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.

On Landing.

It’s hard, in some ways, not to make these blog entries sound something like the narrative parts of “The Wonder Years”. It’s not supposed to be an online diary; it’s supposed to look at US culture through my eyes. But, given the fact that there are still eleven-and-a-half days till I actually go there, the best I can do until then is to walk you through my memories and expectations, plus the mind-numbing lunacy which is moving halfway around the world.

At the moment I’m waiting for a quote for shipping all my stuff. And when I say “shipping” I use the term advisedly. It’s probably going on a boat, on the sea. Probably through Panama. It might arrive with some exciting breed of spider tucked in between the Terry Pratchett books and some photos of Durham. That might be quite cool. Actually, given the fact that Stacey’s hometown was where they shot the film Arachnophobia this might not be the healthiest train of thought. Either way, my stuff is going in cardboard boxes, on a boat, halfway round the world, and it’s expensive, although not as expensive (or as ruinous to the planet) as flying it all there. Exactly how expensive remains to be seen.

It looks like it’s going to be around £800. I had thought £600, but that was when shipping companies were telling me sweet little lies, and before there were revolutions in oil-producing countries, shoving the cost of jet fuel, well, sky-high. Speaking of which, if anyone on the British side of the Atlantic feels like REALLY moaning about petrol prices (because let’s face it, it’s either moan about that or the weather, and it’s sunny at the moment) have a look at this. Prices are true as of April 26th; $1=£0.60 . Sickening, isn’t it? Never mind.

Unleaded Fuel Prices	$/gallon	=	£/litre
San Luis Obispo, CA	$4.17	=	£0.56p
Whickham, Tyne & Wear	$10.58	=	£1.41

But anyway, I’m waiting for an exact quote from various freight companies. There’s only so far you can string that subject out for, and packing is dull, so I tend to daydream. What, for example, am I looking forward to in the first week after I land? There’s the obvious task of renewing old acquaintances, but it’s not a very cultural subject. So, moving on…

Breakfast at the Hacienda Hotel

It’s not an overwhelmingly glamorous affair, breakfast in a relatively modest hotel in El Segundo, a relatively modest part of metropolitan L.A., next to Los Angeles International Airport. It’s not Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Claridge’s or Harry’s Bar. But breakfast at the Hacienda promises the world. On a day when you have breakfast at the Hacienda, you feel anything could be accomplished. Their menu is here. I would gladly have it in a frame on the wall. The reason you feel able to accomplish anything after breakfast might be that a Hacienda breakfast contains an appreciable fraction of the calories required to lift the space shuttle into orbit. In Britain, a hash brown is a perfectly respectable little thing, the size and shape of a deck of cards cut in half corner-to-corner. At the Hacienda, they are golden discs six inches across. They take your jet-lag on and they make it cry. You get two.

 

Highway One

If California State Route One was a person, it’d be Harry Connick, Jr. Oh, so he can play the piano? Just a little, or really well? Ok, phenomenally well. That’s fine, but you say he can sing too? Sure. He can carry a tune? No, he’s got a voice like melted chocolate. And he composes and directs. Writes songs? No, wins Emmies and holds US Patents.

Well, fine, so the guy’s a musician, that’s his job, it’s what he’s good at- wait, what? He’s an actor too? Oh, for crying out loud. Anything I’ve heard of? Memphis Belle, Independence Day and Will and Grace. I see. All this success must mean his personal life’s hell, right? Misery and disaster? Or is he, by any chance, just throwing this out there, married to a Victoria’s Secret model with whom he has three children? Yeah, ok. Well, at least he’s got the good grace to be an ugly bugger, eh? No? Just thought I’d ask.

Highway One is the automotive equivalent. It follows the coast from Orange County to Leggett, 180 miles  North of San Francisco; 655 miles in total. It passes through Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, Santa Monica, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Pismo, Morro Bay (see left) before heading towards Big Sur (Yes, as in The Kooks’ song, see right) crossing Bixby Bridge (Yes, as in the Death Cab For Cutie song). That’s just the first 300 miles of it. I’ll be where I’m going about 50 miles before the bridge, having seen some of the most beautiful coastline in America by doing so, but having missed out on some of the most beautiful coastline in America by stopping halfway.

 

 

Seeing Pelicans

They really are the most fantastic of birds. You will hear me rant about them out of all proportion to their achievement. They just make me laugh. They fly impossibly slowly; you imagine that anything that big, flying at such low speeds, must simply drop out of the air out of sheer embarrassment. They can also dive in the most incredible manner. After gaining height and selecting a target, they pivot on one wing and roll the other over. They plunge into the water from a height of sixty feet or so, breaking the water like gannets. But the gannet is an undeniably beautiful bird, with a pointed bill and kohl-like markings round the eyes, somehow reminiscent of the early jet-powered RAF bombers of the 1950s, all sleek lines and anti-flash white. The pelican looks like a toddler’s drawing of a pigeon. It’s like something out of the Flintstones. They are inherently comical-looking. I saw one land on the railing of the pier at Avila. Slowness of flight is one thing, but grace and control are quite different matters and its momentum nearly took it beak-first into the sink used by fishermen to clean fish caught on the pier. It flapped its wings and hopped from one foot to the other, and by some miracle of balance, completely at the bottom of whatever scale Olga Korbut was at the top of, it stayed upright. I can’t help feeling though, that however comical they look, the pelicans have it all their own way, so the joke must be on us. I love them to bits and I’m determined to get some really good shots of pelicans soon.

 

SLO Farmers’ Market

I am a big fan of the Farmers’ Market movement in the UK, which has exploded over the past decade or so. It has made available high quality, ethically farmed produce available to British consumers at prices which, while not low, are worthwhile and cut out the middle man. For example take the good folks at Broom House Farm in  Witton Gilbert, near Durham. Some of their prime Aberdeen Angus is pictured to the right here, moments before being turned into  steak and ale pie. They also produce Saddleback pork and wonderful lamb and mutton. The meat is phenomenal; it practically cooks itself. I met them at the monthly Farmers’ Market in Durham and have never begrudged a penny I’ve ever spent either there or up at the farm shop itself. The Farmers’ Market has been good for everyone; British consumers, British agriculture, and the market towns where they are held.

The events themselves, however, are somewhat…quaint. Check flannel shirts, flat caps seem to predominate. No matter where you are in the country, everyone behind a stall seems to have a Yorkshire accent. There is the faint feel of Country Life and Horse and Hound. If one stands very still, one can almost hear the Archers theme tune playing, as if by a heavenly orchestra. One is suddenly in a land of Agas and Hunter wellies. Incidentally, I’m not entirely sure whether the pictures of lithe young women showing more than a bit of thigh while wearing rubber boots is either supposed to be ironic or represents a little-suspected but not-entirely-surprising outpost of the underground fetish movement of this sceptred isle….

Anyway, as J.B. Priestley, a fellow northern city boy, put it, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins. Two redoubtable and praiseworthy institutions, neither of which I belong to, nor would I wish to. I don’t feel excluded by the people at farmers’ markets in the UK, but I don’t feel like I’m part of their club, and I don’t feel as if I’m missing out.

Predictably, in California they do things differently. In the county seat of San Luis Obispo, Farmers’ Market is a weekly social event. Restaurants from the town erect huge, broad stands. Large areas of Higuera Street are turned into open-air kitchens, where fast-working me and women see to it that skewers are grilled, pizzas are baked, ribs are roasted, tacos are made, gyros are turned, churros are fried and shwarmas are shwarmed. The air is filled with the smell of sizzling meat, spices and charcoal. There are recruitment drives; Democrats, Republicans and various charities seeking donations and membership subscriptions. Naturally, there are market stalls, selling fresh flowers and fruit, vegetables and bunches of herbs the size of footballs.  This is a flavour of what’s going on there tomorrow, at the various street intersections along Higuera:

NIPOMO STREET -- Kappa Alpha PSI - musical petting zoo [really??? What, like, bunnies with banjos?]
BROAD STREET -- Cal Poly Women's Programs - SAFER Event [for more, see here]
GARDEN STREET -- United Cerebral Palsy - Life Without Limits event
CHORRO STREET -- Loren Radis - local singer songwriter [pretty good: see here]

The market has a facebook page. It’s an amazing way to be made to feel part of the town. And you can eat yourself sick for $6.

 

And there you have it. Lots to look forward to. I’ve just booked my stuff to be shipped on Thursday 5th with Anglo-Pacific. Better get back to the packing.