Recipe: Pizza Dough (baked on the barbeque!)

The weather is looking good (20 degrees+ from here on in!) and we have neighbours that cook everything on the barbeque. If you are outside enjoying the weather, you are also smelling their dinner. So we decided to top their hamburgers last weekend with pizza on the barbeque. We went with our standard pizza dough recipe with a few twists.

Besides getting that slightly charred thin crust, I love pizzas off of pizza stones (or ideally from real pizza ovens) for that grainy flour texture on the bottom of the pizza and the sound of the paddle removing it from the stone. It reminds me of my parent’s restaurant, sold years ago now, where pizzas came fast and furious from the ovens. There’s something about the smell and sounds of pizza straight from the pizza oven that is ingrained in my memory and heart. Trying out our new pizza stone on the barbeque brought back memories and brought the neighbours over to ask what we were cooking!

Pizza Dough
40 grams of yeast (or 2 packages of instant yeast)
1 cup of lukewarm water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
3 cups flour (plus extra for dusting)
1 tsp salt
3 tbsp olive oil (plus extra for rising process)

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Recipe: Taralli

One of the best snacks any Italian can have around the house are taralli, a crispy bread stick. At the store you’ll usually find them in small circles flavoured with hot peppers, sun-dried tomatoes or fennel. My Calabrese side makes them much longer, in loops you need to snap in half, and using black anice seeds from Italy. This is a large recipe, if you are going to make taralli, you might as well make a lot, but if you decide to halve the recipe, use 2 eggs instead of 3. A word of warning: these are addictive.

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Recipe: Asparagus and Sausage Frittata

Two things got me thinking about today’s recipe: first the garlic, onions and asparagus that have started to pop up in the garden thanks to this early spring and second, Aurora Importing’s contest asking what your favourite Nonna recipe is. A fresh asparagus frittata is a great way to welcome spring but doing it slow and over low heat makes it crispy the way my grandparents used to make it. Unlike common Italian frittatas, made with just eggs, my grandparents used cornmeal in their recipe which I suspect was a way, back when times were rough, to add a filler and extend the use of expensive eggs. The result though is a beautifully golden and crispy frittata. Here’s the recipe…my celebration of spring and home cooking.

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Recipe: Low Fat Biscotti

It’s a must. There must always be biscotti in the house to snack on. These twice-baked crispy cookies are the usual Italian fare, but I’ve been looking for a recipe that’s a bit healthier than the sugar heavy recipe I’m used to (although I will post that one soon, as the taste is still my favourite). This low fat biscotti recipe is adapted from the Almond Board of California, since I prefer using a mixer and love the flavour of lemon.

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Recipe: Homemade spelt pasta made two ways

We’ve made our pasta dinners more interesting with these two recipes for homemade whole-grain spelt pasta. We’ve been wanting to experiment with making pasta with new ingredients and a trip to a farmer’s market provided just the opportunity. We picked up fresh milled (just a few days before) organic whole-grain spelt flour sold by CIPM Farm in Hastings County, Ontario. Now was our chance to be completely Italian by making really fresh food with fresh ingredients and make it with a purely Canadian product.

Spelt is an “ancient” grain and the starch in it is more soluble than regular wheat, so recipes using spelt generally require less water and produce a denser product. There aren’t too many recipes out there online for making spelt pasta (while there are plenty of videos of Nonnas teaching others how to make pasta, they don’t use spelt!), particularly whole grain spelt. So we had to try some experiments and come up with our own. Here’s two highly-recommended recipes for making spelt pasta – one using just water, the other using eggs.

Spelt pasta made with water
500g whole-grain spelt flour
1 cup warm water
1/2 teaspoon salt

Place flour on working surface, making a well in the middle. Carefully pour water and add salt into the well and begin to mix in the flour with a fork, slowly gathering the flour from the sides of of the well and being careful not to break the walls of flour. Mix until the dough begins to come together then work the dough by hand, adding flour as needed, until the dough is smooth. Form into a ball and wrap in plastic. Let rest at least one hour.

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Recipe: Turdilli

Turdilli are a Christmas treat in our house. From my Calabrese side, they are indicative of the recipes from harder times – using what they had in the house for sweetness and flavour. In this case ,wine, coffee and honey for example. My grandparents would make these every Christmas, using a woven tool from their home town, a chestillu (I’m guessing here on spelling) to roll out the texture into the turdilli. It makes the same groves you would find on gnocchi and, in fact, that was the other thing we used a chestillu for. The end result is a sweet and savoury cookie (for lack of a better description) that is crispy fried on the outside, soft in the middle and coated in honey.

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