Free-styling: A Pizza Celebration

Time passes quickly here in the city, so much so that a couple months can fly by in what feels like a blink of an eye. That said, I'm still on my 100 kitchen quest and have a few different delicious meals that I'd like to try to recreate and will hopefully be posting soon!

In the meantime, here's a snippet of a more free-style nature. Our good friends, Keavy and Bill, decided to sneak off last month and get hitched. Needless to say we are all extremely happy for them! In fact, I've been trying to think of a way to merge their two names to make a single, tabloid headline-ready title (i.e. "Brangelina" or "Bennifer"), but it's a tough one to work with. The best I can do is "Beavy", which sounds like an eastern European name for a steer...

However, we did decide to give them a small congratulatory pizza party! They were even kind enough to whip up some delicious gin-sour cocktails. It was a great time. In the end I ended up making 5 pizzas that turned out nicely, with a fair amount of experimentation. Here's wishing all the best to "Beavy"--they're great folks and I'm sure they'll have many happy years to come!

Pizza Menu:

- Pizza Margherita 

- Arugula, fresh mozz, prosciutto, lemon, shaved parm 

- Gorgonzola, caramelized sweet onion, figs, olive-oil fried sage, honey-balsamic drissle

- Soppressata, tomatoes, fresh mozz, red onion, mushrooms 

- Pizza Carbonara -- Olive oil, mozz, chopped prosciutto, caramelized onions, basil, eggs

The Arugula Pie

The Gorgonzola Pie  

Carbonara Pie

Kitchen 2: "Motorino", Margherita Pizza

The Kitchen
Motorino
319 Graham Avenue 
Brooklyn, New York



Pizza...the word even feels good to type. This particular experiment is especially near and dear to my heart, mainly because cooking (and eating) pizza has been a small obsession of mine for many years. Living in New York has only added to that addiction.


That leads me to Motorino. Opened in 2008 by French Chef Mathieu Palombino, Motorino proves that you don't have to be Italian to be a mean pizzaioli. I had been there a couple of times before and fell in love with his Neapolitan-style pizzas. Every pie has a strikingly fresh taste, ranging from the fior di latte, to the homemade San Marzano tomato sauce, to the airy naturally leavened crust...cooked perfectly in the 800 degree wood-fired oven and gently kissed with the perfect amount of char. 

Diane and I decided to venture over to the kitchen in early March, during one of the first warm days of the year. After downing two of the light and bouncy pies, it dawned on me to add this into the 100 kitchens annals. I have been studying pizza making for a long time now, so I'd try to take specific cues from Motorino to learn more about the craft. 


The Process

I'll be honest...going into this one I knew I wouldn't achieve the angelic pizza that Motorino and other places have create. However, I did have some head-start in beginning this venture. Namely, I have notes on other pizza experiments I've cooked (helping me make adjustments along the way) and more importantly, a living sourdough starter in my fridge. It's a great secret weapon to get a flavorful, totally from-scratch pizza dough.

That said, I still was craving the heat of an 800 degree oven. The high temperature is needed to quickly cook the pizza and allow it to achieve a nice, airy spring without drying it out to a dense and chewy crust. I've been experimenting with how to get the most out of my home oven, though. My current set up is using an upside down cast-iron skillet in the broiler, which has works well for retaining the much needed high heat.

So I went to work. Without question the dough is the most challenging and important piece of the puzzle. I've been working with a very wet dough recipe that uses the starter, flour, water and salt. The kneading process is slow. I used my Kitchenaid mixer to mix the ingredients first, with a couple 30 minute periods of autolyse to help breakdown the proteins in the flour to develop a strong, structured gluten. After kneading the dough I balled them up and placed them in their own tupperware containers to do a cold-rise in the fridge for 3 days...yep, 3 days. The wait is worth it. That fermentation time and the natural starter will end up giving the dough a delicious flavor .

Additionally, I thought I try my hand at cheesemaking for the homemade fior di latte. I was gifted a cheesemaking set which contained some recipes, rennet, citric acid and cheese salt...the building blocks for yummy cheese. I wanted the actual milk in the cheese to be as fresh as possible, so I nabbed some thick and delicious dairy from the Brooklyn Kitchen, a great purveyor of local and sustainable groceries. Unfortunately I ended up botching the mozz! I think my temperature was off when heading the ingredients which lead to some poor separation of the curds n' whey. But like mama used to say...when life hands you wet curds, make ricotta! (Well, maybe she didn't say it, but she would agree :P ). I ended up making a rich ricotta-like cheese with the curds that ended up being awesome for later.

And let us not forget about the sauce, which uses whole-peeled San Marzano tomatoes broken apart by hand. Usually I want these guys to do most of the work for me so I don't add much. After breaking apart the rotund-reds I dropped in some sea salt, fresh crushed oregano, and a dash of pepper. It's a simple, bright, and refreshing pairing to the rich cheese.

With everything ready to go I began to make the pizza. The dough felt buttery and airy in my hands--a good sign. I'm still trying to improve my stretching technique, but the key seems to be to not overwork the dough. Afterward I slid the doughy disc onto the peel, ladled on some sauce and tore some hunks of fresh mozzarella on top (now store bought, ha). With the last additions of some olive oil, basil and grated Parmesan, it was ready to go in.

A quick back-and-forth motion of the peel left the pizza in the broiler and on top of the super-heated skillet, ready to bubble away for a nail-biting few minutes.

The Outcome

As I said before, I knew I wasn't going to achieve the same perfect pie of Motorino, but at least I can say this turned out to be one of my best pizzas to date. The pizzas improved through the night, too. All of the extra effort really seemed to pay off and make something special. 

This time I had a few friends help eat a fleet of pies, which was awesome. I love cooking and sharing pizza with good friends, which made this pizzamaking occasion all the better. After downing some Blue Moons and about 7 pizzas I think we were all too full to move...the sign of a good dinner. 

The sourdough starter. Believe it or not, the foamy and disgusting looking head means it's perfectly ready to use :)

Mixing the dough. Notice how wet it is before a short proof and a 3-day cold-rise.

Tomatoes for the sauce.

Simmering the sauce. Some pizza makers won't even cook the sauce at all.

Cheesemaking supplies. The kitchen is a laboratory.

The failed mozzarella. It turned out to be one heck of a ricotta-like cheese, though :)

Pie assembled and ready for the oven. It will go in the broiler on top of an upside down, pre-heated cast-iron skillet. Cook time is about 3 minutes.

The final pie. Not Motorino, but a tasty go-nonetheless!

Cross section showing some pretty good crags and oven-spring. It's getting there!

Kitchen 1: "Eataly", Short rib ragu with parpadelle & brocolli rabe

The Kitchen
Eataly
200 5th Avenue
New York, New York


Here we go, the first food post! This particular dish and experience is important because it was where the concept for this whole experiment came to be. My wonderful girlfriend suggested that we go to Eataly for dinner, and afterward conceived of this blog to help me learn more about cooking.

Now the gist. Eataly is near the Flatiron district in NYC and is a fairly new (and giant) Italian market opened by a handful of well-known chefs--if you haven't been there and live in the NYC area, it's worth the trip just for the shear spectacle of it. Inside the market there are a number of micro-restaurants that serve various Italian cuisine.  The basic mantra for the entire establishment is: fresh, homemade, local when possible and sustainable.

We went to La Pizza & Pasta and ended up having an awesome night out, underscored by an unexpectedly delicious meal. The standout of the night was the short-rib ragu with parpadelle and broccoli rabe. The sauce was complex with an enjoyable sweetness that paired well with the bitterness from the broccoli rabe. The short-rib itself was melt-in-your-mouth tender and had a rich flavor that can only come from fresh beef.

Yum. As soon as we had it I knew that would be the dish to start with.

The Process

Since I've practicing my kitchen skills for a bit I had some ideas how to approach it (a lot of my base knowledge from the past year has been from Marco Canora's book Salt To Taste, an awesome book to have in the kitchen).

Because I would be creating everything from scratch (barring the pasta), I went to planning mode. I figured that the recipe should start by seasoning and braising the short ribs in some kind of tomato sauce with an Italian soffritto base, for the complexity and sweetness. The tomatoes themselves (San Marzano tomatoes) would be too acidic, so I wanted to add a some broth and hearty red wine to balance the flavor. That, plus some additional fresh herbs, spices and a 4 hour low-heat braise, would finish the sauce. Once that was done I would sautee the broccoli rabe and fresh parpadelle then do a quick-toss of everything together in a large saucepan, finished with some fresh Parmesan and fresh Italian parsley. 

The Outcome

I'm happy to say that this was a pretty delicious first step for the 100 kitchens experiment! While the sauce could have had a bit more complexity to it (I later read  that other recipes add a bouquet garni during the braise), the overall outcome was quite good and close to other recipes I later compared it to. For me the soffritto was also a key element--celery, carrots and onion, the "holy trinity" of Italian cooking. In the end I shared the meal with Diane so she could do a true taste test. She had seconds, so I took that as a good sign.

Below are some photographs of the process/product. There were a number of other photos but those accidentally (and irreversibly) got deleted. Oh well!

The sauce, post-braise

Sauteing the rabe

Fresh parpadelle (from Eataly, nonetheless!)

The final dish.

First steps

Why hello! Thanks for stopping by 100 kitchens, a blog that I didn't expect to be writing but inexplicably find myself easing into on this cool spring night.

This is a story of food, as told through my experiences. Most recently this has been through the lens of cooking, but it started much earlier. I was lucky enough to be brought up in a home where my parents instilled great appreciation for food and the occasions that come with it. As the youngest of seven (yep, seven) I recall dinners being a time for our mob of a family to spend precious time with each other. It was often raucous; plates clanged about, tiny hands would knock milk on the carpet, and 7 hungry  kids clamored with mouths full of food.

Through all that somehow my folks always managed to put amazing food on the table that brought us all together. My mom was a culinary superhero. We weren't wealthy, but she knew how to turn ingredients into gourmet meals. What other kid could say he grew up eating broccoli with hollandaise sauce, or yorkshire pudding baked to perfection with drippings from a roasted prime rib? These are things that I still salivate over! But more than this I think that deep down my folks wanted us to cherish being able to share this experience with one another, with food being the common link to make that happen.

I took this lesson later into life. Now, at 28, I'm living in New York and have a whole new world of culinary experiences to appreciate and share. And even though I'll never be the superhero in the kitchen that my mom was, I'm trying to learn how to cook more so I can share similar experiences with the people I love.

100 kitchens is my part of that story. I'll be traveling around new york restaurants, pubs, food trucks, friend's houses, or wherever the wind takes me to find 100 food experiences that really stick with me. Then, in an effort to educate myself on how they were made, I'll try to recreate them in my own kitchen based only on the memory that lingers from an unforgettable meal...no specific recipe.

We'll see how this all develops--but for now it will be done by documenting my foray into unknown territory. This will be a long process, so thanks for reading. Hopefully you're having your own unforgettable moments with food and friends.