Tasty (and very Swiss-French) White Pizza

This is my attempt at imitating a pizza I've seen on to go menus here. It's not anything like pizzas I've seen on American menus, but it's really good! The real Swiss-French version of course includes lardons, i.e. bacon. But I don't eat a lot of meat, and I especially try to avoid pork (paranoid about tapeworms).

Ingredients:
Ready made pizza dough or pizza shell
Creme fraiche or sour cream (about 1/4 c)
2 medium mushrooms, washed and sliced
1 medium potato, baked
3 cloves of garlic, diced
1 small onion, sliced thinly
1/2 c shredded Gruyere cheese

Method:
Preheat oven according to instructions for your dough/shell. You can certainly use home-made dough if you want. Place the dough on whatever you'll cook it on. Cover with the creme fraiche, leaving the amount of crust you prefer along the border. Sprinkle with the garlic. Sprinkle about 1/3 of the cheese on top. Arrange on the pizza: onion slices, mushroom slices and slices of the baked potato. Now sprinkle with the remaining Gruyere. Bake until crust is done, it will be enough time for the cheese to get melty and parts of the pizza to be golden brown.

Notes: I can't tell you how tasty this was! Of course you can add more garlic or mushrooms. That's never a bad thing. I also think it would be tasty with wild mushrooms, but I just used champignons de paris (standard button type).

Serving Suggestion: This was eaten for dinner, but I want to try it for a dinner party as an appetizer, cut into small squares.

Weekend Cooking Project: Healthy Pirozhki

I'm going to make pirozhki again, mostly because I'm crazy in love with that beautiful, yeasty dough, and also because I just plain like bread pockets with stuff inside.

In that vein, my mission is going to be to "duplicate" a certain Amy's product that I've loved for years, but that I think has now been discontinued (not that I get Amy's products here, anyway). That would be the pocket sandwich stuffed with the topping from the Roasted Vegetable Pizza. I don't have shitakes, which are on the ingredient list, and I'm not especially inclined to go out and find them. But I'll work something out.

Mainly, I plan on making the dough itself healthier by using 50% whole wheat flour, 50% white flour and slightly less vegetable oil. I also plan on not relenting to the sad face my BF will put on when he finds out I intend to bake these ones.

So, I'm going to have some that have the "Amy's" filling, some with the carrot and onion stuffing I loved so much last week, and lastly, some dessert ones. The chief reason for making dessert ones is to clean out the jam jars and some of the frozen fruit in my refrigerator. I kind of plan on mixing them all together, and possibly adding some ricotta cheese to the filling, too. We'll see how it turns out. If I'm successful with the "Amy's" one, it'll be a major victory, since those products are so good but very expensive.

I may also try to make paneer, but I'm a bit lazy to do so, since ricotta serves as a fine replacement for the unpressed version.

Pirozhki

So on Sunday I made pirozhki. I woke up early in the morning and started doing chores, including cleaning the kitchen to make sure I would have enough space to work. Then I trekked down to the local grocery store (along with 80% of the population of this little French town ... not much else to do on Sunday) to buy cream, and a chicken. I bought the chicken because I read on Yulinka's blog that pirozhki are best eaten with chicken broth. I decided, "What the hell, I'm already going to be in the kitchen all day, might as well do it right."

I decided to follow the dough recipe here, but my little cube of yeast was 42 grams, not the prescribed 30 grams. So, I followed the recipe roughly and ad libbed a little. Here's the dough that I ended up making:

Pirozhki Dough

Ingredients:

1 42 g cube of yeast (I got mine in the refrigerated section, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't dehydrated)
2 t sugar
2 t flour
4 T water
1 kg flour (I used type T45, which I think is pastry flour)
1 c sunflower oil, + a little extra (1 T?) that was left in the bottle
2 c water, + a little extra (about 1 T)
4 t salt

Method:

Combine the first 4 ingredients in a (large!) bowl, mix well. Cover with a dish towel and allow to rest for 10-15 minutes. It'll be noticeably more puffy when it's ready. Now, carefully mix with the rest of the ingredients to form a soft, moist (wonderful smelling) dough. If it's too sticky, add a bit of flour. Don't let it be dry though. You will probably have to use your hands to get it thoroughly mixed. Cover with a dish towel, let sit in a warm place to rise for at least 2 hours. My BF says his mom often makes dough the night before, and leaves it to rise over night, so I'm sure you can leave it longer than 2 hours with no ill effects. The dough will roughly triple in size! That's some kind of magic, in my opinion. And did I mention that it smells great? When you're ready to use it, knead the dough a little, then cut into small-ish pieces. I actually didn't cut it, just tore off balls of dough roughly 2"-2.5" in diameter. To make pirozhki, roll out a ball on a lightly floured surface, not too thin, but until the rolled out circle is about the size of a small salad plate. Place 2-3 spoons of stuffing in the center and close well. Arrange the pies on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper, leaving a couple inches between them. Let them rise again for 20 minutes. Then bake or fry in oil.

Notes: I had planned on baking the pies. My boyfriend had been hinting (he knew I was going to be making them) that he likes them fried. Well, I thought that I would bake them and have them done before he came home, but he came home early, just as I was about to start baking. He pouted. I fried. They were tasty, but a little too rich. I really do think I'd prefer them baked. Next time, I'll bake them, and I may try to use at least some whole wheat flour to make them a little healthier.

On to the fillings. I had originally settled on a ground beef and mushroom filling, as depicted here. At the last minute, I decided to make a second filling with carrot, onion and egg; it's pictured on the site I got the dough recipe from.

Pirozhki Filling: Carrot, Onion and Egg

Ingredients:

1 very large carrot, or 2 medium, peeled and grated
1 small onion, chopped
1 egg, hard boiled
1 T sunflower oil
Salt and (lots of) pepper to taste

Method:

Sautee the carrot and onion in oil until onion is translucent. Remove from heat. Allow to cool, and mix with the egg, peeled and chopped. Season to taste. That's it! Simple, right?

Notes: I was surprised, I have to admit, but the carrot ones were my favorite. The picture of the meat ones looked so good, and they were tasty, but the carrot ones were something special. I really recommend trying this! This filling can be used with the dough to make vegetarian pirozhki; leave out the egg, and you even have vegan ones (or use firm tofu cubes).

Pirozhki Filling: Beef, Onion and Mushroom

Ingredients:

400 g ground beef
2 small onions, chopped
3 medium mushrooms, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Brown meat with onions and mushrooms, stirring constantly so that meat remains in small pieces. When there is no pink left, salt and pepper to taste, and let cool before stuffing pirozhki.

Notes: Like I said, this was good, but not amazing like the carrot ones. I did like the texture of the mushrooms, though.

Overall Impressions: First of all, I'm in love with yeast. It was so fun making the dough. And I know I said it already, but that stuff smells great. I will forever think of yeast as magic in the form of a cakey, grey little cube. By the way, that cube yields to pressure really easily. When you try to crumble it into your bowl, don't push hard, lest to you want yeast everywhere. My mission now is to make a healthy pirozhok. Next time I'm going to make the carrot filling, a cabbage one, and maybe a mushroom and green onion one. Oh, and I'll give them different shapes so I can know what's inside each one. It's cheating, but so what? By the way, this recipe, fillings and dough, made 17 pirozhki (6 carrot, 11 beef) and 6 donuts. Basically I just split remaining dough into balls studded with raisins, fried and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Tasty, but not quite like Dutch oliebollen.

Cheap but Good: Don't buy flavored yogurt!

I'm always kind of wary about buying things that come in portable, individual packages, when I have several small plastic containers at home. I also don't like to buy flavored stuff if there's a plain option available, unless there's a flavor I really like.

So, I don't ever buy flavored yogurts. Instead, I buy a 1 kilo tub of delicious plain yogurt, and take it to work in a small 1 cup container. I can make it taste different by adding nuts, honey, dried fruits, or fruit jams/jellies. These are things that I have on hand anyway, for snacking and breakfast.

This is also great because then I can use the yogurt in savory applications. I can serve it with rice and dhal, or make a sauce to go with kebabs. I can use it in a salad. If I had bought vanilla or strawberry, I couldn't, and would have to buy twice as much--one plain, one flavored. This would make a lot of it go to waste.

When I was in the States, I compared the prices of individual cups of yogurt, and the plain ones were 10 cents per cup cheaper! Besides that, in the large (cheaper) tubs the available flavors are usually only plain or vanilla.

So, I don't buy flavored, or individual cups, of yogurt. The only exception for this is that I sometimes treat myself to cups of Wallaby Mango Lime flavored. It's so good, and the consistency is more like kefir.