We promised it a while back, and now we deliver -- easy video instructions for making focaccia. This is really one of the easiest breads to make, so it's a great start if you feel intimidated by the pizza.
These instructions pick up half-way into the pizza tutorial. You should have the exact same dough (4 cups flour, 2 cups water, 2 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp. yeast, risen for 8-12 hours) ready to go. Except, you won't be making pizza with it this time, but focaccia. The dough in the tutorial makes two pizzas, and it is a good amount of dough to make a focaccia a little smaller than the size of a pizza. Alternatively, you can use 1 kg of fridge dough. When using fridge dough, it won't be as soft and supple as the dough shown here. It will push back and resist your shaping efforts. When it gets too hard to shape, just let it sit for a few minutes at a time, until it warms up and relaxes some more.
You can put many things on focaccia. I prefer to keep things very simple, and show here my absolute favorite, which is the most classic focaccia of all: rosemary. The dough is topped only with extra virgin olive oil, chopped rosemary (dry is suitable if you don't have fresh), and a sprinkling of kosher salt. As you shape the dough by hand, keep dipping your fingers in water to keep the dough from sticking. The process of creating the dimples is important. Without them, the bread might balloon up like a giant pita bread.
Bake the focaccia at around 470F until golden brown (about 17-18 minutes in our oven). As with most everything I bake, I'm using pizza screens for baking the focaccia.
During baking the focaccia will rise quite a bit:
When done, let cool and slice (I usually cut it with kitchen scissors).
Ethical Pizza has been married now for over a month, but we have yet to post about our wedding and -- since we pretend to be a baking blog -- the cake and the food. Naturally, we threw an all-vegan wedding, at Fort Mason in San Francisco (which is the place where I popped the question, eight months prior).
The night before the wedding, Kathleen and I hosted a pizza party / rehearsal dinner at our house. With friends' help, I made about 8 pizzas (our standard tomato and pesto), which everyone loved. I think I may have created just a few more adorers of Ethical Pizza :)
The wedding itself was catered by Back to Earth, who did a 100% fantastic job! The food was absolutely delicious and the service flawless. I think it's safe to say that many of our guests never had an all-vegan meal before, yet everybody loved the menu. We knew that the food was going to be delicious, but the amount of compliments it received, surprised even us.
For the cake, we went back and forth between BTE's pastry chef and Millennium (since we love the Chocolate Almond Midnight!), but eventually settled on Back to Earth and we did not regret it.
Our vegan cake had two tiers. Since at the tasting we couldn't decide between the chocolate and the lemon, we made the bottom tier the chocolate, while the top tier was the lemon, and a white frosting all around, with spectacular effect. People literally raved about this cake -- especially the flavor, the lightness, and the frosting. It was clear that prior to our wedding, for most of our guests, it was outside of the realm of possible to make a cake this delicious and light, without animal ingredients. Kathleen and I definitely relished the opportunity to show off how great vegan food can be. Our thanks and compliments to the chef, the pastry chef (whom we sadly never got to meet), the waitstaff, and most of all, Eric, the president of BTE who was in attendance and ensured that things ran smoothly.
A few more noteworthy suppliers:
• Jewelry by our good friend (and bridesmaid) Melissa at Live Vibrant
• Makeup by Jason Nitsch, Melissa's husband, make-up and tattoo artist
• Hair by Jerry Tapia (Kathleen's cousin, professional hair stylist / Seattle)
On Saturday we biked out to Arizmendi Bakery, a small bakery in the Inner Sunset. According to their website and Yelp reviews, they have a lot of vegan stuff. And, even though we got there half an hour before closing, they didn't disappoint like Mission Pie. They had and we bought a bunch of vegan goodies (note: they are cash-only). My research indicates that this bakery is part of the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives (named after José María Arizmendiarrieta), a network of worker-owned businesses, promoting communist things like dignified, decently paid workplaces and better community coherence. Of course, they would make a much better association if they would fully include animals in their thought processes about fairness and and compassion, and be all-vegan. In any case...
Rosemary potato focaccia. It was a sourdough. Pretty good.
Heh. Haight Ashbury is not that far from here.
From bottom to top: almond-apricot cookie (my favorite), chocolate-mint cookie, lemon-poppyseed muffin.
Not pictured: the "City Bread", a straightforward sourdough loaf we had for breakfast on Sunday.
I realize that I don't post very frequently -- which is way better than posting too often for sure --, but if you have a really burning desire to find out what topics I am preoccupied with at the moment (and I'm sure you do), you can do that here. Obviously vegan pizza baking is not what I think about and comment on most of the time, but knowing myself, there will be a fair bit of vegan-related stuff along with other interests of mine. And yes, some pizza stuff, too.
We made two pizzas the other day, with slightly unusual toppings: stuff we bought mistakenly, or had laying around in the fridge.
One we made with a tomato sauce using the regular recipe, but we used a can of diced tomatoes from Trader Joe's, which had green chilies (so it was a spicy sauce).
We topped it with Cheezly, Yves Veggie Pepperoni and some Kalamata olives.
The other we slathered with 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, into which we pressed about four cloves of garlic. We topped it with Cheezly and olives as well.
Both pizzas turned out fantastic, much better than I would have anticipated. The EVOO / garlic sauce in particular will be added to our standard repertoire. It's simple and oh-so-good! If you're not using olives, add 1/2 tsp of salt into the oil/garlic mixture, before applying onto the dough.
Mrs. Ethical Pizza preparing what I believe to be the world's best BLT sandwich. She's using focaccia that was baked by me, and Smart Bacon that she sauteed until crispy.
Pizza Bianca ("white pizza") is one of the simplest pizzas there is: it is topped with some good quality extra virgin olive oil and salt and that's it. There may be some that claim otherwise, especially in the U.S., and use cheese, herbs and other nonsense on their "Pizza Biancas". None of that changes the fact that the classic Roman Pizza Bianca is topped with olive oil and salt and nothing else. For a nice rundown on the Bianca, see this recent post on Slice.
Despite (or perhaps because) of its simplicity, Pizza Bianca is fantastic. The most attractive feature, to me, is that it offers a range of textures, from crisp, cracker-like parts where the dough was stretched paper-thin, to the more bready, thicker parts infused with olive oil. It lends itself well to a variety of uses, from a simple snack to hors d'oeuvres at parties, to sandwiches, to accompanying soups and stews and salads.
Pizza Bianca is easy to make, and recently we filmed the process since it's much simpler to show than to explain. My usual dough recipe is perfect for the Bianca. I made a batch of it in the morning, pretty much exactly like in our tutorial video, with the only exception being that I made a little less dough, since the Bianca is stretched thinner than my regular pizzas. I mixed enough dough for two pizzas, and I used 3 cups of flour, 1.5 cups of water, 1.5 tsp of salt and 1/4 tsp of yeast and let it rise in the covered bowl on the counter until the evening.
Dough just mixed in the morning:
Risen dough in the evening:
Now for making the pizza, and the videos. The first part shows me removing the dough from the bowl, cutting it in two, and covering it while I prepare the oven. Make sure you flour the dough well before covering it, to keep the plastic from sticking. Note how gently I handle the dough, trying to not knock the air out of it. (BTW: those wounds on my hands are burns from two recent baking accidents. Be careful out there, kids!)
At this point I preheated the oven to 475 F and let the dough rest for about 20 minutes, until the oven was ready.
This next segment shows the most crucial part: shaping and dressing. You want to stretch the dough well with your hands. The goal is to have paper-thin dough at places, and slightly thicker dough at other places, and even thicker dough on the edges. It's up to you how exactly you go about shaping it. I find that the technique I use here works best for me. The dough is soft and will stretch readily. Once the dough is stretched and placed on pizza screens lined with parchment paper, it is dressed: extra virgin olive oil, and few sprinklings of Kosher Salt (or some other coarse salt, though fine salt works OK as well -- just doesn't look as good) is all it takes. Once this is done, the pizzas go in the oven (for about 20 minutes). This segment also features Malcolm, one of our cats who is, among other things, a great olive oil connoisseur. :)
Here's some footage of the pizzas baking in the oven (about halfway in). You will notice the nice blistering action that happens with any well-made Pizza Bianca (if I say so myself).
Finally, when the pizzas are thoroughly baked, I take them out for cooling. Because of the bubbles that are created in the dough, there will necessarily be puddles of olive oil left on the surface, in the "valleys". Some may want to leave this surplus oil on the dough to soak in further, but I like to discard it, lest it becomes too rich for my taste. I simply soak up the oil with some paper towel. A word of warning: the oil is HOT, be careful NEVER to touch it with your hand. Once the pizzas have cooled, slice them (I find that scissors work best), and eat.
Now you know how to make the classic Pizza Bianca. Enjoy!
