Making Pizza At Home

Isn't pizza dough hard to make, though?

Actually, no; quite the contrary. Making good crust isn't nearly as much of an art as making good bread. Many people see 'yeast' in the ingredients list and get scared. They think, "Uh oh! I'll have to knead it, and rise it, and shape it and bake it." Yes, but it needs only a few minutes of kneading, and the rising happens by itself. Shaping takes all of a minute and most pizzas only need 12-15 minutes in the oven. The only time-consuming part is waiting for the dough to rise, which happens in about an hour.

It's also cost efficient to make a homemade crust; all that is needed is some flour and water, a packet of yeast, salt, sugar and a touch of olive oil.

With the right equipment, making pizza at home is fun, fast and friendly. Here are two inexpensive items recommended for homemade crusts that brown evenly and stay light and airy on the inside:

Pizza Stone - A pizza stone is a slab of stone used for baking pizzas and other flatbreads. A pizza stone is the next best thing to a wood-fired brick oven. It helps distribute heat evenly to the bottom and top of the crust, ensuring a perfectly crispy crust that's soft on the inside.

Since it is made of stone, it should be placed in a cool oven and preheated with the oven so that it doesn't crack from the rapid change of temperature. Once preheated, the stone will evenly transfer the heat to the crust. The raw pizza crust is then placed directly onto the stone, without having to remove the stone from the oven.

If you don't have a stone, you can use a pizza pan or the back of a sheet pan for baking pizza. The crust can be shaped right on top of either of these, as these pans do not need to be preheated.

Pizza Peel - This baking shovel has a long handle to keep your hands safe while transporting your pizza to and from the oven. It is a large, thin, wooden or metal spatula that slides the pizza quickly and easily to the pizza stone in the hot oven. The crust can be made directly on top of the pizza peel and then transported to the hot stone.

To help with ease of transport, cornmeal is usually sprinkled on the surface of the shovel before preparing the crust. But wait... move over Mama Mia, a piece of parchment paper on top of the peel works even better! Shape the crust on top of the parchment, then slide the pizza, along with the parchment, onto the pizza stone in the hot oven. The parchment goes right into the oven and easily slides from the pizza peel to the stone. No more smooshed pizzas!

If you don't have a pizza peel, use the back side of a sheet pan with the parchment. The crust will slide right off.

Grapefruit Ambrosia

Yield: 2-4 servings

Ambrosia is the nectar of the Gods; and this one is pretty enough to serve even Aphrodite. Healthy and invogorating, serve it as a high vitamin and mineral breakfast, brunch item or a light dessert.

2 grapefruits, preferably 1 yellow and 1 ruby
3-4 tablespoons agave nectar
Heaping 1/4 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1/4 cup minced crystallized ginger
6-10 pitted dates, chopped

Gently toss all of the ingredients in a large bowl. Taste, adding more dates or agave to bring up the desired sweetness. Add more coconut flakes to thicken the excess juices, if needed. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

Smoked Wild Salmon on the Stove-Top Smoker

Yield: 2-4 servings

This recipe will be featured in the March issue of Natural Solutions Magazine (formerly Alternative Medicine). Check out my article all about sustainable seafood, wild vs. farmed fish, health benefits and how to be a conscious seafood consumer. You can find the magazine on newsstands in natural foods stores nation-wide!

What fish lover doesn't love smoked salmon? Make it at home with a smoker that fits right on top of the stove. It can be purchased online for under $40. Choose wild Alaskan salmon for health and sustainability.

1 tablespoon each dried dill and parsley
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 (1 pound) wild Alaskan salmon fillet,
3/4-inch thick
1/2 lemon, thinly sliced

1. Follow brand instructions for preparing the smoker and smoking chips.

2. Mix herbs, salt, pepper and garlic powder in a small dish. Rub spices onto the fillet. Place lemon slices on top of the fish, overlapping them slightly for a decorative effect.

3. Place fillet on the rack and close the lid. Heat burner to medium. Place the smoker on the burner and cook 25 minutes, until the fish flakes open with the touch of a fork. The tender lemon slices can be eaten along with the fish.

Cookies

Cookies can be baked until crisp or just long enough that they remain soft. Depending on the type of cookie, some cookies are not cooked at all. Cookies are made in a wide variety of styles, using an array of ingredients including sugars, spices, chocolate, butter, peanut butter, nuts or dried fruits. The softness of the cookie may depend on how long it is baked.

A general theory of cookies may be formulated this way. Despite their descent from cakes and other sweetened breads, the cookie in almost all its forms has abandoned water as a medium for cohesion. Water in cakes serves to make the base (in the case of cakes called "batter") as thin as possible, which allows the bubbles – responsible for a cake's fluffiness – to form better. In the cookie, the agent of cohesion has become some form of oil. Oils, whether they be in the form of butter, egg yolks, vegetable oils or lard are much more viscous than water and evaporate freely at a much higher temperature than water. Thus a cake made with butter or eggs instead of water is far denser after removal from the oven.

Oils in baked cakes do not behave as soda in the finished result. Rather than evaporating and thickening the mixture, they remain, saturating the bubbles of escaped gases from what little water there might have been in the eggs, if added, and the carbon dioxide released by heating the baking powder. This saturation produces the most texturally attractive feature of the cookie, and indeed all fried foods: crispness saturated with a moisture (namely oil) that does not sink into it.

Cooking

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Cooking is the act of preparing food for eating by the application of heat. It encompasses a vast range of methods, tools and combinations of ingredients to alter the flavor or digestibility of food. It is the process of selecting, measuring and combining of ingredients in an ordered procedure in an effort to achieve the desired result. Factors affecting the final outcome include the variability of ingredients, ambient conditions, tools, and the skill of the individual doing the actual cooking.
The diversity of cooking worldwide is a reflection of the myriad nutritional, aesthetic, agricultural, economic, cultural, social and religious considerations that impact upon it.
Applying heat to a food usually, though not always, chemically transforms it, thus changing its flavor, texture, consistency, appearance, and nutritional properties. There is archaeological evidence of roasted foodstuffs, both animal and vegetable, in human (Homo erectus) campsites dating from the earliest known use of fire, some 800,000 years ago[citation needed]. Other methods of cooking that involve the boiling of liquid in a receptacle have been practiced at least since the 10th millennium BC, with the introduction of pottery.