Silver Case

Quick update.

Luke and Ling got back from Perth this afternoon.  Don’t know whether it’s an illusion or not, but Luke looks bigger. I’ve only seen him a few hours total in the last ten days.  One thing is for certain, however, and that is he’s trying to talk much much more.  Lots of long extended babbling repeats of things we say.  Matt comes over next month and I’m guessing by then he will be making some serious noise.

Okonomiyaki is sometimes called Japanese pizza. Tonight we had both Okonomiyaki and italian pizza.  I used the end of the pizza dough from the other day (I didn’t achieve as fluffy a crust as I wanted. I think because I blind-baked the crust in the middle of the oven, not on the bottom element) and used up left over batters from a kimchi okonomiyaki and a seafood okonomiyaki.  I bought several liters of sake, some umeshu, and two cases of Japanese beer for the party sunday. Still to arrange is the sashimi and spare okonomiyaki parts.

My green coffee beans are ready for collection tomorrow. Looking forward to playing with my iRoast 2 roaster.  I used some mocha java recently and it made decent espresso, bit darker than sumatran stuff I’ve been using.

Downloaded several Bruce Sterling and William Gibson books onto my n73 today. It appears that MobiReader only will read its own books purchased from its store. Death Penalty.  QReader appears to read .txt (but not .rtf) and refuses to read .pdfs, so I need to convert the rtf and pdfs to text before copying them over.

Still bumbling along with Japanese.  I’ve been having my teacher come over and give me private lessons instead of the class. I fell behind when I was travelling, so am racing to catch up. Actually I’m not even racing. The class is a giant grammar-cram and I don’t get a chance to practice my speaking. With a tutor, I can practice and work over stuff a lot more, so I am happy with that arrangement.

And I think that is about it.

Did more pizza work this weekend.  I experimented with the cheap, high-gluten ‘Flying Fish’ brand flour.

I made a batch of dough yesterday, letting it double in size, and then sticking it in the refrigerator.   It was shit. Heavy and undeveloped.  I made a mistake involving either amount of water (not enough) or amount of kneading (not enough).  I am pretty sure it was the lack of water.  Water is needed for the gluten development.  I never caught the mistake because I stupidly didn’t check to see if I could make a ‘baker’s window pane’ (translucent film) with the dough.

When I realized what a turd I had in the bowl this morning, I got pissed, threw it away, and made another batch.  This time I made it a bit wetter and after a good long beating with my kitchenaid (idiotically the hinge/kingpin of the blender isn’t keyed, so vigorous blending walks the kingpin out of blender. Inevitably a catastrophic failure) I could make a perfect windowpane.

But alas, I made anoter mistake (I think).  I put the dough to ferment and came back about 75-90 minutes later.  When I went to play with the dough I realized once again I couldn’t make a windowpane.  I think the mistake I made was over-fermenting the dough.

Disgusted, I considered throwing it out, but for some reason didn’t.  Instead i made a pizza with it. It was my best pizza yet!  This is where I learned a few new things:

• I like a medium crust.  If I make the dough crust a lot thinner than I think I want, this winds up being a medium crust like I prefer.  Same goes for the crust lip. I don’t like a big dough handle, so I make the crust lip pretty small, but it still grows big or bigger than I want.
• I like my crust crispy.  So this time I baked the crust blind (no sauce) for about seven to ten minutes, and very close to the bottom oven element to get the bottom as crisp as possible.  Generous spritzing of olive oil on the crust, too.  By the time it was fluffed up and starting to brown, then I added on my sauce and toppings and baked it on the middle rack.  This made really crispy, brown pizza crust.

A few things for next time:

• Increase amount of olive oil in the crust and decrease the sugar.  Sugar attracts water.  Oil fries the crust.  Should mean a crispier shell.
• When I’m mixing the dough ingredients, I’m going to let half the flour soak in half the water for thirty minutes first. This will give better hydration to the flour and should result in better gluten development.
• In throwing the crust, I realized if I twirl the crust at eye level using my fists, I can generate the centripetal force needed to stretch out the dough. It seems unecessary to launch the thing to the ceiling (at least at first).

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.

I made pizza again monday.  It was the best yet. Its success came  from patience. Resting overnight in the refrigerator, sitting out, giving the dough time.   I was stupid about prepping the dough for tossing, so it came out in a weird heart-like shape, but it otherwise tasted good.  I used that metal pizza pan Mom sent me and that helped its crustiness.

So I made another round of pizza dough, this time trying the technique of letting the dough rise overnight in the refrigerator.

This is the second time I’ve tried this technique and the second time I say, “it totally fucking sucks.”  The yeast doesn’t rise enough and the gluten never develops into a nice texture.   The pizza dough had a texture similar to a cross between a nasty country biscuit and white bread.  Fucking foul.

On top of that, I accidentally tossed a tablespoon (20ml) of salt into the flour rather than a teaspoon (5ml).  I thought I fished out enough of the salt from the flour, but no no no.  Now imagine a cross between a nasty country biscuit, white bread, and a salty brine.