo is to beef -- leaner, darker meat with a more intense flavor.  Our butchers would have ground it for us, but I forgot to ask. 

me "grinding" the cinghiale

A caveat: I don't really know if the style of ragu I make is fiorentino or something else (but there may be a ragu battle in my near future to find out -- new years eve was interesting).  I "learned" to make ragu through having it on pici several times in the Val d'Orcia (in Tuscany, south of Sienna), watching one of our friends make it once and having a very different style ragu (made with cream, not tomatoes) a few times in the north of Italy.  Some of the Ragu I've had here in Florence has been rather different -- more on the lines of a bolognese than what I usually make.