dabrownman's blog

This huge mistake might just keep Lucy from getting to First Class Baking Apprentice.  We went to the trouble to make another fine cube in the Oriental Pullman pan for the wife’s daily sandwiches and everything went swimmingly swell until Lucy really screwed it all up.

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After we plopped the fermented and developed dough into the pan for an estimated 3 hour final proof at 4 PM, Lucy forgot all about it and I found it this morning a 6:30 AM on the heating pad, thank goodness it was off, with dough oozing out of top at one end!  Jeeze!  If it would not have been in a pan all would have been lost for sure!

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The side and bottom look good

We have never done a 17 hour final proof on the counter before for sure – till today!  I fired up the oven immediately, wiped off the ooze and in about a half an hour when it hit 500 F, into the oven it went while turning the heat down to 450 F.

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Top looks good too

20 minutes later we took the pan out and the ooze had continued at the same end.  The lid was stuck on but, when I took off the baked ooze and ran a paring knife along the top at that end, the lid slid right off to reveal a more than perfect cube.  Thank goodness for PAM spray on the lid and pan.

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Mixed smoked pork and chicken enchiladas  - yummy!

We continued baking lid off for 8 minutes at 425 F Convection and then tried to get the loaf out of the pan to finish baking it on the stone and get the sides brown.  But that same end was stuck right at the top but a quick paring knife scraping the edge took care of that easily.  Another 8 minutes on the stone and the temperature read 207 F and onto the cooling rack it went

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Monthly bacon cheeseburger with fries also yummy!

There is no telling what the crumb will look like but the outside sure is cubic and brown.  The whole grains were red and white wheat, rye and oat with all 13.33% of them in the single stage 100% hydration levain.  The 20 g of seed starter used to make the levain was taken after 24 hours of the newly refreshed NMNF Rye Stater being in the fridge. The levain was retarded for 24 hours after it doubled on the heating pad.

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Chicken Tikka Masala with Shrimp, Chinese long bean, squash, broccoli and pea pods also very nice.

  We did a 30 minute autolyse of the dough flour which was half Bob’s Red Mill Artisan Bread flour and half LaFama AP getting the overall hydration up to 73% with the pink Himalayan sea salt sprinkled on top.  We held back 2% water which was added in after the salt was mixed in and the levain added so that we could claim a duplicitous double hydration for this dough if nothing else went right.

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If you don't have a good SD pancake breakfast on bake day it may cause mental retardation or something worse ...like not being able to drink wine later in life.

After 3 sets of slap and folds of 125, 50 and 20 slaps on 30 minute intervals we did 3 sets of stretch and folds from the compass points also in 30 minute intervals.  The dough was placed on an oiled flexible plastic mat on the heating pad and covered with a SS bowl and a kitchen towel to keep it warm.

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We used stitching to shape the dough together and then tightened it into a loaf shape using the counter as a foil and placed it into an oil sprayed Oriental Pullman Pan for proofing.  The rest of the total mess you already know.

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This bread is great toasted with butter and strawberry jam, berries and Minneolas from the back yard. 

We didn’t go to Pain Bianco for lunch or to Bianco’s new restaurant, Roland’s, for dinner on my birthday as planned.  No one want to go to both lunch and dinner and it turns out that Roland’s doesn’t serve tongue tacos.  But, Tacos Chiwas does serve Lengua de Res so we decided to go there and they are Bianco’s partners for Roland’s.

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Salads for lunch and dinner are a Lucy staple for good health  for sure 

The Lengua tacos were the best tacos I have ever had anywhere – nothing close, but the girls were disappointed upset that they were out of Pork Carnitas – their favorite until they had the Pork El Pastor and the chicken tacos.  I had the EL Pastor and the Beef Barbacoa which were terrific with the Barbacoa better but the Lengua was grand and luscious to the extreme.  Tacos Chiwas is highly recommended and guaranteed authentic.

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As luck would have it, the Hispanic market we love had beef tongue on sale yesterday for $3.97 a pound so Lucy got 2 - 4 pounders.  We worked up an instant pot recipe for it and will be pressurizing it today for Lucy’s Stupendous Lengua Carnitas Spectacular Tacos tomorrow.  It will be one notch above Chiwas Lengua Tacos for sure.  We are also making Lucy’s Special Spiced Sourdough Clour Tortillas for them too…… before the food police make this all illegal.

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Talk about beautiful!  Well the crumb was at any rate and the bread was really tasty too!  Nice and sour but not too much at all either.  I can't believe that it survived a 17 hour proof!  Without a pan, with a lid, this bread would have been toast so here it is before toast!

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This one is similar to the ones we have made of late for the lovely wife except it wasn’t made in a pan.  Other differences were that the levain was made with home milled whole; rye, red and white what and oat groats as a single stage and the levain was retarded for 24 hours after it doubled.

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There were 7 different grains if you count the flax which is a grain that is overlooked many times when counting them up.  Only the spelt and the durum were sprouted but they were not whole grains since Bob Red Mill didn’t specify that they were on the package.

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The other seed besides flax was black sesame seeds.  Lucy called this a 12%’er since the whole grains were 12%, the 100% hydration, pre-fermented whole gain levain was 12%, the sprouted spelt and sprouted durum were each 12% and the coarsely ground flax and black sesame seeds were also 12 grams each.

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Lucy said that we should have done a 12 minute autolyse with 12 sets of 12 slap and folds and 12 sets of 12 stretch and folds all on 12 minute intervals.  That was when I put her in the kennel to think about if she ever wants to be promoted a Baking Apprentice First Class on her 15th birthday in May – or not!

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We did do 3 sets of slap and folds and stretch and folds from the compass points each on 30 minute intervals after a 30 minute autolyse with the PH salt sprinkled on top that brought the overall hydration up to 72%.  At the end of the autolyse we added another 3% water to get a double hydration going and make it easier to mix in the salt with a spoon before adding in the warmed up levain.

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Thai Green Seafood Curry - yummy

The levain had been sitting on the heating pad for an hour and a half after being removed from the fridge and stirred down.  It had risen 25% while warming up so it was ready to go.  The ground flax and sesame seeds went in in the first set of stretch and folds that were modified to the Strutting Peacock Fold technique.  We like the little black spots they make in the dough once they are thoroughly mixed in an hour later.

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We then did 4 folds for the pre-shape and then stitched the dough together and then rounded it into a very tight boule,  put it seam side down into rice floured basket, into a plastic t-shirt grocery bag and then into the fridge for a 13 hour retard.  It only rose 30% so we put out on the counter the next day for an hour and half and it was too cold to do too much so we moved it to the heating pad for another hour and half before un-molding onto parchment on a peel.

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Grilled Cheese Sandwich lunch with green sides of salad, pickles, olives and avocado.using my wife's bread so don't tell her.

No slashing was necessary since it was proofed stitch side down.  We slid it onto the thin bottom of the combo cooker, spritzed it and covered it with the thick top and into a 500 F oven it went for 20 minutes of steam at 450 F since it was a small loaf of 909 g total.  When the lid came off we baked it for 8 minutes at 425 F and then took it off combo bottom a put it on the stone to finish baking and the bottom wouldn’t burn.

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12 minutes later the bread was nicely browned.  It bloomed and cracked well and even blistered a bit too.  Will have to wait on the inside but it has promise to be a bit more open than the panned bread at with basically  the same recipe and hydration with the addition of seeds for this one.

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This bread was delicious.  had a plain end of one quarter.  This is why we bake sourdough bread.  Way more open than the pan bread and it tastes better with the seeds!

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The Lucy is u to her latest lay hack that puts her other lazy hack's like NMNF starter to shame.  This time she didn't even make any dough at all and claimed victory,  No smoked meats or veggies either but at least she got pepperonis on some of them this time.

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she had me make a batch of pizza sauce just like always but lazy loafer didn't specify fire roasted tomatoes this time either.  Pizza sauce isn't like other sauces Italian sauces around here.  It has more red wine, moire garlic and way more Italian herbs and hot chili flakes to make it spicy as all get out.

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She didn't specify fresh mozzarella either foe some reason.  She said she didn't because I was too lazy to go to the tore which was totally wrong on several levels like the Chiefs play the Evil Empire.

She didn't make 2 -14" pies for the 3 of us this time but instead made 5 of the tiniest ,individual pies where you could ;ad 4 of them onto the oven stone with the peel at one time!  Talk about lazy, she used store bought tortillas !for the crust - such sacrilege!

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I had to make the salad too!

We did grill the onions and the Italian sausage and chopped up a couple of mushrooms and a bit of yellow bell pepper and snipped of a bunch of fresh basil from the bush growing n the back yard but she just watched me do that of course  so we is pretty liberally used here.

Both has sauce, mozzarella and Pecorino Romano gated on top with basil garnish bit the sausage ones had yellow peppers and the pepperoni had the mushrooms.  I have to say that the crust came out tasty, not burned on the bottom after 10 minutes at 500 F and crispy too with no folding and crunchy.  Makes me not want to ever make pizza dough again 

This is the latest iteration of the bread I have been making for her of late.  I’ve got her hooked as long as the sourdough bread looks like a loaf, tastes good and has some whole grains in it and she doesn’t have to make it of course?

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You can see the last fold in the top.When you want to fill the Pullman properly you have t account for the spring too so that it sprigs to perfectly fill the pan as it bakes and the crumb is nit compressed as a result.

This one Lucy calls the 20%’er.  It has 20% whole grains made up of home milled red and white wheat, oat and rye and 20% each of spelt, durum and Bob Red Mill Artisan Bread flour and LaFama AP.  We went back to sizing the loaf to perfectly fit the Oriental Yippee Pullman pan that is our favorite pan by far.

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This one had a 10% pre-fermented Bran / flour, 100% hydration levain that was single stage that took 6 hours to double on the heating pad using our 2% (12 g), ancient aged, NMNF rye starter.  I say ancient because we hardly bake at all anymore and this was nearly the last of it and I used what was left in the container to refresh it.  So, it had to be at least 4 -5 months old with no maintenance in the fridge.

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You can see how the steam condensed on the lid and then ran down the insides of the pan and darkened the top all of the loaf on the sides - So water does darken bread once it can evaporate in the heat when not contained  by the pan anymore.

The one thing Lucy live more than me is being lazy and she is really, really lazy and now limps like her Master but her limp is going away and mine is not probably because she still drinks Tequila shots and Boilermakers just about every day.

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Big thick meaty grilled pork chop with veggies and salad

The autolyse, with the salt sprinkled on top, was an hour and the slap and folds were 150, 50 and 10 slaps each and the stretch and folds were 4 each twice all on 30 minute intervals. It was pretty easy work with an 75% overall hydration.  All the time between those dough manipulations, the dough was on an oiled plastic sheet on the heating pad and covered with a SS bowel and a towel

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It pays to have a good breakfast n bake day but the wife already had some of her omelet and sausage~

We then did a set of stretch and folds and some slap and folds to tighten it up and to get it into a roll shape and put it into the pan release sprayed pan with the lid on – also on the heating pad covered with the towel.  It sat there looking lonely and doing nothing that we could tell since the lid was on for 2 hours.

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So we put it in the fridge for a 12 hour retard to punish it mightily and teach it a cold lesson of what happens to you if you do nothing like Lucy.  This might be what caused Lucy’s stroke come to think about it.  It was a cold winter and she did go outside without a coat or her hip flask she fills with brandy.

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Well the cold did nothing for this dough and it showed.  We put it o the heating pad to do a final proof and it took a few hours – about 5 to rally get up to the lid of the Pullman and that was when we tossed it into a 475 F oven, turning it down immediately to 450F.  after 22 minutes of steam we took the lid off and baked it for another 21 minutes until it hit 206 F on the inside.

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It really browned up well and filled the Pullman perfectly coming out like brick and just as crunchy on the outside too.  My wife just asked Why I burned her bread?  It is cooling now, softening and when cool we will wrap it in plastic and let it really soften the crust before we slice it for toast tomorrow.  It smells fantastic which is great because we didn’t have to pay extra for that either.

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Levain

2% NMNF starter

10% water

10% Bran and high extraction 4 grain

Dough

10% HE oatt rye, red and white wheat

65% water

20% each, Bob Red Mill, spelt, durum artisan bread flour and LaFama AP

2% Pink Himalayan sea salt

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Well to start with there are only 2 of them and there should be 3 of them

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But no one knows how they are made or what is in them so here goes.

First make your own Clower Tortillas from the recipe on this site and cover them with Pepperjack cheese and melt it in the microwave

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Then make the chorizo from scratch.  Then fry it with white onion and potato and then fill the cheese tortillas with the mix.

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then roll them up and cover them with home made chorizo red sauce.

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Then cover the breakfast burritos in more cheese and melt it it in the MW too, also heating the filling again

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But then the real missing part of the first photo besides the skimpy number of burritos comes to life.  Get the green garnishes ready, lime wedges, chopped green onion, sliced avocado and cilantro.

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But we are not done oh no!  You have to get some crema and even more sauce ready to put on top too.

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And there you go OOOpppssss! it is still totally naked!  Now, like any Mexican dish. you can put an egg on top to finish it off but in the morning it is a requirement for a breakfast burrito!

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 and Lucy always reminds us to never for get that salad for lunch after breakfast!

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Here are the top 100 ETFs over the last 10 years based in average yearly returns

The top 25 returned more than 15% annual returned and the bottom 25 returned more than !0.5%

Over the past 44 years the Dow 30 and S&P 500 ETF's averaged more than 10% returns including dividends and the Nasdaq 100 returned 13.33%  w/o dividends annually over the past 44 years - Wow!  That is the entire time I have been investing  in the stock market  before there was and Apple or even a Microsoft!

But this isn't unusual it has been the same for 91 years!  So when you hear the stock market is too risky remember that it is the only sure fire way to really make a mountain out of a molehill - regardless of IQ, talent and Income.  A great way to gain financial security.  Sadly if you live in Europe, not including the UK, your task is 5 time harder since your markets and businesses do not perform like they do in the USA but the UK performs at about 70% of the US though

Happy investing over the next 91 years.

PS.  Retiring well just take time and investing 10% of your take home pay every payday from the time you are 21 until you retire at 65 years old and this is if you are making minimum wage of $7.50 an hour - just invest $25 a week.  That's it  If you invest it in the Dow 30 ETF you will have $1,335,982 in today's money taking into account 3% inflation that would be  $386.044 and pay you $15,411 in today's money in yearly retirement income..... more than you will make in SS payments by a wide margin.

But, if you invest in the NASDAQ 100  you will have $1,071,073 in today's money - the beauty of choosing wisely and compound interest.  That would pay you $42,870 a year in retire income in today's money.  Tell me where else a minimum wage earner can become a millionaire by ding so little?  Well, there isn't one!  Imagine every minimum, age worker would be a millionaire in today's money when they retire at 65 years old.  Taking care of yourself is way better than having the government steal 80% of what they should pay you in retirement for what you put into SS.

My dear wife doesn’t like stuff in her bread.  No nuts, no seeds, no nuthin’.  For Lucy that is like missing out on some important bread flavor but it is better than not baking bread at all.  Still, Lucy was ready to come up with a bread for the dear one since she took Lucy to the Vet yesterday and came home with some kind of pills to help her recover from being stroked out.

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I guess we all have to expect a stroke or two when we are 105 years old too.  I must say that she seems to feel better every day and getting around enough to go after the Roomba we got for Christmas.  Yes, the Roomba did prove that it is smarter than Lucy because the dog chases after it rather than the other way around.

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This week’s bread is way different than what we would normally do when it comes to fermentation.   With it being really cold and below freezing at night lately, the kitchen is down to London temperature in the summer, 68 F, so we could do an overnight bulk ferment on the counter of 8 hours.  Or at least we thought we could at any rate.  It is sort of like being a Roomba and thinking you can clean my floors.

This week we had a 100% hydration, 10% pre-fermented flour, bran levain made up of 2.6% bran from the home milled whole grains made up of rye, Red and white wheat and oat in equal amounts and 7.4% of high extraction flour of the same grains.  We retarded the levain, after it doubled, for 24 hours.

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We did a 1 hour autolyse with the remaining 10% of HE flour, 40% LaFama AP and 40% Bob Red Mill’s Artisan Bread Flour with enough water to get the overall hydration up to 78% and the total whole grains up to 20%.  The retarded SD levain was being warmed up on the heating pad during the autolyse and the PH Sea Salt was sprinkled on top of it.

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We did 150 slap and folds once the levain hit the mix and then 10 minutes later we did 50 more before covering the dough with plastic in an oiled SS bowl and leaving it on the counter overnight for 8 hours of bulk ferment.  It had only puffed itself up 30% overnight so we did a set of stretch and folds and put it back in the bowl for another hour and then did another set with another hour rest making for 10 hours total of bulk ferment on the cold counter.

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It had risen about 75% during the 10 hours so we shaped it and put it into a regular wide loaf pan to mimic an Oroweat loaf from the supermarket placing the tin and dough into a plastic grocery bag for a final proof on the counter.,  We normally don’t do final proofs on a cold 68 F counter like this either so we had no idea how long it would take but figured about 4 hours if it was as slow as it was fermenting overnight but it took 7 hours.

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Red Pork EnchiladasOne thing we are hoping for is, that with the long bulk and final proof, the flavor should be boosted for this bread since slow bread is supposed to promote more flavor.  It is kind of fun to make a loaf of SD like some Fresh Lofians in the UK do all the time.  Slow food is good food and fast food will kill you – so don’t eat it?  The only exception to the rule is salad which is fast and a Lucy favorite!\

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This bread turned out to be a a great tasting one for sure.  My wife loves that it is a loaf shape but tastes like a sourdough.  It is bit more open than the last one that has more whole grains in it.  Still soft and moist and easy to cut with that new Wustof bred knife that come highly recommended.

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https://www.mexicoinmykitchen.com/

and the top 15 Mexican Food Blogs are

https://blog.feedspot.com/mexican_food_blogs/

Yes I'm making instant pot Cicken Chili Verde to put over my Chicken Chili Verde Tamales for tonight's dinner:-)

Happy New Year

In Tucson built in 1880.  Also has no garage or parking on the property   Be the first one to own this one!

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Tucson-AZ/pmf,pf_pt/239061547_zpid/7481_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/32.572277,-109.831696,31.756196,-112.342072_r...

Per our tradition, we welcomed in the new year with pizza, once again made the ‘killer grill’ way.  We no longer make pizza in the oven because it just doesn’t get hot enough and the pies are inferior in every way.

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Dough coming out of the fridge after a 24 hour retard

Lucy even perked up when got to have some crust.  She loved it too.  The 100% hydration pre-ferment for this one was 9% flour made up of equal parts sprouted Khorasan and sprouted spelt.  The liquid was all apple yeast water.  At the last minute, Lucy added in a pinch of IDY and 8 g of NMNF rye SD starter to make to make it a triple threat. 

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We put it on the heating pad until it doubled, then we stirred it down and put it in the fridge for an 18 hour retard.  The next afternoon we autolysed the dough flour, half LaFama AP and half BRM Artisan Bread Flour for an hour, adding enough water to get it to 71% hydration with the 2% PH sea salt sprinkled on top.

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We started off by doing 150 slap and folds and then let it sit for an hour before doing 50 more and then 25 more an hour later.  The dough was placed on an oiled plastic mat, on the heating pad and covered with a SS bowl and a towel between slapping sessions and then we let it sit for 2 hours after the 3rd one. 

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We punched it down and put it into an oiled SS bowl, covered it with plastic wrap and placed it into the fridge for a 24 hour retard.  It had nearly doubled on the heating pad and then doubled again in the fridge.  Three and half hours before we needed to make pies with it, we took it out of the fridge, divided it into 3 parts of 250 g each and placed them back into the SS bowl where the pieces doubled in volume again.

This dough was perfect for making pizza, easy to roll out with not much elasticity but strong enough not to tear and make holes either.  Earlier in the day we made a batch of Lucy’s Pizza Sauce with fire roasted tomatoes this time, smoked a pound of two kinds of Italian sausage – hot and mild, 12 large Crimini mushrooms cut into quarters and a huge red onion sliced into half inch slices.

Chris Bianco’s Wise Guy Pizza is the inspiration but we put pizza sauce on ours because we like it better than a white pie like Chris’s.  We also put fresh basil on our pies after they come off the grill.  Since it was so cold and windy outside, the grill only got to 550 F instead of 650 F like usual but the stone was still hotter than 550 F with all 4 burners running at full whack.

The Cheeses were fresh Mozzarella, Full Fat aged Mozzarella and then grated Pecorino on top.  I had some nice 3", thin sliced spicy smoked pepperoni too but forgot all about it...... so it never made it on a pie.  It is usually my daughter's favorite but she never mentioned missing it.

Normally it takes 8 minutes to make a pizza but this time it took 12 minutes.  My daughter said she was disappointed that the dough didn’t have the usual fresh rosemary, sun dried tomatoes and fresh garlic in it and then said that she liked the smoked mushrooms the best and wished there we more of them on the pies.  Then she said it was the best pizza she ever had?

She liked picking up the whole pie with her hands and no plate to show her husband how crisp it was and that even the entire pie had so sag.  Extra, thin, crisp and tasty is what makes pizza the most popular food ever invented after about a dozen others!   Make sue to put the cut slices on a wire cooling rack so that they don’t get soggy and foldable.

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Lucy reminds us to have a salad with those pies!

What a great way to bring in 2019 when served with Artful Farmer and Paraduxx red blend wines!  The 4 of us polished off the 3 pies and I hate to admit I had 6 pieces.  My daughter’s husband now knows all of Lucy’s tricks to making a great pizza.  Now he wants  some of my SD and YW starters.  Happy New Year to all!