No Knead, Easy & Quick Pizza - It Can't Get Easier!

Its no secret that I love Peter Reinhart's Napoletana Pizza Crust, but I still keep looking out for and trying out new recipes. A good dependable recipe and a good pizza for all the times you need one. Peter Reinhart's recipe when you have the luxury of planning well ahead, flexibility to make pizza anytime over the next 3 days.  How about one when you need pizza in a real hurry without any prior planning?

Ever since I have discovered how easy it is to make pizza from scratch at home, ordering pizza in is something I can't digest. Good money spent on not-so-good stuff.  If I had my way and some cheese at home, I will have good pizza ready in, say, an hour and a half, sauce, dough and all? My kids wanted to order pizza one day and yours truly all but kicked my legs and cried, imploring not to do so. The trade off - my 11-year-old budding foodie would get to make the dough. The young food enthusiast these days has been contemplating gastronomy as one of his future choice of academic options! Food love, one trait he has inherited from me!

The deal I suppose was good enough for him to be content with eating dal-roti-subzi for the moment. The next day saw us all set to make pizza, the sauce ready to go on it, the elusive cheese reassuringly sitting in the fridge. A pizza from this no-knead flatbread was the plan. Sure made my son happy as he made it successfully!

Tough for a kid or a beginner to fail when the dough is as simple as gathering all ingredients in a bowl and beating 20 strokes with a wooden spoon. The sticky dough goes directly on your pizza pan,  prepare the toppings while it rises .The sauce can preferably be made before you make the dough as it also needs to cool. Rest the dough for 30-40 minutes and bake. No fuss, no knead, quick and easy!

The reliability of old tried and tested recipes always tempt me to play around, this time the playing around restricted to simply dividing the dough into 3 parts and baking it with sauce and toppings in a very hot oven. Really simple but also works really well! 

I tried this with a potato, onion, garlic and EVOO topping too which was OK-ish, but the classic tomato sauce and cheese will always be a favorite!

The recipe below makes 3 8-9'' pizzas, depending on the thickness of the crust.

Ingredients:

All purpose flour - 210 grams/ 1.5 cups approximately

Salt - 3/4 teaspoon

Garlic powder - 1/4 teaspoon (optional)

Instant yeast - 1 teaspoon (Use 1 1/8 teaspoon if using active dried yeast)

Olive oil - 1 1 /2 tablespoons

Lukewarm water - 3/4 cup / 180 ml

More extra virgin olive oil for greasing the pans
Homemade Pizza Sauce
Toppings of your choice.

Procedure : Generously grease 3 9'' round or square pans or two large sheet pans with extra virgin olive oil. Enough oil (say about a teaspoon per pan ) will give your pizza a golden and crisp crust, easy release too. Keep aside.

Sift together the flour, salt and garlic powder. Keep aside. Take the water, oil and yeast in a medium sized bowl, tip in the flour mixture. (If using active dried yeast, mix it with lukewarm water, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, allow to stand till frothy, 5-10 minutes, add the oil and the rest of the ingredients) With a wooden spoon, stir to bring it all together, then beat 20 strokes. The dough will be sticky. Divide it into three equal portions, you must eyeball correctly or weigh for uniformity in baking time and thickness of the crust of each pizza. Dump each portion on one pan. With greased hands, push the dough on the pan to make a 9'' round (about 5 mm aprox). (or smaller ones for a thicker pizza. I like mine with a thin crust). Try to keep the thickness uniform throughout (one of mine got a bit thicker in the middle). Keep in a warm place (cover if possible, taking care that the lid does not touch the crust or the area immediately around it) for about 25-30 minutes (may be 40-45 minutes when its not hot) or till the dough is puffy, not necessarily double.

Pre-heat the oven to 250 degrees C (or higher if you can set in your oven) in the meantime. Spread the sauce and the vegetables on it and bake for 13-15 minutes (couple of minutes longer for a thicker crust) or till golden brown around the edges (watch carefully towards the end as you don't want it to burn or turn into a cracker) Remove from the oven carefully, top with more sauce and cheese, bake another 2 minutes till or the cheese melts. Remove, allow the cheese to set for a minute, slice and serve immediately.

Not a bad crust for a super easy, tasty and quick pizza, what do you think? Way better than the one you will get in 30 minutes! So next time you need pizza on a whim, you may not really want to reach out for the phone...head to the kitchen instead!

The pizza is yeast-spotted!

Bloggers Table - Azure, Vivanta By Taj

There have been quite some meets happening at the Bloggers Table, Chef At Large, but I have had no luck being part of these these save for the first one at Blue Terrain, Novotel. Content at the moment that the kids are busy and happy, happier to have them out of my hair, but engaged elsewhere for sometime! But they are  back home too soon, back in my hair in no time! My sister took pity on me and offered to have my little monsters over for the weekend. Hard to say if the kids were more excited about it or me! A gentle nudge by Natasha Ali around the same time made me realize the Bangalore Table was to be hosted at Azure, Vivanta by Taj, Yeshwantpur the same Friday.  Happy coincidence as sister happens to live close by! Novena of  Edelman Private Limited, assured a decent spread of grub and drinks for me, a vegetarian and complete teetotaler. After dropping the kids off, hubby and I looked forward to what  was described as a Mediterranean Sojourn at Azure.

 The evening started with drinks at Shimmer, the bar. True to its name, Shimmer has a ceiling replete with dazzling suspended lights, a cheerful sight.  Oliveto, Watermelon And Basil Bramble and Rosemary Delight were made with flair, and anyone who wished to was given a chance to play bartender as well! A virgin version of Rosemary Delight for me. Am not much of a rosemary person, much less of a herbs in my drink person, so a couple of sips and I was done. 

The bar feels quite cramped though with narrow-ish spaces between the bar stools and the seating arrangement. Was quite late, an hour or more spent at the bar and we were all ravenous. Any more delay and I would have probably forgotten my manners and asked for my meal to be served!

We rapidly moved to Azure upstairs, a huge table laid for us bloggers and the press. Pleasant ambiance with a live counter nearby. The meal and the wait for it started with loads of cheerful banter - food, blogs, food obsession and photographing everything you eat. What else do you expect from a bunch of obsessed foodies meeting over a meal?

I opted to skip the soup as I find it takes a lot of precious space in my tummy and quite a bit of my appetite too! Though I would not have cared much for  the Lemony horse gram soup, I could have tried the Spanish Potato soup.

The first to appear on the table, the bread, was soft and served with soft butter, nice! The salad I had ordered, Plum Tomato Confit artichoke with cured buffalo mozzarella and French dressing was a burst of flavors, married so well, it hit the right spot! On any other day, I would not mind making a complete meal of one so good!  The Greek Salad was OK-ish and nothing to write home about. The salad did not reach Neha Mathur and we had to request for another, but it unfortunately did not reach the table at all!

 I loved the falafel, crispy and delicious! The dips that came along, tahini, Baba Ghanoush and hummus were disappointing though, missing critical flavor. The pitas were soft, though not particularly tasteful. The same was true with the aubergines which came along, no zing!

The talk and laughter though went on and on, one of those times when you enjoy like-minded company more, the food less!

The famished bunch that we were, we rapidly headed for the main course. My choice was Burrata with asparagus and vegetable mousseline. This, I belatedly gathered is an Italian cheese made with mozzarella and cream. Burrata arrived and how!! A colossal  portion of cheese no less, mozzarella on the outside and cream within. I love cheese, but then in considerably smaller portions as part of my salad or as a topping on some crusty bread. Burrata certainly aroused a lot of curiosity and the platter went around the table, everyone seemed to share my feelings about it. Rather sad, as such good cheese did not get its due, thanks to the size! May be it's just not my kind of a main course. I wished I had ordered the seemingly predictable Tortellini stuffed with cheese.

Swati saw my stuck-with-cheese predicament and shared her Tajine ( slow cooked vegetable stew with couscous) with me, a spoonful and sigh, another let down! As I was still hungry for my carbs, I requested for some rice which came along with another main course. This  was good, perfectly cooked aromatic rice, subtly flavored, with plenty of pine nuts, though a little less fat would have made it taste even better. I ate it with  some red bell pepper dip,  it helped take the focus off the grease!

I had already taken a sneak peak into the dessert menu and knew what I would order. Baklava! I have never tasted this legendary Middle Eastern dessert, layers of phyllo and nuts. I don't know if this is how baklava tastes, but it certainly did not have me swooning and digging in with all the gusto of a die-hard dessert lover.

Warm chocolate fallen cake with coffee ice cream beckoned to me loud from hubby's dessert platter and was it good! I got to try this at home sometime soon! The ice cream was mediocre, the flavor of coffee evident and quite nice, but the sandy-ness of it left a lot lacking in terms of texture. I would have much appreciated another Mediterranean dessert in lieu of the omnipresent sorbet.

My carnivore friends did not seem to be particularly impressed with their meal either, sad again!

So, the average meal was rounded off with the warm chocolate cake, the saving grace. It was quite late,  we had a long drive ahead with our poor man Friday at the wheels for the evening. Could not help but think, shouldn't a hotel the stature and reputation of Taj have infinitely higher standards? The menu had limited options, the serving sizes were decent though. Service could have been much faster and efficient. We would have loved it if the meal were as memorable as Taj is in our memories.

Thanks Taj for hosting our Table!

Coffee, Almond & Chocolate Dessert Cakes

So I turned a year older!  One of the things I look forward to is the cake I bake for myself. Its more fun as I don’t have to organize for a birthday party as I do for the kids.  And I can get away without cooking anything for the day if I chose to! A good time to get experimental as I can survive a not-quite-there cake as it is my birthday cake and just for the immediate family. A chocolate genoise I baked did not quite rise to the occasion –  was I grouchy! My mother thought I was crazy to be spending half a day baking myself a birthday cake and even crazier to be baking another after one failed! But that’s me and it makes me happy! At times like this, old cakes in your repertoire are saviors. You know you are sure to turn out something decent. This cake is one from my earliest baking days,  a recipe I have used innumerable times. Always tasted good and (sheepish!) was the only recipe I knew! An oil based one, makes a good tea-cake, works well as a base for a cream filled cake when moistened with the right amount of syrup.  It is not in the same league as a fatless sponge in terms of texture, but the chocolaty-ness of the cake makes up for it. But the cake surely takes fairly well to a decent amount of syrup and retains its texture when moistened and chilled. The cake came together quickly and baked quickly as I wanted a thinnish layer of cake and not too many cakes in numbers.  Lots of coffee, ground almonds and agar agar powder just enough to help the cream hold its shape once out of the supporting mousse strips.  Layers of chocolate cake and coffee almond cream – not a bad dessert for the birthday girl to eat on her birthday…and the next day too!! Chocolate Cake – A Nita Mehta recipe ( Sorry, don't remember the name of the book) Ingredients: All purpose Flour – 65 grams / 1/2 cup Cocoa powder – 4 tablespoons /20 grams approx Baking powder - 3/4 teaspoon Powdered sugar - 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons Oil – 6 tablespoons Eggs – 2, large / 96 grams Pure vanilla extract - 1/2 teaspoon Procedure:  Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees C / 350 degrees F. Grease, flour and line the bottom of an 8’’ square tin with baking parchment.  Shake off the excess flour. Keep aside.  Sift together the flour, cocoa and baking powder together thrice. Keep aside.  In a medium sized bowl, beat the eggs and vanilla for about 2-3 minutes (speed 3 on your hand mixer) or till double in volume.  On low speed beat  in the oil till incorporated, then the sugar. Beat just enough to incorporate well  Fold in the flour mixture gently. This makes a batter of dropping consistency, neither too thick nor thin. Spread the batter in the cake tin and bake for about  16-18 minutes or till a tooth pick inserted in the center comes out clean. Do not over bake or it will be dry. Allow the cake to cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then invert on a cooling rack, cool completely  Using a sharp serrated knife, cut the cake horizontally into 2 layers (about 5mm thick each worked best). Cut into circles with a sharp round cookie cutter. Keep covered in an airtight box till you make the cream. Before you make the cream, have your mousse strips (10-12), cake circles and syrup ready.  You can at this point soak a circle in syrup (read below) and refrigerate covered for an hour or more to see how much of syrup you will like in the cake and soak the rest accordingly. For the syrup Hot water –1/2 cup Instant coffee - 1 teaspoon Powdered sugar - 2 tablespoons (or 3 for a sweeter cake) Vanilla - 1/4 teaspoon Mix everything together, taste. I like the syrup to be just about sweet.  Cover and keep aside. This can be made ahead of time and refrigerated. If using coffee in the syrup you will need more sugar to temper the bitterness. For the coffee-almond cream :  Sweetened whipping cream, chilled – 2 cups Instant coffee powder –4-5 teaspoons ( I used 5) Powdered Sugar – 2 tablespoons (Read note) Agar agar powder (not flakes) –1/2 teaspoon Ground raw almonds (ground till powdery but with a bit of texture) - 1/2 cup Note: The non-dairy cream is sweetened, but I have used a bit more as there is enough coffee (to give good coffee flavor) to temper the sweetness. Without the extra sugar and so much of coffee the cream may taste a bit bland. Keep the beaters and a large bowl chilled.   Take about 6 tablespoons of the cream (from the 2 cups), agar agar and coffee in a small saucepan. On low heat, heat till bubbles form around the edge and towards the center. About 30 seconds to a minute. Be careful not to burn. Stir to mix with a spatula. Strain using a fine mesh strainer.  Allow to cool to room temperature.  Do not leave for too long as the agar will begin to set and you may need to re-heat and cool again.  Fill a larger bowl with ice cubes.  Sit the smaller bowl in the ice. While the hot cream cools, whip the remaining cream and sugar over ice. Once the beater marks start to show, add the coffee cream and continue to beat till soft drooping peaks form when the beaters are raised. Fold in the ground almonds. At this stage, the cream will be of spooning consistency (will set more firm on refrigeration, so do not keep it in the fridge at this point). The cream can’t be made ahead as it will set in the fridge. Take about 1 ½ cups of cream and fill in a pastry bag fitted with a 1M tip.  Remove the adhesive tape from the strips, stick together to close and fit the cake circle snugly. Test one and remove, you can fit them in after spooning the syrup.  Keep the closed mousse strips on a platter (this will be the platter which will sit in your fridge once assembled. I kept my platter in my cake caddy).  Spoon syrup over the cake circles one by one. The cake should be thoroughly moist, but not soggy or dripping syrup. If needed turn the circles over and spoon the syrup on both sides. Immediately, carefully fit within the strips (one at the bottom of each).  Now spoon the cream on the cake to come a little under the rim of the strip. You will fit another soaked circle on top.  Moisten more circles and place on top of the cream. Pipe some cream on top, cover airtight. Refrigerate at least 8-10 hours before serving.  Remove the strips carefully and place on the serving platter.  Just before serving, dust some coffee on top. Place a coffee bean on each. Making simple chocolate decorations like the one above is fun, try it if you haven't! Please note:  Prolonged refrigeration made the cream with agar agar it go a tad dry-ish, so you may not want to keep these around for more than 2 days once assembled. If not using agar agar, whip the cream to soft peaks (which hold their shape when the beater is raised) and use immediately. In this case, the cream will not hold its shape firmly.  Bake 1 ½ recipe of cake above in an 8’’ round spring-form, increase baking time accordingly. Make 3 layers and layer with cream (you will need more of this too). Chill, release and decorate with a chocolate lace collar. A note on agar agar: I am experimenting with agar agar powder, used it to give texture to just hold its shape and this looks like it worked! The cream took on a slightly mousse-y texture and held its shape while it was still creamy, but obviously not the same mouth feel as softly whipped cream. How do you use agar agar?