works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • Making Homemade New York(ish) Style Pizza for Pi Day

    The kid was determined to eat round for March 14th.

    We’d already made a pair of fruit dessert pies for later, but she decided that pizza was on the menu. What better way to make use of one of those specialty cast iron pieces that doesn’t otherwise see much day-to-day use: the 14 inch pizza pan.

    Sadly I didn’t give myself enough runway to make use of my sourdough pizza crust recipe.

    Some recipe research and light modification produced the following, which actually turned out fairly awesome from a “reminds me of that time in New York” slice perspective.

    recipe

    450 g all purpose flour
    1 tablespoon olive oil
    1 tablespoon sugar
    1 teaspoons salt
    1 teaspoon active dry yeast
    1 1/4 cups tap water

    1 cup tomato sauce
    blend of pizza spices, to taste
    2 cups grated mozzarella cheese
    assorted pizza toppings

    We blended the flour, salt, sugar, and yeast in a food processor, then drizzled in the water and oil until a shaggy dough ball formed. This was kneaded on the floured countertop to a smooth consistency, then divided into two smaller portions, rolled until smooth. We oiled these up and let them rest and rise on the counter for a couple hours.

    I heated up the tomato paste in my small cast iron melting pot, stirred in the spice mix, and let it bubble away for about fifteen minutes until everything was nicely blended.

    The proofed dough balls were hand-shaped to two fourteen inch crusts, docked, and baked at 450F for about ten minutes (or until I noticed they were starting to brown on the top.) Ideally you should crank your oven a little hotter, but I need to clean mine and 550F would have smoked us out of the house.

    The pizza crusts were topped and then baked back in the still-hot oven for about 12 minutes until the cheese was bubbly.

    She missed out on a school trip to New York city last fall thanks to pandemic lockdowns, but with a recipe like this… well it smoothed out the rough edges a little bit.

  • This is Pi Day

    Any excuse to bake something, my pie skills are not top game but with the assistance of my daughter we managed to bake a pair of non-standard cast iron pies to celebrate the dad-jokiest of days.

    We doubled the recipe below to make a six inch mini (or as the teenager would have it, personal) pie and a super-large double-dip pie in the big ol’ twelve inch lodge pan.

    Pi day also falls at the wrong time of year for some proper fresh fruit, so where we’d have a couple thousand baking apples to work with in August, in March we used our fallback: cherry and blueberry pie filling from a can.

    Recipe

    1/2 pound lard
    2.5 cups flour
    1 teaspoon salt
    1/2 cup orange juice
    1 can of pie filling

    The flour, salt and lard got mixed up roughly in a bowl, being careful not to overwork. Unlike with a good gluten-strong bread, pastry and gluten are cautious friends and too much gluten development makes for chewy crust where a flaky pastry is preferred. Blend lightly, my friends. Oh so lightly.

    When just mixed, the orange juice was combined in and the whole thing was wrapped tight for a couple hours of rest in the fridge.

    Rolled out, panned up, filled, and topped, we baked these at 475F for ten minutes then dropped the heat to 375F for a finishing bake watching for the desired browning. The filling was pre-cooked, so the cast iron pan on the bottom and the hot air on top ensure the whole thing is cooked through.

    Happy Pi Day. Enjoy something round!

  • Pi Day, Eve

    We spent the evening making pies.

    Tomorrow is March 14th.

    It’s one of those “we celebrate the day because it’s funny“ kinda days.

    The third month.

    The fourteenth day.

    3-14

    3.14

    Pi.

    π

    Pi day.

    Last year I bought a pie on my way back to my office after lunch. It was March 13th. I got called into a meeting fifteen minutes later and didn’t go home until almost 9pm that night having been drafted to the emergency communications team reacting to COVID-19.

    I ate a cold piece of pie late the next day after another 16 hour work day, stressed, deflated, and shell-shocked from the pandemic hitting our little city full force.

    I went a bit overboard on this baked pie.

    I used the 12 inch frying pan as a pie plate.

    Two cans of store-bought pie filling.

    It’s so big.

    The kid helped, and in fact she did most of the work.

    This year’s pie is going to be so much better than last year.

  • Our Well-Loved Cookbooks: Flour Water Salt Yeast

    So . . . I ordered yet another cookbook yesterday.

    I’ve recently been watching a cooking channel on YouTube (perhaps one you have heard of, unlikely one you figured I’d watch) and the host released a cookbook last year, so I splurged. Until a make a few recipes from the book itself, I don’t feel that I’m in a solid or fair position to offer a review or opinion. Hopefully in about a month or so (after I spin up a few of the recipes and get a sense of the style) you’ll see such a post here. Until then…

    My lacking of an opinion is not the case with Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast.

    I remember when my newly kindled interest in sourdough bread-making started to really heat up. I’d begun culturing a starter and then I went scouring the internet for advice. A lot of people recommended this particular tome. I added it to my collection and spent a few solid days reading the details, pondering the techniques and anticipating my next loaf… mostly because that first starter was still pretty new and not ready to use.

    I could write a lot about this cookbook.

    I could tell you that the tone has always struck me in the same way as I felt when I worked my way through university and had this one lab-rat job for a boss who had a PhD in molecular biology and couldn’t believe he had to explain this stuff to me and fine, but pay attention and do you mind if I crank up the radio and we’re all going out for beers after work, you in? Pleasantly mentoring? Friendly condescending? Lovable know-it-all-ish?

    Or, I could tell you that within the words contained on these pages there is as much elaborate history and detail about bread theory as there is actual recipes, and if this was online everyone would complain that they need to scroll for five minutes to get to the ingredients list but since this is a book it’s as much a beautiful read about bread (and pizza crusts) as it is anything else. Be prepared to read as much as you cook.

    I could even tell you that if you read this book, no if you seriously read it and understand it, you’ll change the way you cook and you’ll go out tomorrow and buy a digital kitchen scale and understand that the math and French you learned in high school could serve more than an abstract purpose in your life as you start to refer to bread as having desired hydration levels and calculate flour percentages in your dreams. Shush! My sixty-percent levain is resting!

    Basically I could just tell you that if you want to make good bread, I haven’t found a better volume. This is a great cookbook and one that will endure in my personal collection for a long time.

  • Gone Fishin’ (Part Zero)

    A lot of my story-posts begin with “back when I was a kid” because back when I was a kid we did a lot of things that were low-cost, time-burning ways to entertain kids in the local wilderness, a lifestyle that appeals more and more to me as I get a bit older.

    So it should be no surprise to say that back when I was kid we frequently went fishing…

    … and I’ve been thinking about that lately.

    As an adult I’ve let this once-hobby lapse a little bit.

    Well, a lot, to be honest.

    In fact, it’s been three years since I bought myself a sports fishing license, a permit to drop a hook for non-protected fish species within the provincial rivers and lakes (excluding National Parks!) I haven’t made it a priority.

    Also, as my wife reminded me when I told her that I was planning on putting a little more time and effort into fishing this upcoming season, the last time I went out I broke the tip off my fishing rod. So, technically, I’ve had no license nor a functional fishing rod.

    This morning I changed that narrative and dropped some money on my fishing plans making it all official.

    First, fishing Licenses for the 21/22 season went on sale at 9am, and I’m now legal to fish in the province of Alberta, from pulling a pike from the mud-hued river that is a thirty minute walk from my front door to snagging a rainbow trout from any deep lake in the foothills of the rocky mountains.

    Second, a fishing rod repair kit should be arriving via Amazon Prime delivery by Saturday afternoon and I can spend a few minutes (or maybe hours) making sure my old equipment is closer to prime condition for some spring and summer angling.

    More camping. More outdoors. More rivers and lakes. Less computer screens. As much as I’ve enjoyed this past winter, spring can’t come soon enough.

    Now if I manage to catch anything, I suppose the biggest question will be what’s the best cast iron pan for frying up some fresh fish, huh?