Insalata Di Caprese, and Then Some!

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

I was thinking to post about my chocolate mousse for the dubious occasion of Valentine’s Day, until I realized that 1. the mousse post would be late anyway, as it would be ready to photograph too late for anyone who’d want to make it for this specific Valentine’s day (I am not one of those food bloggers who makes food just to take pictures of it!), and that 2. the mousse is a fantastic recipe to post anytime, and not just when the entire internet is drowned in chocolate recipes for Valentine’s day.

So therefore, you get chocolate mousse with bourbon later, and today there is a post about another one of my favorite-ever things to eat: Insalata Di Caprese.

Insalata Di Caprese, at its most basic, is a ripe tomato, a good ball of mozzarella sliced thickly, and basil leaves, all dressed in a simple extra-virgin olive oil.  The marriage of textures and flavors is perfect, and the way tomato and fresh greens infuse into the trembling softness of mozzarella is… well, there is a reason why the salad is famous the world over.  It is not actually known if the recipe originated on Capri, but when something tastes so amazing, do we really care?  I certainly do not!  Nor am I one of those snooty purists who say that adding anything at all other than the above ruins the salad.  I never believed that some fresh garlic, black pepper, bacon or parsley did it any harm, and I love it with the peppery bitterness of arugula in particular.  Since arugula, tomatoes, mozzarella and good bacon are all fridge staples in our home, this makes arranging the lunch that much simpler – and yes, we do eat endless variations of it on a fairly regular basis.

The testament to how great this is, is that for all we eat it often, it is still enough of a favorite that I turned to it without a second thought when it came to figuring out what to do for a light and festive Valentine’s Day lunch for T and I.  And, going by the adage that bacon makes everything better, I decided to add some crisped slices of really good smoked local bacon – and the celestial pigs sang hallelujah, for we ate it and it was very, very good!  The smokey and not-too-salty crunch of the pork set off the tart sweetness of the tomatoes and the milky mozzarella di bufala campagna, and made for a salad that was both, fresh, savory and satifying – a perfect lunch to precede the likely indulgence of the evening meal.

Oh what, you need a recipe for this?!  Fine, then!  This will serve two.

• A few handfuls of arugula with a few optional basil leaves mixed in.
• A ball of good-quality mozzarella (buffalo mozzarella being the luxury for today), sliced gently.
• 10 thin slices off a piece of dry, warm-smoked bacon (or any bacon of your choice), fried slowly on low heat to render the fat until they are crisp.  I found that scooping the fat out of the pan as it renders, makes these crisp a lot faster and better.
• 1-2 ripe tomatoes, sliced.
• A drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, a sprinkle of flaked salt, and some dried lavender or black pepper to taste.

Toss the greens into wide salad bowls, arrange the sliced mozzarella on the greens, and the tomato on the mozzarella.  Sprinkle with salt and spices and drizzle with olive oil.  Top with crisped bacon.  Serve.  If the boyfriend hadn’t had to work in the afternoon, a bit of sparkling wine would have gone amazing with this!

My Guest Post at Ping’s Pickings – Topinambour and Mushroom Salad

Earlier this week, I’ve done a guest post at the blog of the Illustrious Ping, queen of making tiny gorgeous fiddly things that I stare at with envy.  Often.  So of course I was terribly excited when she invited me to write a guest post, and put up one of my recent and very successful (according to T) recipes, a salad of topinambours and mushrooms and quinoa.

Where am I going with this?  Not very far.  You should visit Ping’s blog (link below!), make and eat my salad (unless you hate mushrooms and then it’s your loss!), and then look around at all the pretty and adorable and totally yummy things she makes.  Who knows, you may get stuck on reading her stuff too, the way I did!

*waves to Ping*

ping’s pickings: Guest Post: Eat The Roses.

Pizza Arrabbiata With Arugula And Prosciutto Crudo

Everyone loves pizza.

Edit:  I still love pizza.  But I no longer love this method and dough as much as I used to.  Instead, I have found pizza enlightenment, and you should too.  Of course, the toppings and sauce ideas from this post are still excellent, but if you are going to make pizza, please, PLEASE read this post and use the dough and method of baking described therein.  Your pizza will never be the same again!

Or, ok, maybe I shouldn’t make such sweeping statements, but I’ve certainly never met anyone who didn’t love pizza.  There is a reason why it’s one of the most popular foods in the world, and that is because good, properly-made pizza is yummy, satisfying, not too heavy, and very very easy to make…

Wait, what?  Yes, it actually really is.  I mean, you can just get all your favorite toppings, they require no prep, and the dough is really not hard to make (not at all compared to most bread dough).  And you know the even-better part about it?  Pizza tastes great even if it comes out lopsided-shaped.  Heck, some of the fanciest Italian restaurants don’t turn out a perfectly round pizza, but an irregular-shaped thing which is supposedly “more authentic”.  So there, if you have a feeling your pizza will be shaped like that, you can just be proud of it and pretend it was meant to be that way, just like the restaurant chefs’ one is.

A note before I continue – as I’ve mentioned in the previous posts, our camera is missing after T took it on a trip to Canada (we hope the nice people at Air Canada find it for us, but if not, there’s camera shopping in our future), so in the meantime, the photos are taken with my phone – apologies if the pictures aren’t up to my usual standard.  I do try!

So yes, enough photo excuses and back to pizza – isn’t it great to have a pizza made just so, just precisely the way you want it, with the right – like, a huge pile, if that’s right for you! – amount of the right toppings, and just enough of the sauce you like, and… yes, your dream pizza.  You can have it.  And it takes very, and I mean, very little time or effort.

This morning dawned pretty awful – gloomy, grey, the kind of morning when waking up is an effort, and getting out of bed is a heroic act.  You know, that sort of morning.  And my wonderful camera-losing boyfriend is sniffling and trying to work despite the cold, and blinking at me a little pathetically.  He’s heroic like that – tends to try to work until the point I yell at him and shove him into bed (which usually happens when he tries to work with a too-high fever).  To me, pizza is one of the ultimate comfort foods.  Interestingly enough, raw fish – sushi, sashimi – is the other big one – but on a cold, gloomy day, pizza definitely wins over most anything else.  So, to cheer us both up, and after reading and drooling over this lovely pizza on Daisy’s blog and this one on Zoe’s, I have decided to make pizza.  Pizza my way.

What is pizza my way?  Well, considering how many of my food obsessions can be put together into a pizza, it must have garlic, olive oil, chili, arugula, cheese and prosciutto crudo (or dried ham of some definition).  And it so happens that I have found (and obviously immediately bought) a jar of really great pesto arrabbiata at the local supermarket – entirely without traces of nuts (see nut-allergic boyfriend)!  Arrabbiata sauce (pesto in this case, which is the same thing as far as Italians are concerned) covers several bases in the above list right away – garlic, sundried tomatoes, chili and olive oil in one tiny jar!  After seeing just how amazingly it works on a pizza, it’s definitely a new favorite.  For those of you not in Sweden (and hopefully less allergic than my significant other), I think any sundried tomato pesto will work amazingly well, and you can always mix in the desired amount of chili flakes into it if you want the heat as well.

This pizza fed two people with good appetite for lunch, easily.

Pizza dough:

• 1.5 cup (3.5dl) bread flour.  I’ve used bread flour with whole wheat mixed in, total protein level at 11%.
• 1.5-1.75dl warm water
• 1.5 teaspoon dry yeast or a 1x1x2cm piece of fresh cake yeast
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon garlic granules
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• Olive oil to coat

Toppings:

• 4-5 slices of prosciutto crudo or other air-dried ham
• three generous handfuls of fresh arugula
• 1 cup (loose, not packed!) coarsely shredded cheese of your choice
• 2-3 heaping tablespoons sundried tomato pesto+chili flakes or Arrabbiata pesto if you can get it
• Finely grated hard cheese such as parmesan, romano, grana padano or gran moravia – to taste
• I also used a generous grinding of black pepper, but this, too, is entirely optional.

How-to:

Pizza dough takes about 1 hour to rise.  It requires no 2nd rise, so once it is risen, it’s ready.

• Put the dry ingredients of dough into a bowl and stir to mix.
• Add yeast to finger-warm water, and mix.  Let stand for 5 minutes.
• Make a well in the flour mix with a wooden spoon, swirl the yeas mixture and pour it in, while stirring.  Stir until dough comes together.  Add warm water by a tablespoonful if mixture is too dry (different flour absorb water differently, so it is a balancing act).
• When dough starts to come together, lay spoon aside and mash it a bit with your hands (no advanced technique or kneading needed) so it forms a lumpy ball.
• Take ball of dough out, wash, dry and oil your bowl, put the dough back in, and cover with plastic wrap and a towel.  Put in a warm place.
• You can either give the dough a few stretch-and-folds (if you don’t know what those are, please, please read this page and watch the videos, they are great!), or knead it lightly about halfway through the hour.  I prefer 3 stretch-and-folds at roughly 10 min intervals, and it gives me all the gluten development needed, no effort required.
• About 30 min before the dough is done, preheat oven to 250°C with a cookie pan upside-down in it, or a pizza stone if you have it.  If I were making a smaller pizza I’d have used a cast-iron dish the way Zoe did and the way I do for bread-baking, but this one wouldn’t fit in that, so upside-down pan it was.
• Prepare your toppings – this amounts to taking them out of fridge, and shredding the cheeses.
• Take the ball of dough out of the bowl, give it a gentle knead or two, and if you know how to stretch dough, do that, but if you are like me and can’t manage it from a ball, what I do is roll it out into a pancake, then stretch some, then roll more, then stretch, etc. until the dough is large enough for me to be happy.
• Place the dough onto a baking parchment and a peel (if you have one), or the back of a cookie sheet (if you are like me and don’t).
• Spread the pesto over the crust leaving maybe 2-3 cm margin and sprinkle with coarsely grated cheese.  Tear up one of the prosciutto slices and scatter one handful of arugula over.
• Open the door and slide the baking parchment+pizza onto the back of the preheated oven pan.  Or you can take a pair of tongs, slide the preheated pan partially out of the oven, and drag the parchment with the pizza on it onto the hot pan.  It’s clumsier but also works, and is reliable.  I’m all for reliable!
• Bake until the cheese is bubbly and the crust is baked through and turns golden.
• Remove from oven onto a wooden board, sprinkle with remaining arugula and tear up remaining prosciutto.  Sprinkle with the finely grated hard cheese, and grind black pepper on top if you so desire.

Munch.  I’d find someone to share it with if I were you, because you’re running a real risk of stuffing yourself silly!  Aren’t boyfriends who are happy to save you from more than half the pizza great?!