Silver Case

Asked Ling to mix up some dough today to be ready when I got home from work.  She let it double in size and then stuck it in the refrigerator.

The good news was that it seemed to develop some very nice gluten, tossing it was like tossing a wet bath towel. It held together.

The bad news?  It was whole grain flour.  When Ling told me, I assumed it was a brownish wheat flour.  Well it was a brownish wheat flour with a cup of mixed birdseed and sunflower seeds mixed it.  Yuck. It just looked wrong.

Truth be told they were soft seeds so I couldn’t detect them in the crust much.

The pizza came out true and I was somewhat satisfied with it.  The main problem is that the crust isn’t crispy though.  One of Ling’s mom’s friends was over.  She said pizzarias oil the pan and this makes it crispy.  Maybe maybe not, but that will the nex thing I try. There may be a delay though…the joy of eating pizza four nights out of five is beginning to wane.

Funny dinner. Ling’s mom and her mom’s friend were over.  I invited them to have a slice.  This lady’s husband is really loaded, giant house in Bukit Timah, kids are surgeons and lawyers and things. High-flyer Singapore family.  The lady is a kick. Back in the 1970’s the kids liked Pizza and things.  This lady cooked but didn’t know the secrets of how to make the stuff well. (No google back then…imagine the horror)  So what did she do?  Started working at these places for a week, learnt their recipes and methods and then would quit.   She worked at something like a half-dozen different restaurants for a week or a two before she’d move on to it.  She practiced her espionage carefully, too, making sure to change her id card address to her mother’s house, a much less fashionable address, not driving to the job, etc.  She seemed to get quite a kick out of the story as much as actually learning their secrets.

The most interesting secret to me is that Rocky’s pizza (a Singapore pizzaria I haven’t been to in years) uses “Flying Fish” brand flour, which is actually a really cheap, poor-persons flour from the market. Apparently, though, it has really high gluten, so it makes great pizza dough. Ling’s next mission is to get me some kilograms of that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 9:19 pm and is filed under pizza.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.