the quest for zest

A food & travel community from The Crossroads of America.

Eat Local. Travel Global.

Pizza Italiano, Part 2

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Making the sauce and choosing toppings.

In our last article, “Pizza Italiano, Part 1”, I took you through the steps of making a simple and authentic Italian-style pizza crust. This article gets down to the business of making a sauce and preparing a couple of our favorite toppings. The sauce contains only the essential ingredients, so it can easily be modified to suit a variety of tastes. The toppings for a roasted mushroom, or prosciutto and arugula pizza, are not only quick, but authentically Italian. Required kitchen gear for these recipes is just a food processor to make the sauce, a box grater for the cheese, and a large skillet for the roasted mushrooms.

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Pizza Italiano, Part 1

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Making the crust.

Pizza is one of those foods I, like almost everyone, have enjoyed my whole life. Growing up, Dad would make pizza from scratch a couple of times a month. I can still remember peering over the counter top and stealing a nibble of Italian sausage or shredded cheese before he would shoo me away with a wave of his spatula. Through high school, Pizza Hut was my favored greasy treat which subsequently ensured a constellation of pimples on my face for every yearbook photo. As I got older, I came to love deep-dish Chicago-style pizzas with their cornmeal crusts and chunky toppings held together with gooey layers of cheese.

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Tortillas Frescas

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Making fresh tortillas is easy, quick, and will transform your taco night.

I am a huge Rick Bayless fan. His cookbook, Mexican Everyday, was the first cookbook I ever received and it played a big role in establishing my love of cooking. The more I cooked from it, the more I was inspired to cook from scratch as often as possible. A recurring theme of his taco and enchilada recipes was a recommendation to make, and use, fresh tortillas. When it came to something as basic as a tortilla, I wondered, “How big of a difference could there be between fresh and store bought?”

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Breakfast In The Face of Adversity

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Valuable lessons from our first attempt at cooking while traveling.

This past weekend Danielle and I took a trip to Brown County, Indiana. Not wanting to eat out for every meal, we rented a small cabin in the woods with a full kitchen. We assumed cooking for ourselves would be more fun and healthier then indulging in the “home style” cooking which is so popular in the region. We packed what we thought we would need and headed south. We were particularly looking forward to the breakfast we had planned for Saturday morning. A steaming hot mug of rich coffee. A tall stack of blueberry pancakes drizzled with local maple syrup. We even brought sausage to fry up. It would be a special treat enjoyed deep in the crisp autumnal splendor of southern Indiana’s forests; that was the plan anyway.

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Playing with Fire

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A detailed look at how pizzaioli cook with a traditional wood fired pizza oven.

Cooking pizzas in the oven at 800 Degrees Wood Fired Pizza is not as easy as their pizzaioli make it look. There is much more to it then simply building a fire, tossing in a pizza, and taking it out when it’s done. Chef/owner Matt Rogers makes no bones about the learning curve. “Working in this oven — it’s an art,” he says. “You don’t just step up here and know how to do it.” It takes a lot of practice, more then a few ruined pizzas, and a great deal of skill to master a traditional wood fired oven.

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Bon Jour, Philomène.

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The perils of cooking from a fifty year old cookbook.

After a year or two of reasonably good luck dicing, simmering, and grilling my way through cookbooks by Rick Bayless and Jacques Pépin, I felt I was ready to cook something more challenging. Partially inspired by the movie Julie & Julia, I went in search of a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child. This search lead to me purchasing another cookbook — French Family Cooking: In Plain English.

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