Tag: cooking

Stuffed Crust Pizza Redux

I tried making another stuffed crust pizza. I rolled the crust out into a rectangle a few inches larger than the pan. We had picked up a block of mozzarella that’s not the soft, watery fresh mozzarella. We cut it into rectangular prism and lined the inside of the pan rim with cheese. This worked a lot better than shredded cheese. I then folded the excess crust over the cheese and pressed the edge together to seal it up.

Topped with tomato sauce, cheese, and way too much pepperoni. Baked at 550F for about 14 minutes

The crust was cheesy, but it was still too much bread. I’m thinking the crust would be rolled out to the pan size and then cut laterally with a bread lame. Then the crust wouldn’t be doubly thick.

But I’ve also thought it would make sense to add sauce to the cheese inside the crust. But … that’s kind of silly. It’s a pizza roll surrounding a pizza. A lot of effort without any real benefit. Pizza is cheesy and doughy already. I think that’s the end of the stuffed crust experiment. But, if we do it one more time, I’m trying the lame.

Maple Cinnamon Rolls

I made an enriched bread (4c flour, 3/4c milk, 1/4c maple syrup, 1T yeast, 1 double-yolk egg, 1/4c butter, and 1t salt). Let it rise overnight, then rolled it out into a sheet about 1/4″ thick.

Then spread about 1/3c of softened butter across the entire thing.

Sprinkled 1T of cinnamon over it.

Then sprinkled 2/3c of maple sugar over it.

Then rolled it to form a log.

I pressed the seam to seal the log.

Then sliced rounds from the roll.

Each round is placed into an orange shell. They’re going to rise in the fridge overnight, and tomorrow we’ll cook them on the grill. 400F for about 15 minutes.

55 Days of Grilling: March 28

Tonight, Scott grilled up some burgers. I didn’t mix cheddar cheese into the burgers this time, but they still ended up mushy. Not oily and mushy, but still not what I expect a burger to feel like. One thing I’ve read is that you shouldn’t add salt until the burgers are on the grill. Also seems that freezing the ground beef can produce mushy burgers. In both cases, the problem is water being drawn out of the meat. We’ll have to try with not-frozen beef to see if that makes a difference.

Pineapple Upside-down Cake

This is my mom’s mom’s pineapple upside-down cake recipe — translated from her normal unmeasured recipe and complete with what I’ve always assumed has been a smudge on the paper because cooking at 360 is really odd. It works fine at 350, although I’m sure 360 would work too.

  • 2 cups flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 can of pineapple rings
  • 2 additional tablespoons of butter
  • 1 generous cup of brown sugar (and by generous I mean go nuts)

 

Preheat oven to 360 degrees f. Drain pineapple.   Measure 2 cups of pre-sifted flour; sift again with baking powder. Cream butter; gradually add sugar and cream well. Separate eggs. Beat the yolks and blend into the creamed butter mixture. Add the flour and milk alternately into the creamed mixture. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks  form. Fold the egg whites and the vanilla into the batter. Melt the remaining butter in cast iron pan; spread the brown sugar over the molten butter. Lay in pineapple rings, and pour the batter over the fruit.   Bake for about 45 minutes.

Turn upside-down onto a serving dish before the sugar hardens and scrape out the pan.

 

55 Days of Grilling: March 27 — Apple Upside-down (Pan)Cake

We made apple upside-down pancake for breakfast using the buttermilk pancake mix I’d put together a few weeks ago:

2c flour
1t baking powder
1t baking soda
1/2t salt
2c buttermilk
1/4c maple syrup
1 egg
2T oil
1T vanilla

Anya sliced two apples into fairly thick rings. Scott melted about a tablespoon of butter in the bottom of a cast iron skillet. He added the apples, sprinkled cinnamon on both sides of the apples, browned them up in the butter, then added about a third of a cup of maple syrup (we want to add a lot more syrup next time — my mom’s mom’s pineapple upside down cake has a cup of sugar in the pan … so there’s a lot of increasing that could be done here).

He poured the pancake batter on top of the apples. Closed the lid of the grill and cooked it for about 15 minutes — until the edges solidified — around 450F. Thin slices of butter were added between the edge of the cake and the skillet, and the cake was cooked for another 5 minutes.

We then buttered a half-sheet tray and flipped the cake onto the tray. The cake was cooked for about five more minutes on the half-sheet. The cake was cooked well; but, to ensure both sides have a chance to caramelize, we might want to flip at fifteen minutes and cook for ten minutes on the other side.

Served with a drizzle of maple syrup — it was delicious.

This could easily be a dessert — especially with bit of ice cream (we’ve got a maple walnut ice cream that sounded superb). Needs more apple next time! Maybe apples cut in half so there’s substantial section of apple embedded in the cake.

55 Days of Grilling: March 26

Tonight, we’re grilling some pork ribs. I’ve got them in the pressure cooker right now, and we’ll coat them with sauce and crisp them up this evening. The ribs still had silverskin on, so I removed that. Then I mixed up a rub: 1/4 c maple syrup, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper, 1 tsp garlic powder, 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes, and 1/2 tsp smoked paprika.

The ribs were coated in this spice mix. I added a cup of water and 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar to the pressure cooker. The ribs were curled into the pot and pressure cooked on high pressure for 25 minutes.

Served with garlic corn and mashed potatoes. Next time, we’re going to try cooking the ribs on the grill the entire time — basted occasionally with sauce. Pressure cooking first means the ribs are well cooked before we even started grilling them. And “fall off the bone” isn’t a good state if you’re trying to place it on the grill!

55 Days of Grilling: March 25

We made two stuffed crust pizzas the other night and only cooked one. We modified the second one and grilled it for lunch today. There was way too much dough around the edge of the pizza (and almost no crust in the center). First, I tried to massage some of the dough from the edge into the center. Then we un-rolled the crust. The cheese, sauce, and pepperoni were spread out over the bottom of the dish. The excess dough was pulled toward the center and topped with sauce, cheese, and pepperoni — essentially making a pizza on top of another pizza. Or a pizza-topped calzone. Some butter was placed between the crust and the cast iron pan. We grilled it for 15 minutes. Unlike the pizza from the 23rd, this was actually pretty good.

55 Days of Grilling: March 23

Tonight, I tried to make a stuffed crust pizza. The dough was 4c all-purpose flour, 1 Tbsp yeast, 1/2c wheat gluten, 1 tsp salt, 1/4c olive oil, and enough water to make dough.

I tried to stuff shredded cheese into the crust — not such a good plan. Rolling the edge so there were three layers was a really bad idea — we had a circle of bread (with a bit of cheese in it) and a puddle of toppings in the middle.

55 Days of Grilling: March 22

Tonight, we made chicken parmigiana — two chicken breasts pounded to be flat. Looking at recipes online, it’s meant to be fried in oil. We were going to cook it on the grill, so I used the same technique that I use to make crispy fish in the oven — add a little oil to the eggs used to bread the meat.

In one bowl, I mixed two eggs with a quarter cup of olive oil and a bit of salt. In a second bowl, I mixed 1 cup of all-purpose flour with 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper, and 1/2 tsp garlic. In a third bowl, I mixed together 1 cup of panko bread crumbs, 1/4 cup of parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper. The chicken was dipped in egg, dipped in the flour mixture, dipped in egg again, and coated with panko. Scott grilled the chicken and topped with parmesan and mozzarella. Served with spaghetti and a spicy tomato sauce.

55 Days of Grilling — 17 March

Tonight, I made a brisket with carrots and potatoes. Carrots and potatoes were placed in the bottom of a cast iron dutch oven and sprinkled with salt, paprika, chipotle pepper, black pepper, cayenne pepper, thyme, garlic. Brisket was rubbed with the same combination mixed with a little brown sugar. Very heavy lid added to cook. 

 

It was cooked at 200F for an hour. Since it didn’t seem to have cooked at all, I bumped the temp up to 250F and cooked for another hour — until the internal temp reached 205F.