Taking available-light pictures of food at night is difficult, to say the least. Fancy flashes help, but they don’t come cheap, which is why when I saw this trick listed on photojojo.com on using a film canister to take the edge off your built-in flash, I had to point you to it at once. Check it out!
As someone who has had to (shudder) throw away more than her share of flours, trust me when I say that flours are best stored in cool places, away from moisture and in a tightly sealed container. If you use flour infrequently, you can keep it in the freezer, but do let it come to room temperature prior to using it, particularly when using recipes that require yeast. Due to a slightly higher fat content, wholemeal flours don’t keep as long as white flours. Some flours lose their effectiveness as they get older, so it is good to pay mind to their expiration dates.
All right, this is just not pizza. I mean, maybe it is pizza-like or pizza-esque or even pizza-ish, but I have a terrifically hard time calling it pizza. In fact, when I saw Giada DeLaurentis make this on her Food Network show last weekend (I seem to have broken a seal with her, no?) all I could think was “that’s not pizza!” and then hmm, that would be a fun Sunday night dinner. So, I did the only rational thing: I decided to not call it pizza. In fact, as soon as I started to think of this as a flat bread, an open panini or an assembly of some of my favorite things, the deliciousness near-overwhelmed me.
So, let us take this apart, shall we? We start with a thin layer of pizza dough. You can use my easy-as-sin one, though I have myself moved onto the just as easy wine-and-honey version I updated a few months back. If you don’t feel like making your own, I’m really not doing my job here, but nevertheless, feel free to pick up one from your local pizza joint (what, you don’t have one on your block?) or grocery store. The recipe calls for a one-pound dough, though my homemade one clocked in at 13.5 ounces and, lo, the world did not end.
For the longest time, I couldn’t find bread flour anywhere. And I live in New York City, which is not exactly a place one expects to have trouble finding pantry staples! The one good thing that came out of this was my discovery of Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Flour. This stuff is a godsend. To make bread flour, add one tablespoon of it to each cup of all-purpose flour. Think of all the cabinet space you’ll save!
This biscotti is what I like to think of as a Hole in One Recipe. And I know what you’re thinking, “Deb, golf? You never seemed the type.” And you’d be exactly correct; willingly standing outside in the heat and humidity for hours at a time wearing funny shoes is an enigma to me. But a hole in one? This I can compute.
You see, sometimes it takes several tries to come up with the recipe you’d hope for to make the thing you crave exactly as you are sure it should be–for example, I have not yet found the perfect yellow layer cake and I’m still remiss over my two recent butterscotch pudding disasters. But biscotti? I got what I wanted on the very first try.
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