pizza class
Those of you that know me probably think I never leave my house (cave) at all on weekends. Now I'm not going to argue that point, but I do offer the following evidence that at least on occasion I do socialize. I went to a pizza baking class today!
The object above that looks like a typical backyard barbecue is anything but. Chris, an engineer in RTP, modified a BBQ to make a pizza oven. It seems that some time in culinary school made Chris more interesting in cooking and he soon realized that making professional quality food was difficult on home equipment.
So he used his engineering skills to modify a barbecue to allow it to reach pizza oven temperatures--over 700f!
In this oven it only takes 4 minutes to bake a pizza pie to perfection. And the dough tastes so good.
Over there on the left you can see our first attempt. While it was supposed to be a pizza it turned into a calzone 'cause the dough was a little too moist and wouldn't slip into the oven easily.
It tasted wonderful. There was just a little pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese and banana peppers on it and it was wonderful. Baking at really high temperatures is really an advantage.
Here's some bread Chris had made before the class. It was made using his sourdough starter and a no-knead recipe. The bread was light and so tasty. Gotta love that bacterial action--it really enhances the flavor of bread.
The goo you see smeared on the bread is two cloves of garlic that had been marinated in olive oil. You can believe that the class had some very fragrant breath after eating two loaves of this bread.
Isn't this beautiful?
We each brought our own ingredients for the pizzas we made. The pizza on the left was made by Elaine and she used just about everything you could think of on hers. It was a lovely looking pizza--and I can assure you I didn't have a bite of it. Too much green stuff on it for me.
I brought 4 types of cheese, plus diced bell pepper and onions. I try to keep the greenery to a minimum!
The object above that looks like a typical backyard barbecue is anything but. Chris, an engineer in RTP, modified a BBQ to make a pizza oven. It seems that some time in culinary school made Chris more interesting in cooking and he soon realized that making professional quality food was difficult on home equipment.
So he used his engineering skills to modify a barbecue to allow it to reach pizza oven temperatures--over 700f!In this oven it only takes 4 minutes to bake a pizza pie to perfection. And the dough tastes so good.
Over there on the left you can see our first attempt. While it was supposed to be a pizza it turned into a calzone 'cause the dough was a little too moist and wouldn't slip into the oven easily.
It tasted wonderful. There was just a little pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese and banana peppers on it and it was wonderful. Baking at really high temperatures is really an advantage.
Here's some bread Chris had made before the class. It was made using his sourdough starter and a no-knead recipe. The bread was light and so tasty. Gotta love that bacterial action--it really enhances the flavor of bread.The goo you see smeared on the bread is two cloves of garlic that had been marinated in olive oil. You can believe that the class had some very fragrant breath after eating two loaves of this bread.
Isn't this beautiful?We each brought our own ingredients for the pizzas we made. The pizza on the left was made by Elaine and she used just about everything you could think of on hers. It was a lovely looking pizza--and I can assure you I didn't have a bite of it. Too much green stuff on it for me.
I brought 4 types of cheese, plus diced bell pepper and onions. I try to keep the greenery to a minimum!
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