Mmmm mmmm Pizza Dough!

Pizza dough can be used for so much more than just pizza. You can make calzones of all shapes and sizes, with different fillings such as leftover shredded pot roast and veggies, bbq chicken, even my carnitas! Oh and there are also the bread sticks. All you do is make some garlic butter and coat strips of dough, then sprinkle with a smidge or a ton of parmesan. You can even use this dough to make focaccia, a heavenly italian flat bread that is usually lightly topped with, for example, sun-dried tomatoes, a bit of cheese, garlic, onion, and many other things (not all at once lol!). Personally what I like to do for focaccia is lightly knead in some herbs, cheese, or diced sun-dried tomatoes, and top with a bit of olive oil and parmesan.


Today I am going to try making a refrigerator pizza dough, and I was inspired to try it by this article.

How To Make Pizzas With Your Own Refrigerator Dough

How would you like to mix up the dough for your favorite pizza before you go to bed, put the pizza dough in the refrigerator, and pull it out to make your pizza when you get home from work the next day? You can with this refrigerated pizza dough technique.

One of the international pizza restaurant chains refrigerates their pizza dough for eight hours. We like that concept. Since yeast produces a different flavor profile at low temperatures, refrigerated dough makes complex, yeasty breads. We also liked the convenience--you can mix the dough one evening and make the pizza the next.

So we set off to test the concept.

We used pizza dough mixes but we could have made dough with a recipe. We mixed it according to package directions, left it in a clean large glass bowl, and immediately put it in the refrigerator covered with plastic.

The next day, we removed the pizza dough from the refrigerator where it had partially risen and made the crust. We let it rest and rise for one hour. In one hour, in a warm kitchen, the pizza crust had risen and was no longer dense. We added the sauce and toppings and baked as we would normally at 425 degrees for 15 minutes on a dark pan.

We found the crust extraordinary. With refrigeration, there is definitely an overtone of yeasty flavors almost like sourdough bread. We think you’ll like pizzas made this way.

Kitchen notes:

1. Yeast is very sensitive to temperature and refrigerating dough is not an exact science without precise temperature control. Rising times will vary in your kitchen. In our kitchen, time varied from 60 minutes to 90 minutes. A thinly rolled crust will take considerably less time to warm and rise than a thicker crust.

2. It’s important that you get the dough into your refrigerator immediately after kneading and before the yeast begins to multiply.

3. The dough will rise some in the refrigerator. Yeast will grow as the dough slowly cools stopping completely at about 40 degrees. Make sure that you use an oversize bowl so that there is room for expansion.

4. Be sure that the dough is covered with plastic to keep it from drying out. We very lightly sprayed the top of the dough ball with an oil mister to keep the plastic from sticking to the dough.

5. The dough can sit in your refrigerator for up to three days.

We’ve worked a great deal with refrigerated dough. It takes a little patience to let the dough warm and rise but the results can be fantastic.

A Hot Sauce History

I LOVE spicy food, have for as long as I can remember. That nose-tingling just before the heat hits you in the case of hot sauce, or the delayed pungent punch of horseradish and wasabi. In fact I have loved spicy food ever since I had my first bite of a spicy mexican corn chowder when I was 3. My mom and grandmother were having lunch together at a little cafe in Jamestown called The Smoke. They got their soup, and I simply would NOT stop fussing until my grandmother gave me a bite of her soup, which they were afraid MAY be a bit too hot for me. Well, obviously it wasn't!

So here's a bit of history about one of my favourite spicy foods: hot sauce!


Hot Sauce History 101

By Eric Vinje, Cosmic Chile
http://www.cosmicchile.com

Things may be heating up for hot sauces, but they’ve been around since humans first realized they could eat peppers. Bottles containing hot sauce have been recovered from archaeological digs as well as shipwrecks, according to “The Hot Sauce Bible,” The Crossing Press, 1996.

We have had a long love affair with hot sauces in the United States. Advertisements for cayenne sauces appeared in Massachusetts newspapers as early as 1807, according to some reports. In 1849, England’s Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce was first imported into the United States from Great Britain.

Many of the first homegrown hot sauces in the United States came from the South. Cajun cuisine and other fiery ethnic foods fueled the drive to make hot sauces.

One of the first mass manufactured domestic hot sauces was Edmund McIlhenny’s Tabasco® Brand Pepper Sauce, which came on the market in 1868 and is still made today. According to McIlhenny “family lore,” Edmund first bottled his Tabasco® sauce in recycled cologne bottles. The McIlhenny Company has trademarked “Tabasco,” which is why it’s the only Tabasco sauce on the market today. (Although it is trademarked by McIlhenny, Tabasco actual refers to a geographic and political region in Mexico – where the Tabasco pepper was said to originate.) Similar sauces can note they are made with Tabasco peppers, but can only be known at “hot sauce.” In addition, the McIlhenny Company is so proud of its heritage that it is opening a museum in 2006 in New Orleans.

McIlhenny’s initial success also spawned a raft of imitators particularly in the roaring 1920s including Trappey’s Hot Sauce (made by B.F. Trappey, an ex-McIlhenny employee) as well as Crystal Hot Sauce, according to Linda Stradley’s Whatscookingamerica.com web site. Jacob Frank started selling Frank’sTM RedhotTM Cayenne Pepper Sauce in 1920 and it was this hot sauce that French’s, the current owner of Frank’s Redhot Cayenne Pepper Sauce, proclaims as the “secret ingredient” in the original Buffalo Wings concocted in 1964 by Teresa Bellissimo at the Anchor Bar and Grill in Buffalo, NY. All three of these sauces are continued to be made and sold today.

Some hot sauces didn’t tickle the palate of consumers. Heinz, the condiment company based in Pittsburgh, produced a Tabasco Pepper sauce, but it failed to compete with McIlhenny’s original and was eventually taken out of production. Other early America hot sauces included a “Chilli Sauce” from E.R. Durkee & Company, which continues today as a spice and condiment company.