u/doctorfedora

so hey, I made some peanut butter cookies today, using my favorite recipe, which is incredibly good

• 240 g peanut butter (NOT "natural style" that separates and needs to be stirred together. I get the stuff from 業務スーパー because it's cheap and works just fine)
• 120 g sugar (you can use brown sugar for more complex depth if you want, and you can probably even push this number lower — I think the original recipe I had called for 180 g instead, but I think less sugar than that actually works even better)
• 1 egg
• optionally: couple squirts of vanilla extract or something

Mix the ingredients together, optionally chill in fridge for a little bit to make the mixture easier to work with, then form into cookies (note that they won't really spread very much while baking, so if you want them thinner, you need to squash them down beforehand) and bake at 180°C/350°F for 12-15 minutes, depending on thickness. After removing from oven, let rest on pan for a few minutes to set, before transferring to a cooling rack.

This recipe also works great with chunks of chocolate mixed in, or you could probably even coat them in chocolate? I dunno. It's a real easy recipe and it's practically impossible to screw it up. You may have also noticed that the recipe happens to be wheat-free, if that's something that matters to you. Either way they're the best peanut butter cookies I've ever had, I think.

I bet you could bake them in a toaster oven without much difficulty, too. Maybe make a batch of the dough ahead of time and just bake a couple cookies' worth to have fresh warm cookies after dinner. Used to do that with chocolate chip cookies for a while, years ago.

I decided this week that I was going to try making ice cream at home, possibly because of YouTube. Originally I was going to do Ragusea’s two-chilled-bowls method but then I stumbled upon a thing on the internet saying that a food processor can work really well, so here we go.

I cooked the mixture at 75–77°C for half an hour beforehand for protein science reasons, and added a bit of pectin as a stabilizer, before chilling the saucepan in an ice bath and transferring the mixture to a ziploc bag to freeze overnight.

The following morning, I broke up the frozen mixture into pieces (I should have broken it into smaller pieces, I learned) and put them into my food processor. I pulsed it for a bit, and the large chunks just sat on top, which wasn’t ideal. Eventually my immersion blender went into overheat protection mode, so I called it quits and just smoothed out the rest with my spoon and spatula, and transferred to a storage container.

It was educational (the pectin works great but I needed to break the bag mixture into much smaller pieces) and even if it’s a bit icy, it tastes really great!

RECIPE:

500 ml milk

200 ml 48% cream

100 g sugar

1 g salt

One 10 g packet pectin (itself only 25%)

A vanilla bean pod and like 2 tsp of extract

Mix dry ingredients with whisk in saucepan

Add milk and cream

Whisk over heat until 75–77°C

Maintain 75–77°C for half an hour

Ice bath to cool

Immersion blend to smooth and aerate

Freeze in bag overnight

Break into SMALL pieces

Food processor time

I've posted a fair bit about making Neapolitan-style pizza in my fish grill, but I've neglected to share my experiments with American-style pizza. These aren't very large (the cast iron pan there is only 24×24 cm) but they're pretty good! One odd phenomenon I've noticed is that the top and bottom bake up really nicely and browned, but there's kind of a pale ring on the underside of the edge, possibly due to the shape of the pan.

Recipe time!

The dough is a 66% hydration situation. This recipe made two pizzas.

300 g bread flour
200 g water
7–8 g salt
Like 3–4 g yeast? I can't remember. Use less if you're doing an overnight rise. I started this in the morning and did it as an all-day refrigerator rise.

Sauce: I got a little carton of crushed tomatoes from the supermarket and strained it to reduce the moisture without cooking, and then added a whole bunch of dried oregano, also a bunch of dried basil, a little salt, and a little cayenne pepper. I might have also added a bit of smoked paprika? I don't remember. Maybe also a little squirt of tomato paste.

The cheese is low-moisture mozzarella I bought at Liquor Mountain in a 1 kg block for like ¥2,200, which I then shredded myself. This gives much better results than using pre-shredded, but if you're doing a one-off thing then it's probably not worth the effort, if I'm going to be honest.

Mix the dough ingredients in a big bowl, and then once it stops mixing together, cover it and let it rest in the refrigerator for 10–20 minutes, and then come back and knead it for a little while. Do this a few times to make sure it's evenly hydrated and also that it has a good solid gluten structure.

After the dough seems pretty nice and smooth, divide it into two or three balls (depending on your pan size and pizza thickness preferences, I guess). Do the thing where you tighten the surface and get a smooth surface, then put them in covered rising containers (I use bowls with plates placed on top, honestly). Don't forget to oil the surface of the dough balls a little bit, just to keep them from drying out, just in case.

Keep these in the fridge for six or eight hours or something if you're using as much yeast as I did, or longer if you use less yeast. Pull them from the fridge 30–60 minutes before baking.

Heat up your fish grill (or oven if you're so inclined) and preheat the cast iron baking pan over really high heat for a while, and then also preheat it more in the fish grill/oven for a while. You want it really hot, ideally.

For a while I struggled with pre-shaping and launching pizzas, until I realized that I was a goof and I could just do it all the easy lazy way and it would actually come out better with this approach. So here's what I do: take your dough ball in your dough bowl, and gently run a scraper or silicone spatula around the edge to loosen it from the bowl. Dust the top generously with semolina or fine cornmeal or rice flour, then just use your fingertips to press all the air out of the dough ball, leaving a tiny crust around the edge (this is American-style, not Neapolitan-style, so it'll be fine). You may have to add a little more dusting flour here as the surface deforms.

Next, just turn the bowl upside-down onto the back of one of your hands, to turn out the dough out. Probably do this over the sink or something since the dusting flour will come out with it. Then I just kind of do a little shimmy to knock off the excess dusting flour, and I place the dough (dusted side down) onto the hot cast iron pan (which is currently, at this point, sitting on the cooktop being blasted at full heat).

At this point, you sauce the pizza (with less sauce than you think — check the photo and notice how there are parts where it's only technically sauced in the first place) and add cheese (with less cheese than you think — check the photo and notice how there are a lot of parts where the sauce isn't actually covered). If you want, you can kind of stretch the dough to spread it out a little further on the pan here. Don't feel like you need to rush here! If anything, this high-heat cooktop session helps with oven spring and underside char.

Now you just transfer to the preheated fish grill (also at max heat) and bake in there for like… five to seven minutes, I think? Turn it occasionally, check it occasionally, and then once the top looks good you can finish the underside on the stovetop if the underside is a little too pale for your liking.

It's so easy to make pretty good pizza! I kind of can't believe it sometimes.

I am once again Back on My Bullshit with some more little fish grill pizzas, this time with an experimental approach. I haven't seen much online about using a tangzhong for pizza dough, so I figured, hey, why not give it a try and see what happens?

The answer is: the tangzhong makes it very soft and pillowy, but also it means the crust comes out 100% crispiness-free. It's like a sandwich bread crust. It's pretty odd. You may enjoy this sort of thing, though, and if you do, give it a try! You can even try pushing the hydration even higher if you're brave enough. I've seen mention online of as high as 100% hydration pizza dough with a tangzhong ("like eating a cloud").

80% Hydration Dough Recipe:
300 g bread flour, divided (15 g + 285 g)
240 g cold water, divided (75 g + 165 g)
7 g salt
2 g yeast

The Other Stuff:
I made sauce by getting a can of whole tomatoes packed in juice (NOT purée) and straining the tomatoes, then squishing them up with my hand until there weren't many big chunks left. I added a little salt to season.
For the cheese, I used ½ a ball each of one of those 100 g balls of fresh mozzarella, strained for a while beforehand. Don't bother slicing or anything. Just pinch off chunks.

The Part Where You Actually Make It:
Make the tangzhong by taking 5% of the flour (15 g) and mixing that with five times as much water (75 g) in a saucepan, heating over medium while stirring until it's very obviously gelatinized into a glossy mass (around 65°C). Remove from heat and let cool (I actually used some ice cubes to help cool it faster, and measured their mass and subtracted it from the rest of the water I'd need to add).

Mix all the dough ingredients together, and cover and put in the fridge. Every 20 minutes or so, give it a bit of a knead and maybe some stretch folds, just to help build the gluten and make sure it's evenly hydrating. Autolysis is your friend. This goes in the fridge for, I dunno, eight hours? More if you want? I started it in the morning to have pizza in the evening. Divide and shape into smooth oiled balls, put them each in separate containers, yada yada yada.

About 60–90 minutes before bake time, remove the dough from the refrigerator to warm up a bit. Preheat cast-iron skillet or something similar (you can even use, like, one of those ファミレス cast-iron steak plates if it's big enough) for a while until it's super hot, and preheat your fish grill while you're at it. Both on maximum heat.

To shape the dough, I actually have just kind of given up on getting fancy with it and instead recognize that I've been overthinking things. Dust the top of the dough ball in the bowl with something that won't glop into the dough (so something like fine semolina or fine cornmeal or even rice flour works great), and then just sort of press down through the dough to flatten out the middle part, leaving a crust around the edge. Then you just kind of turn the dough out into your hands (non-dusted-side up), shake off the excess dusting flour over the sink or whatever, and place it dusted side down onto the very hot skillet. Adjust the shape a little if needed, and then, while it's still being blasted with heat, put your sauce and cheese on top. Take your time, since this is giving you a bit of the char you want on the bottom anyway.

Once it's looking like a pizza, transfer to the preheated fish grill and bake for like 5–7 minutes, probably? Give it at least a couple minutes initially, and then rotate as necessary to account for uneven heating. Once it looks how you want it to look, take it back out and, if the underside is a little too pale for your liking, you can continue to cook it over high heat until it's good. Transfer briefly to a cooling rack, etc. etc.