A New Year for Good Foods!

Happy New Year!  My boyfriend Greg and I decided to start this blog to keep track of our cooking adventures and experiments. What a perfect time to start it! We both have a science background, so naturally our nerdiness comes out in our thought processes in the kitchen. We like to do a lot of research and planning before attacking a recipe just to make sure we get the best results possible. Our aim is to talk about the tasty things we cook, and to share some photos and tips to coincide with the recipes.

To kick off the new year, we made some yummy treats to celebrate with our friends.  To start off our night we decided to cook what I call "cheese puffs,"but are more formally known as gougeres.  We found the recipe in Mark Bittman's book 'The Best Recipes in the World'. We felt like the recipe sounded tasty and cheesy enough to fill our New Year's eve appetizer needs.  They only took about a half hour to make, but as a bonus you get a good arm work out from the cheese you have to grate (it builds character).

I started off by grating some fresh Gruyere cheese with our new KitchenAid box grater--we just picked it up for pretty cheap at ROSS (win)!   We got our cheeses for this recipe at Trader Joe's--they seem to have a good and reasonably priced cheese selection.  In my opinion, the Gruyere cheese made all the difference in this recipe; its unique flavor really stood out in the final product. We went with the young aged (6 months) Gruyere cheese instead of the extra fancy cave aged Gruyere cheese which was double the price (maybe when we're rich).  I also grated up some dry parmesan cheese as a complement to the moist Gruyere cheese (the mixture smelled lovely).

From Kitchen Assays

Meanwhile, Greg worked on the dough mixture for the puffs, which consists of basic all-purpose flour, salt, and a half stick of butter.  He heated the water, butter, and salt in a saucepan and brought it to a boil on medium heat. Then he added the flour all at once, stirring constantly until the dough mixture separated from the walls of the pan (approximately 3 minutes).  He put the batter into the stand mixer and started mixing it on low.  He then added eggs, one at a time. Each time an egg was added the dough separated slightly but came back together after a minute.  The final step was to incorporate the grated cheeses.  After that we had a nice easy dough to work with and spooned small balls (about 2 inches in diameter) onto a baking sheet.

From Kitchen Assays

Gougere batter (pre-cheese)

We then placed them in a 425 degree oven for around 12 minutes (until tops were golden brown) and tested the inside. It was still a little doughy in the middle so we put them back in for another 3 minutes (about 15 total). Note: We feel like we should have rounded the puffs into well-formed balls because they didn't puff up evenly and looked a bit messy. This didn't affect the taste though.

From Kitchen Assays

Little puffs in the oven

From Kitchen Assays

Finished goodness!

They looked and smelled wonderful! We immediately took a knife and slit the top of each one to help the moisture escape so they would stay crispy. I'm not sure whether it was necessary, but it was a tip we had read in the book The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters (for a similar recipe). They were warm and delicious, and I probably ate about 10. They tasted like gourmet Cheeze-its. A big hit!

On to the main course! We found an awesome and simple way to make pan pizzas using regular nine inch cake pans thanks to the PBS show America's Test Kitchen.  We've made these a couple times now, but we've added our own twists to make them tastier and somewhat healthier than your typical pepperoni and sausage pizzas.

We started by making the dough. First, we combined the flour, yeast and salt in the stand mixer with the dough hook attachment. Then, we added the sugar, skim milk and olive oil (for some fatty flavor that the skim milk lacks) all at once turning the speed up to medium low. Starting slow is good, otherwise the milk just splatters everywhere.  The dough is finished when you can pull it off the dough hook and it's nice and taught. It will be a little bit sticky, but it shouldn't be wet. We then formed it into a ball in our hands, placed it in a greased glass bowl, and put it in a warm oven to proof for about 30 minutes.  Unfortunately, our yeast decided to give us a hard time. The dough just didn't want to rise. I took it out and kneaded it a little bit more before returning it to the warmth of the oven--but even after 15 more minutes we had no rising. I figured there must be something wrong with the yeast. We gave the dough making another go; this time warming the milk, and "blooming" the yeast in the warm mik. This dough seemed to rise faster, but still not as fast as we were expecting (based on our previous experiences). Maybe Trader Joe's dry active yeast is no good... Maybe we bought the wrong kind yeast? Not sure.  Eventually both doughs rose, so we put one in the fridge to use the next day.

I then made a sauce that contained a mixture of Trader Joe's basic pizza sauce with slices of canned whole plum tomatoes.  I thought the canned tomatoes would be a better choice than fresh tomatoes since tomatoes are not in season right now and I find that winter tomatoes are mealy and bland. It was a good choice. The canned tomatoes were sweet and delicious!

From Kitchen Assays

Dough and bad lighting.

After dividing the risen dough ball in half, I rolled out the dough with a rolling pin part way then draped the dough over my fingers to let gravity shape it to the proper size. I then placed the dough into the cake pans which were already heavily coated with olive oil.  To build the pizza Greg and I like to put down baby spinach before we put the sauce. It makes the spinach wilt into the sauce so it's almost like it's not even there when you eat it. Not that we don't like spinach, it's just a texture preference on our pizza. After the spinach and sauce, we sprinkled about a cup of fresh grated whole milk mozzarella on each pie, some precooked chicken, and fresh cut mushrooms. Finally, we topped the pizzas with a sprinkle of shredded parmesan. We popped them in the 400 degree oven for around 30 minutes (the time varies depending on how monstrous your topping pile gets).

From Kitchen Assays

It looked and smelled marvelous!

From Kitchen Assays

The crust is so crispy and chewy (in a good way)!  It was the perfect feast to bring in the new year with! These are probably the best homemade pizza's we've made. They're so easy to make too. I'm sure we'll keep tweaking the recipe, and trying other topping combinations as well. (In the past, we've topped the pizza with grilled ground turkey, and put artichoke hearts on them as well.)

Well, that's a start with our cooking experiments. We hope to keep updating every time we make something new and exciting! Stay tuned.