This new oven is really good for me – might have a nervous breakdown relearning everything but I ain’t going to get bored. Fortunately Sue rebounds pretty quickly when I get snappy when the baking isn’t going the right way for me.
Nice simple pizza for recovery day after yesterday’s celebrations. Except I’m using a modified dough for the first time with 25% wholemeal which, strangely enough, seems more relunctant to stretch than my usual straight white dough.
But first, I’m baking a pizza based on a Peter Reinhart smoked salmon recipe from his “American Pie”. The dough gets brushed with olive oil and is baked without toppings. Then, out of the oven, it is coated with a dill & chive yoghurt sauce, sprinkled with onion and tomatoes and topped with smoked salmon.
I wanted to use a guacamole type sauce substituting avocado and coriander, but when it came to it, the avo turned out to be knackered. Needs must, the only thing I had available to swap for the avo was piquillo peppers, a slightly different animal, but into the mix they went.
Up until now, in the Turbofan, I’ve been baking good pizzas but the dough is is pressed out into and baked in a pizza tin. So I have never gained the dough handling skills for shaping pizzas and peeling them onto the oven deck.
Like I said earlier, the dough balls seemed a little reluctant to stretch and stay stretched but I got the first one in the oven, a little small, but OK.The second insisted on laughing at me and I couldn’t get any diameter on it but in it went and then concertina’d back so I had a sort of wrinkled oval. That’s when Sue asked me something and I got snappy.
Anyway, I just carried on, the doughs came out a little misshapen and a bit too bready but that gives me something to work on.
And seriously good eating.
And Sue wants to know what the fuss was about …
Seven minutes in the Pico, 320C top and bottom.
The PArtisan Baker 
As they might say in some parts of this country, “you be eatin high on the hog lately”
Not a lot else to do around here right now, Charles