Quod subigo farinam

 

Looking back, the blog has been getting just a tad deep and meaningful, which is fine; but only in moderation, I feel. It’s probably time to talk about more frivolous things. For instance, I think the cat might like classical music. She’s usually hiding under the bed at this point in the day, or sleeping on Stacey’s pillow. Today, though, it’s a relatively tranquil and pleasant day in Cayucos and instrumental music helps me write, because their words don’t get in the way of mine. So this morning the cat is dozing on the sofa, quite clearly listening to Beethoven’s 9th. She’s obviously a cat with hidden depths.

We (Stacey and I, not me and the cat) went to SLO farmers’ market this week, which is not unusual, but instead of getting street food from the many, many, many vendors we got Buffalo Chicken pizza from a great little local shop. And there, in between watching the baseball on TV and trying to make up food-related names for baseball teams (Baltimore Oreos, Chicago Subs, Cilantro Blue Jays…..) we started wondering why pizza is one of those things which, 99% of the time, somebody else cooks for you, whether it’s take-away, frozen or in a restaurant.

It boils down to two main reasons. Firstly, home-made pizza is generally very disappointing. Getting the base crispy is damn nigh impossible because you have to put wet ingredients onto raw dough and leave it there long enough for the topping to cook through. Secondly, it’s an absolute arse to make. There are many components which have to come together at once, cooking with yeast is a trial at the best of times and you need about 3 hours from starting to make the dough to sitting down to eat.

My reaction to the very American solution to the home-made-pizza dilemma was one of disbelief. It can’t possibly work. There are so many things which are bound to go wrong. It doesn’t make sense. Whoever came up with it must have been stoned or drunk or both. It’s lunacy; it’s the most ridiculously counter-intuitive idea since bungee jumping. There is just no way you can barbecue a pizza. Here’s how.

You need two things pre-made before you start. I’ll tell you all about one of them- pizza dough- later. The other is a decent pizza sauce. This recipe is fail-safe:

Half an onion
Three cloves of garlic
Olive oil
1 tin of tomatoes
1tsp oregano
1tsp basil
little bit of cayenne pepper.

Fry the chopped onion and garlic for about 2 minutes in olive oil. Add the herbs and stir through; allow to cook for another minute or so, before adding the tomatoes. Bring this all to the boil. Liquidise the whole lot until it’s smooth enough to spread with the back of a spoon. You might want to return it to the pan and reduce the sauce to a thicker paste if there’s too much liquid; use your own judgement.

Now to the barbecuing of the pizza:

First: Preheat the gas grill for fifteen minutes. The grill needs to be very hot and as clean as humanly possible. Roll out your pizza dough (more about this later) thinly. Brush one side with olive oil and put it, oiled-side down, on the grill. Lower the lid. It needs barely three minutes to take a bit of colour (see left) before you remove it from the grill.

It is this browned side you’re going to put your topping on. Unlike raw dough, it won’t go soggy when exposed to sauce.

 

Then: Rub the raw side with olive oil. This raw, oiled side will be the bottom of the finished pizza and will cook at the same time as the topping. The olive oil adds flavour and stops it sticking to the grill.

-This is the bit I didn’t believe would happen. I thought there was no way you could prevent dough from sticking to hot metal. But it works, honest.

 

 

 

After that: Turn the pizza base over so it’s grilled-side up. Spread it with sauce and arrange your chosen toppings on top. Ours had spicy beef (beef mince cooked with garlic and chilli powder), Italian sausage, peppers, onions and cheese.

Remember your toppings have to cook quickly. Whatever you’re putting on, cut it thinly. Grate cheese finely rather than coarse. The topping should be no thicker overall than the base, roughly speaking, otherwise there will be too much water in it and it won’t cook before the dough burns.

Lastly: Return your pizza to the grill. It will have to spend longer on the grill this time in order to cook the top, but the dough on the bottom will cook just as fast. You will therefore probably have to reduce the temperature of the grill. If you find the dough is cooked but the cheese still needs finishing off, put the pizza on the warming rack, where the heat is less fierce, to make sure the topping is cooked properly.

 

 

Now, while we have a delicious home-made pizza, crispy of base and melty of cheese, perfect in many ways, you may have noticed that I’ve totally glossed over the solving of the second problem with making pizza at home: making pizza dough is a pain in the arse. Not only that, but making good pizza dough is the work of a genius; certainly far beyond me. I can make a disc of tough bread which has the ballistic properties and mouth feel of Kevlar. But just because you could theoretically top it with meat and cheese doesn’t mean you should do so. Now, in the UK you can buy pre-made, part-baked, so-called pizza bases. Frankly, don’t. Buy a frozen one. It’s cheaper, by the time you’ve bought topping ingredients, and it’ll be better. Here, there’s the vastly superior option of buying vacuum-packed fresh dough. This works well on the barbecue. We did neither- we used a bread-maker.

It’s cheating, I know, and not everyone has got one. But they are wonderful things, if you can get a high enough level of use out of it to make it worthwhile. Frankly, we do. It’s $4 here for a loaf of bread you’d want to eat, and you can still pay more than that for one you wouldn’t. There’s a certain argument that there is a certain nobility of purpose in baking one’s own bread. It’s a fair argument, I suppose, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to be able to eat sandwiches made of the stuff. Home-made bread is nearly always too dense, for several reasons: it’s rarely warm enough for dough to rise to its full extent within realistic domestic time limits; it’s hard to find a place whose temperature is consistent enough to allow it to do so; kneading for 10 minutes is damn hard work and anyone who says it’s not is either lying or not kneading hard enough. There is also the necessity, when working dough with the hands, of adding more flour to the hands, dough and work surface to stop it sticking. This flour starts to add up eventually, and it makes the finished loaf very heavy. The bread maker maintains constant temperatures, kneads effortlessly and consistently, and there are only 2 pieces to clean. You put ingredients in, wander off and wander back once it goes beep.

Not only does our bread maker make ordinary bread and pizza dough, but it allows me to muck about with more exotic stuff- pictured left is last week’s effort. There’s a story to it.

In our kitchen lives our newest pet. It has no name, but if it were to have one, The Thing or Cousin It would probably be a good place to start. It bubbles, has its own moods, is fed daily, produces alcohol and is allergic to metal. It’s a symbiotic culture of  Lactobacillus Sanfranciscensis and yeast, known to the world of cookery as a sourdough starter. The yeast leavens the bread, while the lactobacillus both protects the yeast from chemical damage, and lends the bread you bake with it a distinctive firm, open texture and pleasantly sour flavour.

As you might guess from the name, L. Sanfranciscensis is a California native; it is the foundation of San Francisco Sourdough bread. It first started being used by people to leaven bread during the gold rush era. Getting supplies from anywhere to the goldfields was a royal pain in the neck, and you could forget perishable goods like bread. So the miners had to bake their own. You feed a sourdough starter every day, and although you remove some of it daily, it self-renews. Ideal when you’re in a cabin, in a canyon, excavating for a mine. In fact, in the goldfields, I am told, the miners mostly ate thick pancakes made light and fluffy with the stuff. We tried this last weekend and they are really very addictive indeed. They also used to skim the alcoholic liquid off the top to drink. There’s is no way on Earth I’m going to do that.

Having been given a packet of the freeze-dried starter culture, manufactured by this appropriately-named San Jose company, it now sits on top of the highest surface in the kitchen in an airtight container to keep the fumes in, all the while developing a deeper character and gradually growing sourer as the L. Sanfranciscensis culture becomes more established. In fact, I think I’ll call it Frank. I wonder if he likes Beethoven.

5 American things I love

Sunday is Independence Day. I have reasons to be cheerful that the Thirteen Colonies won the war, and so do you. Here are five of them, plucked at random and in no particular order. Obviously there are more than 5 things to like about America, but this is what I chose to write about today. Oh, and I was wrong, Iain. It turned out to have a recipe in after all. Call me Julie.

 

1.  The First Amendment.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Freedom of the press, of thought, of speech, of conscience and of faith enshrined in law. I am entitled to my opinion and to express it, and so are you. I can pray the way I choose to, and so may you, or choose to not at all. I can associate with whom I want, and for whatever purpose as long as we’re mellow about it.

On a more abstracted level, it boils down to this: the State will not tell you how or what to think. This is the absolute basis for a free society, and was passed in 1791.

 

To contrast-  almost 30 years later, a peaceful demonstration of 60,000 was brutally put down by cavalry at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. 15 unarmed civilians were killed, and more than 600 wounded.  They had dared to suggest that the city of Manchester should be represented in Parliament, as it had no MPs at the time (compared to Old Sarum, population Nil, which had 2.)

Four members of the Manchester Yeomanry were brought up in court, for having killed people guilty, it seems, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was found that they had acted quite lawfully in dispersing an illegal gathering. Henry Hunt, the radical orator who the 60,000 had turned up to see, got 30 months in Ilchester prison for “sedition”. Not for planning or calling for bloody revolution and heads on pikes, but for asking if Manchester could have 2 MPs, please.

Incidentally, John Ashton, who was one of the civilians murdered because, like Hunt, he had neither the right to assemble nor to speak freely the way an American would have done 28 years previously, was carrying a flag on which was inscribed “Taxation without representation is unjust and tyrannical”. Sound familiar?

 

 

2.  San Francisco

 

I’d quite like to buy San Francisco. A groovier place existeth not. It’s got class. It’s relaxed. It’s a large collection of wonderfully insane people doing whatever they want in a very relaxed way. It gives the impression of always being at the absolute optimum time of the day, no matter what time that is. Time for a really great morning cup of coffee. Time for a walk by the harbour. Time to meet up with people. Time just to chill under this nice big tree. Time to clock off work and go for a beer. Time to dress up and go out.

It is soaked in its own remarkable history. It was built on the strength of the Gold Rush, which turned it from a village to amajor world city in a matter of a few years. The price of one city property went from $16 to $45,000 in three years between 1848 and 1851. San Franciscans are more eccentric even than the English. They have the weather for it. For proof that this has ALWAYS been the case, please go here and here.

  

 

3. Reuben Sandwiches

I'm talkin 'bout enjoyin' a bowl of chicken soup, with a Reuben, and then makin' dirty Reuben love.”

                                                  - Legendary Anchorman Ron Burgundy

Reubens are an American classic. I would find any theory which suggested that this was not a Jewish-American dish hard to believe- salt beef, sauerkraut and caraway all scream Ashkenazi to me. Wherever it comes from, the effect is the same. The senses scream for seconds; the digestive and cardio-vascular systems protest loudly.

1 cup sauerkraut, well drained
1/2 tsp caraway seed
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/2 cup Thousand Island dressing (or, better yet, Russian Dressing, if available)
12 slices of rye bread
1lb thinly sliced salt beef (good pastrami would almost do at a pinch- this variant is called a Rachel)
6 thick slices of American cheese (Or mild cheddar)
3tbs melted butter
serves 6

-Toss the sauerkraut, caraway and garlic powder together in a bowl. Set it aside.
-Spread the rye bread on one side with the dressing.
-Top 6 of the slices with the beef, sauerkraut and cheese, and then the second slice of bread. Brush with melted butter.
-Dry-fry the sandwiches butter-side down. Butter the other side and flip when browned.
-Continue cooking until the cheese melts and the bread is lightly browned.

4. The Chrysler Building

 

I really want to see this up close. When I was about 12 and getting into Jazz in a big way, I fell in love with Art Deco. Seriously, it’s no wonder they all thought I was gay. But never mind.

It’s one of the most beautiful buildings in the world and won a very bitterly-contested race to build the world’s tallest building after its architect, William van Alen, got permission to put a 53m spire on top of the stainless steel-clad crown. It was assembled in secret within the skyscraper and then hoisted up at the last minute, making the Chrysler Building the first man-made construction over 1000 feet in height, beating the rival 40 Wall Street project, which had been the tallest building in the world for all of a month. It retained the title for a year or so, before the Empire State Building was completed in 1931.

The Chrysler Building represented the end of an era, though. It started construction in 1928, and was completed in May 1930. Between these two dates, Walter P. Chrysler, the automotive giant who financed the building project to provide his children with a legacy was named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1928, only the second time it had ever been awarded. Also, the Wall Street Crash occurred.

Gone were the days when magnates would compete to build skyscrapers. The Jazz Age was mortally wounded, and the days of the Great Depression had arrived. What remained was the Chrysler building, a gleaming steel obelisk commemorating the infallible style and arrogant ambition of the previous decade.

 

5.  Tom Paine

Napoleon said of Thomas Paine that “A statue of gold should be erected to him in every city in the universe.” Tsk, the French, eh?

Paine wrote pamphlets which helped whip up popular support for the American Revolution. Born and brought up in England, he first moved to America in 1774 at the age of 37. He had few original ideas, but he did have a way with words. Tom Paine articulated complex, avante-garde  ideas in a way which struck a chord with the common people. People who can do this are often groundbreaking. Lenin, for example, or Stephen Hawking, or Abraham Lincoln, would fit into this category.  He came out with some crackers.

 
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”, and

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” and

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

His first job was an apprentice corset-maker and then in his teens he enlisted and served as a privateer. Years later he escaped execution during the French Revolution (which he had helped to foment) because his door, which would have shown the chalk mark which indicated one for the guillotine had been opened to let the air circulate, making him the world’s first draught dodger.

After his death, his bones were dug up by the English radical William Cobbett, who took them back to England to give him a triumphal re-burial. But apparently, reburying your political hero is one of those things which keeps slipping your mind, because Cobbett died before he got round to doing it. His heirs lost the bones, and Tom Paine was never seen again.

 

Happy 4th July, everybody!

Whiskey Sours

One reason President Josiah Bartlet would get my vote, were he, you know, a real person, is that he hoards trivia and inflicts it upon those nearest and dearest to him. While many would consider this a character flaw I recognise it for what it is: the tell-tale mark of a true genius. Also genetically indicative of one who is likely to be extremely handsome. Or so I’ve heard. But Bartlet did, on at least one occasion, get it a bit on the wrong side. He said that to be Bourbon, a whiskey had to be Kentuckian; otherwise it was “Sour Mash”. T’ain’t necessarily so, Jed.

Bourbon is, indeed, named after Bourbon County, KY- indeed 95% of all bourbon is from the Bluegrass State, but legally, bourbon can come from anywhere in the USA. The relevant legislation- The Federal Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits (27 C.F.R. 5.22) doesn’t narrow it down any further than that.  It does tell us one or two interesting things about why Bourbon has such a distinctive flavour. The legal requirements for whiskey to be classified as Bourbon are as follows:

• Bourbon must be made of a grain mixture that is at least 51% corn.^[1]
• Bourbon must be distilled to no more than 160 (U.S.) proof (80% alcohol by volume).
• Neither colouring nor flavouring may be added.
• Bourbon must be aged in new, charred oak barrels. ^[1]
• Bourbon must be entered into the barrel at no more than 125 proof (62.5% alcohol by volume).
• Bourbon, like other whiskeys, may not be bottled at less than 80 proof (40% alcohol by volume.)
• Bourbon which meets the above requirements and has been aged for a minimum of two years, may (but is not required to) be called Straight Bourbon.^[2]
• Straight Bourbon aged for a period less than four years must be labelled with the duration of its aging.
• If an age is stated on the label, it must be the age of the youngest whiskey in the bottle.

 

So, what does this mean? Lots of the flavour comes from the maize. In practice, Bourbon usually consists of 70% maize. This is starchy, resulting in a potentially sweet, mellow product. In addition, the use of American white oak barrels results in the same beautiful, balmy texture which is imparted to fine Rioja, whose producers use old Bourbon barrels to age their wine. The result is incredibly smooth; nothing like Scotch; much more like Irish whiskey. Really, the difference is so great it’s like comparing tea to coffee.

 

Therefore, the drink should be treated differently. Good bourbon should be drunk on the rocks, unmixed. The slow release of water from the melting ice allows the whiskey to express itself in the same way warming a glass of good single malt scotch in your hand does. it spreads out the individual flavours of a highly complex drink. Unlike single malt, though, the virtue of bourbon does not lie solely in its complexity. It is not- unlike good scotch- a drink of the upper classes, redolent of the corridors of power or the sage-green leather upholstery in a London club. Bourbon speaks rather more of the frontier; of the drinker who had to carry several nights’ worth of alcohol in as small a package as his horse need deal with, of cowboys, gamblers, bootleggers and speakeasies.

And so, riding the crest of a wave of Americana, we run aground upon the shore of the dimly-lit, muted- trumpet-imbued world of Raymond Chandler, the writer whose books gave us the storylines of so many films noir. If I said to you that Humphrey Bogart in a rain-soaked West Hollywood represented Chandler’s greatest creation, Phillip Marlowe, you’d know what I was talking about. And Marlowe drinks his whiskey, sour:

We leaned against the bar. ‘Whisky sour,’ the big man said. ‘Call yours.’
‘Whisky sour,’ I said.
We had our whisky sours.
The big man licked his whisky sour impassively down the side of the thick squat glass. He stared solemnly at the barman, a thin, worried-looking negro in a white coat, who moved as if his feet hurt him.
’You know where Velma is?’
Farewell, My Lovely- Raymond Chandler

You can almost smell the tobacco smoke, can’t you?

Whisky Sour is a cocktail which, like so many others, is easy to get right but even easier to get badly wrong. It has to be just so. Basically, it is sweetened American whiskey, soured with fresh lemon juice and balanced out with sugar. There are recipes which call for those three ingredients to be shaken together with ice. This is a half-arsed job, simply because sugar does not dissolve very easily in liquid the temperature of ice. I have another recipe from an otherwise excellent book which calls for egg whites and angostura bitters, which is frankly daft. It doesn’t need to be that complicated. You keep it simple by sticking to the three basic ingredients. You make it right by helping physics along a little and melting the sugar in advance.

Sugar syrup for cocktails:

Put half a kilo of sugar in a pan over a moderate heat. Slosh in, bit by bit, as little water as possible to melt the sugar. By the time the sugar syrup is nearly boiling (if it starts to boil it’ll caramelise, and you don’t want that) it should become as clear as water. Turn the heat out, transfer it to a cold jug and let it cool, then chill.

Whiskey sour

50ml Bourbon (supermarket own brand is absolutely fine, but don’t use Scotch.)
50ml sugar syrup
Juice of one small lemon
Ice

Stir all ingredients together thoroughly in a short, roomy tumbler. Let it stand for a minute for the ice to chill the cocktail, and then serve. The perfect whiskey sour is, above all, balanced in flavour. Neither the sweetness, nor the acidity, nor the alcohol should dominate; this drink should be the perfect triumvirate. You’ll know if it tastes wrong.