Italian Thin-crust Pizza

So there's this pizza place in the Twin Cities called "Punch." There are a lot of lovely pizza places here-- "Pizza Lucé" and a few others are awesome places to grab a slice. In my opinion, Punch blows them out of the water. The three of us went first went to Punch on a gorgeous Saturday last June, where we sat outside on the patio and devoured exquisitely-prepared pizzas with buffalo mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes. If you're in the cities and haven't been, GO. It's a bit pricey as far as pizzas go (maybe $10-$12 for an average pizza, which will feed one hungry guy or provide a meal and a snack for a girl like me), but it's so worth it.

Anyway, we decided after our experience there that we really wanted to try our hand at making our own pizza like that. We'd made pizza before--both regular crust and deep dish--but this would be new and exciting. We didn't have the advantages of san marino tomatoes, top-notch olive oil, imported mozzarella, and a wood-burning pizza oven kept at 800°F, but we did our best, beginning with the crust.

Ingredients (for two pizzas)

• 1 1/3 c. wrist-temperature water
• 2 1/4 tsp. yeast (or 1 package, if you buy it that way).
• 3 1/2-3/4 cups flour (can use part whole wheat, I'd imagine, although we kept it all white this time)
• 2 TBS olive oil
• 1 TBS salt
• about 1 1/2 TBS sugar
• a sprinkling of corn meal
• Toppings! (all suggestions-- amounts and ingredients are totally open, so make it as you like)
• a few handfuls of canned diced tomatoes (fresh, soaked in a little olive oil and salt, would work great too-- we just happened to have the canned stuff)
• a solid handful of basil, ripped or chopped into little pieces.
• lots of shredded mozzarella. We didn't use the fresh stuff, but if you have it all the more power to you
• several TBS of pesto
• a sprinkling of coarse salt--kosher, sea, rock, etc.
• a few handfuls of sauteed mushrooms
• a handful of chopped sun-dried tomatoes
• a clove or two of fresh garlic, minced
• Generous drizzlings of olive oil

Part One: The Crust

• In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast into the water and wait 5 minutes or so until it bubbles. If it doesn't bubble, make sure it smells like yeast before you keep going. If it doesn't, it might be dead yeast. Start over.
• Add the flour, olive oil, sugar, and salt and mix slowly for a bit.
• Turn onto a floured surface and knead for about 10 minutes until the dough is stretchy and smooth. Rub some olive oil into the bowl where you mixed the dough and dump the dough back in, flipping it around so it gets nicely coated with the oil. Cover the dough and let it rise until it doubles in bulk. It'll take an hour or two.
• Punch down the dough and divide it into two balls. Let them rest for 10-15 minutes. Then roll them out. You want them pretty thin-- see how much of the cookie pan the dough takes up and try to do something similar. The ridge on the thin-crust shouldn't be as pronounced as that found on most regular crusts.
Note: Don't roll out both crusts at the same time unless you're baking them together. Just leave the other half in its ball until needed. Before you transfer the crust to the sheet, sprinkle it with corn meal or flour.

Part Two: The Topping

We started by tossing the salt and garlic over the crust, then followed with little spoonfuls of pesto, the tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, mushrooms, and basil. The cheese coated all of that, and we drizzled olive oil on top.


Part Three: Baking

So this is the bit that separates this pizza from its thicker-crusted counterparts. You want the oven as hot as it'll go. For us, that was 450 or 500°F. If yours gets any hotter, great. Also, if you have a pizza stone, great-- although I suppose you'd need to either have a large pizza stone or make smaller pizzas to get a crust thin enough.

Bake for about 8 minutes. The crust should get really crispy and everything should bubble. If it gets a little brown that's even better. It won't be as good as the stuff made in a proper oven, but for us it worked well. Also, your oven could be quite different from ours, so just watch it and see if it needs more or less time. Serve quickly, because it's awesome hot, but don't burn the roof of your mouth!

Just some pasta and tomato sauce....

Hey folks. I (Emily) was not about to get left out in the influx of new posts, so here we go. This was an endeavor Iain and I undertook back in August and just never got around to posting what with house hunting, new jobs, Fulbright Applications, etc. For the record, do not do this unless you have a lot of time open, like a Saturday or something. It's totally worth it though.

So, as you may remember, last summer I was the proud keeper of a backyard garden with a huge crop of basil. The result of this was a need, towards the end of the summer, to use up said basil. We made a ton of pesto and froze some leaves with oil in a jar, but even that didn't finish it off. Thus, we were left with the fortunate responsibility of using up the rest. In one of these endeavors, we decided to attempt homemade basil pasta.

Now, don't panic here. You've probably heard about hours and hours spent rolling paper thin sheets, cutting them up, and finding places for them to dry. And yeah, that's pretty legit, but ultimately it's less work than I thought it'd be, and it's also fun work.

Iain and I consulted a few sources when figuring out our recipe, but we ended up with a hodgepodge that I feel no guilt about posting up here. So, here's what ya need.

Ingredients

• several handfuls of fresh basil, chopped into small pieces
  
• one cup of flour per egg, more or less. I think we used four and four, and that made a ton of pasta.
• a pinch or two of salt

Pretty simple ingredients all in all, yes? If you don't have basil, you can use another herb or make it without, but the basil was pretty awesome. It's a summer thing though, I know, and pasta's good all year round. You could try it with spinach too, or even squash or something I bet. Anyway, off we go.

Procedure

• Pour the flour out onto the counter. You need a big counter space for this, both for mixing and rolling. If you don't have one, you might want to consider using a table instead.


• Push all the flour into a big mound and make a little well in the center by scooping some of the flour out and mounting it on the sides.

• Crack the eggs into the well. Well, don't crack them into the well. Crack them on the counter and open them into the well. Be careful so as not to breach the walls. It should look something like this:



• Carefully beat the eggs a bit with a fork, then start to incorporate some of the flour around them. Continue doing this, slowly in order to avoid breaking the walls, until the flour and eggs become a cohesive mass. You can add the basil when it feels manageable, like it won't make mixing impossible or just get all over the floor. For me, I think that was about halfway through. If you really feel like making green pasta, you can mix the flour and basil in the food processor, but I like the little green flecks better than I think I would a green noodle. However, if you're using squash or something, you'll definitely want to the use the food processor method. If you need to, add a bit of water or flour to get to the right texture. It shouldn't be so sticky that it's sticking to your hands, but you'll add flour during the rolling process, so it shouldn't feel dry either. Something like this.
  


• Now, this is the fun part if you're like Iain and enjoy rolling things out. For me, this is the not-so-fun part. But it's still worth it. Split the dough into manageable chunks (I think we did four, but it depends on the size of your rolling pin and counter space) and start rolling. This will take awhile. You need to get it pretty darn thin-- something in the realm of 1/8 inch. It depends on what pasta shape you're making. Of course, if you have a pasta machine, that takes care of it, but being poor and mobile, we do not. Go generous with the flour, both on the rolling surface and the rolling pin. Sticky pasta is sad pasta. It should look like this when it's done.
  


• This next bit is the fun part for me, because you get to shape it. We decided to do about half linguine/fettuccini (depending on how thick our strips were) and half farfalle. There are a few ways to make strip-style pastas. One is to take each bit of rolled out dough and just slice it into strips. Some will be longer than others, but don't worry about it. If memory serves me correctly, this was Iain's preferred method. I liked the jelly roll method myself. Basically, take a piece of rolled out dough and roll it tightly lengthwise or widthwise, depending on how long you want your pasta. Then cut off strips about 1/8-1/4 inch thick and unroll them into pasta. It won't look perfect, but it works.
  For the farfalle, cut pasta into little rectangles about 1 in x 2 in and pinch the middle of each together with thumb and forefinger to form the bow ties. You won't be able to use all of each pasta sheet for this shape, since you need the rectangles for it to work, so make the edges into short linguine or something.
  
• Now it's drying time. For the farfalle, baskets work really well, but we didn't have any, so we just left them on plates in single layers. For the linguine, coat hangers worked surprisingly well,although we had to be careful when centering the noodles on so they wouldn't fall right off. We let the noodles dry for perhaps three or four hours, and that seemed sufficient. The farfalle kept in an airtight container for a few days beyond that. It might have been good for longer, but we didn't want to take the risk, so we ate it.

That evening, it was show time. We put up a pot of water to boil and got started on a simple sauce. The chances of us ever buying tomato sauce again are nil to none, because canned tomatoes work so well. We threw a can of diced ones into a saucepan with some diced up onion, garlic, dried oregano, more fresh basil, olive oil, and crushed red pepper, let it simmer up for a bit, and voila-- cheap and awesome sauce.

Fresh pasta only takes about five minutes to boil, or at least ours did. The coat hanger linguine took a bit of maneuvering to get into the water, since it was bent in half, but we got it without much, if any, breakage. However, if you plan to gift the fresh pasta before it's cooked, you might want to dry it on something that will allow it to stay straight. I've heard towels work well.

And there you have it. Fresh, homemade pasta and tomato sauce. The stuff is filling too. It's so eggy! So make it when you get the chance, and happy Halloween to all!! (I'm gonna be a Jedi).