A Tale of Three Tarts

Nothing facilitates culinary creativity like a well-stocked larder.  And nothing is more essential to a well-stocked larder than bacon.  Cuz where do you think the word larder comes from, anyway?  Comes from lard, which is French for bacon.  You learned something today, didn't you?  You're welcome.

Actually, that derivation just occured to me as I started writing this, but it turns out it's spot on.  Here's what my Webster's New Twentieth Century Unabridged has to say:  "larder, n., [ME, larder; OFr, lardier, a larder, a tub for bacon; LL. lardarium, a room for meats, from L. lardum, the fat of bacon, lard.]" (Another thing I've just learned is that it's really hard to type and use the mouse with a big honkin' dictionary on your desk.)

I wish I had known that (about the etymology, not the awkward dictionary) when I was writing this essay I recorded for Wisconsin Life on Wisconsin Public Radio,"The Importance of Bacon" (a variation on a chapter in the cookbook).  In light of the faddish frenzy that has arisen around bacon in the last couple of years, I'm sort of ambivalent about my role as evangelist of smoked pork belly, but that WILife essay is something of a defense and apology for my position, which I'm happy to expound upon further here.

What disturbs me about the bacon craze is, 1) The seemingly indiscriminate approach, which implies that all bacon is good, without distinguishing greatness from dreck, and 2) The culture of gluttony it seems to promote.

Now, at some level, the appeal of bacon is so great that even the worst bacon is good.  But the watery, chemical-laden supermarket bargain bacon, made from pork that comes from who-knows-where, is only good because the sledge-hammer combo of salt, smoke, and fat can disguise many flaws.  Set next to really good, natural bacon, from well-raised pigs, it looks like exactly what it is:  rubbish.  When I'm cutting bacon from one of my home-smoked slabs, I'll often taste a sliver of the "raw" stuff; I don't think you'd be tempted to do that with the $1.89-a-pound product from Bob's Food Barn.

And as for the gluttonous, drooling, stuff-your-face attitude, the bring-on-the-fat, over-the-top, clog-my-arteries, please, approach, well, I feel that's wrong at so many levels, I'm just going to let it go at that.

Pizza night chez Trout Caviar last week perfect illustrates why I glorify bacon, and other rich and wonderful products of our region--they are splendid when used in a balanced approach to cooking and eating.  Combined with good bread (the crust), savory vegetable elements (onion, sauerkraut, leek, potato), a delightfully satisfying whole results, in which you can have your tart and eat it, too, literally--one recipe's worth of Bacon Onion Tart (p. 108) provided Mary and me with dinner for two nights, and a happy hour snack, to boot.

The recipe in the book has you divide the dough in half for two tarts; I did mine in thirds.  Tart #1 was the traditional tarte flambée or flammekeuche, the Alsatian classic topped with crème fraîche, onions, and bacon. 

For tart #2 I rinsed about a cup of sauerkraut (make your own via Trout Caviar, p. 222!), squeezed it quite dry, and sautéed it in a bit of duck fat with a small leek sliced.  That mixture was combined with crème fraîche, and got a sprinkling of grated Wisconsin havarti cheese (I'm on a havarti kick recently, thanks to the Stettler Cream Havarti from Decatur Dairy  in Brodhead, WI; we get it at Renee's shop in Connorsville ).

And for tart #3, I sliced a small potato as thin as I could; I spread some crème fraîche over the dough; placed the potato slices on top; scattered one thick slice of bacon in fine dice over the top; added a handful of Wisconsin "gruyère" (Roth Kase).

The tarts baked at 525 for, what, five or six minutes.  You just watch for the crust to brown and the toppings to bubble.  With a salad, a glass of riesling--voilà.  Little better on a cold January evening; get in a brisk walk or a turn on the skis as the sun drops down through streaks of gray and pink.  Sip a glass of that crisp, tart, fragrant wine as you work on putting your tarts together.  Something else that really heightens culinary creativity is knowing whom to steal ideas from, and I raid the Alsatian larder regularly.

And here we are back in the larder:  I decided to make this dinner mid-afternoon of the same day, and didn't have to go out for a single thing  Bacon, onion, leek, 'kraut, cream, cheese, the dough makings--these are things we almost always have in stock.  If I hadn't had those particular cheeses, I'd have used something else, or left it out.  If my 'kraut crock was running low, I'd have taken out a packet of blanched, frozen garden kale, and used that.  I'm not opposed to recipes, the dear knows, but I prefer to think in terms of methods of preparation, rather than hard and fast rules or lists of ingredients.  There aren't many recipes that can't stand a certain amount of substitution or variation--and who knows, by adding your own twist, you might just come up with your new favorite dish.  The spud 'za pretty much stole the show in this instance; it will find a place in the regular rotation.

One quick note on crème fraîche:  You can buy this product at co-ops and better grocery stores.  For the recipe in the book, I suggest just mixing sour cream and heavy cream half and half.  If you have more time, you can produce a homemade version by mixing sour cream and heavy cream--a tablespoon or two of the former for each cup of the latter--and setting the mixture in a warm place--your oven with the light turned on, for instance--overnight.  The next day it should be nice and thick and tangy.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Pizza Pizza

Now, I realize that this is a really, really stupid thing to say, but I'm going to say it anyway: We are nearly halfway through the winter!

I know what you're thinking--Gohhrr! 'E's daft!--that sort of thing. You're thinking that we just barely passed the solstice, there are still many weeks of white ahead. But bear with me: The solstice, December 21, is the start of astronomical winter, but meteorological winter started on December 1. That's, what, 42 days ago. Meteorological spring starts on March 1--48 days from now. So in three days, on Friday, January 14, we will reach the halfway point of winter. How's that for a TGIF treat? And when we get to March, you know what? Here's what: The average high in the Twin Cities on March 1 is 34 degrees! That's above freezing folks! Hooray for melting!

To celebrate, let's have some pizza: Another midwinter fact I'm grateful for is that a recent perusal of my produce selection shows that we're holding up pretty well in most areas. I still have fresh kale from our garden in the fridge--picked that a couple of weeks ago, and it's still in excellent shape. There's probably more out there, under the deep layer of white, under a couple of blankets, if the mice and rabbits haven't found it. We have loads of nice carrots, garden leeks in the the extra fridge downstairs, local celery root from the co-op, potatoes a'plenty, shallots, garlic, onions, parsnips, and squash.

Man, do we have squash. Last fall we were eating a lot of squash, stuffing it, roasting it, grilling it, gratin-ing it. It seemed we could not have enough laid by to last us the winter. I kept seeing serve-yourself squash stands in rural Wisconsin, and I was unable to pass them by. A lot of those squash went bad weeks ago--I expected that. Some had clearly been frost-bitten (those four-for-a-buck-ones from a help-yourself field), so I used those first, and the rest went rotty. But by now the ones that are sound should be good for the rest of winter (which is almost over, anyway...). And though we went off them for a while, I'm happy to get reacquainted.



If you do start to get sick of the repetitive winter veg routine, pizza is a great way to liven things up. Everything's better when baked fast and hot on tasty bread (almost as if you put it on a Ritz, right, Mme. Ed.?). These two winter-veg-topped pizzas are inspired combinations, though I say so myself.

The kale and blue cheese is something of a stand-by for us. I used to toss some currants on it, or chopped dried figs. This time I got the idea to use dried apples, because I have this idea that in many applications, one dried fruit is as good as another, and our dried apples are free and local. But when I chopped up a few, they seemed a bit dry, and tasted not so sweet. So I tossed them with the product of another recent brainstorm: Maple syrup-cider vinegar reduction. I was trying to come up with something that had the mellow, sweet-and-sour flavors of aged balsamic vinegar. This is not that, but it's very good in its own right. It is a bit mellow, it is sweet-and-sour, but the flavors really come at you, whereas in an aged balsamic I think they kind of coddle, reassure, and then gracefully retreat. This stuff is excellent to glaze grilled meats or vegetables, and it did the trick to moisten and soften the dried apples that I put on this 'za.



Some of them got very dark in the oven, almost burnt, not quite. Those charry pieces tasted remarkably like crispy bacon bits--Bide-A-Wee Bac~Os! The kale came up beautifully crisp, the blue cheese just oozed on down--great. It's important to toss the kale with oil, maybe a half-hour before baking. It will actually absorb a bit of the oil, and start to break down in volume, making it easier to keep atop the crust.

For the squash: I've made this twice. Both versions have been good, neither has been perfect. I think the third time will be the charm. First time: I sliced the squash very, very thin on my Benriner, but I left the slices pretty big, and I completely covered the crust with them. I suppose I was thinking of some potato pizzas I've seen and made. Well, the squash got nicely browned, and those very thin slices cooked just the right amount, but the full coverage sort of smothered the crust, it was a bit wet under the squash, tasted sort of steamed. The bottom of the crust was nicely crisp, so it held together and was good, but there was room for improvement.



Second time, last night: I didn't bother to cut the squash slices as thin, as I planned to cut the strips thinner, and not completely cover the crust. Again, a good result, but the thicker (still, not more than 1/8-inch) squash pieces, though they cooked nicely, did not become as brown as I would have liked. So, next time I'll combine 1 and 2, and I think that will do the trick.

Oh, and both times I added the goat cheese partway through the baking, fearing that it would all melt and run all over the place if I put it on at the start, but now I don't think that will be a problem. I would put it on with the rest of the toppings, and that's what I suggest in the recipe below.

In the next couple of posts here I'm going to carry on from pizza to hot dogs, then a really great burger--simple, happy food to keep our spirits up as winter makes that big turn toward spring....
But have you noticed, the sun is really warm now, when it's out. Which, today, it's not, and it's...snowing...of...course....

Whatever happened to the Little Caesar's mascot, the little dude in Roman togs? Roman toga. Toga togs. Pizza pizza. Cute.

And hey, just for fun, let's do the local audit: kale, leek, and chili, our garden; apples and maple-vin redux, Bide-A-Wee trees; squash from a farm on the banks of the Upper Kinnickinnic; garlic from Evan up near Turtle Lake; Minnesota cheeses, Donnay chevre, Saint Pete Blue; Smude sunflower oil on the squash; crust made from North Dakota, "Dakota Maid" flour and a little Whole Grain Milling (MN) whole wheat bread flour.

Not local: olive oil, salt, pepper, yeast.


Pizza Dough, "Poolish" Method (a poolish is a yeast sponge which somewhat approximates a sourdough)
Makes two approximately 12-inch pizzas, fairly thin crust

1 cup warm water
1 tsp active dry yeast

Stir the yeast into the water and let stand for about five minutes. Add:

3 Tbsp whole wheat flour (we like Whole Grain Milling's whole wheat bread flour)
3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

Mix well, then cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let stand for several hours or overnight.

1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 Tbsp olive oil
Additional unbleached all-purpose flour, around a cup

Stir the salt and olive oil into the poolish. Add unbleached flour a bit at a time to make a soft but workable dough. Knead for a couple of minutes. Leave it alone for 10 or 15 minutes. Then knead again for a couple of minutes, adding flour as needed, till the dough is nice and smooth. Let rise for 1 1/2 to 2 hours at room temperature, or refrigerate, then remove from the fridge an hour before you plan to shape it.

To shape the crusts, divide the dough in half. Form each half into a ball. Flatten the ball into a disk. You can now use a rolling pin, or just your hands, to extend the disk into a 12-inch crust. Do not hurry. Let the dough be your guide. Gradually roll, stretch, toss to flatten and broaden the dough. When it resists, leave it alone for a few minutes. Pour yourself a glass of wine. Go find your dog or cat and a tell her what a good dog/cat she is, yes she is, isn't she just a yummy snookums doggums/kitty-cattums yes she is! Wash the dog/cat goo off your hands. Stretch the dough a little more. You're almost there. Okay. My work here is done.

Place the dough on a cornmeal-dusted baking peel (if you're using a baking stone) or baking sheet (if no stone). Brush with olive oil, and let rise for 30 minutes or more, until the dough is looking puffy. Top and bake as below, or use your imagination and whatever's in the fridge.

Kale, Apple, Blue Topping

8 medium leaves kale, tough lower stems removed, washed, spun, sliced 1/2-inch thick
1/4 cup chopped dried apples, roughly 1/3-inch pieces
3 cloves garlic, sliced very thin
3 ounces blue cheese, crumbled

Toss the kale with 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and let sit 30 minutes. Mix the apple pieces with 1 1/2 tablespoons maple-vinegar glaze (*see below), and let sit at least 30 minutes. Stir the apples occasionally during this time.

When you're ready to bake, distribute the garlic slices evenly over the crust. Add the apples and glaze to the kale. Pile this on top of the pizza--it will look like too much, but the kale will reduce dramatically. Dot the blue cheese over the pizza. Bake at 550 (or your oven's top temp) for 5 to 7 minutes, until the crust is brown and the kale looks crispy, but not burnt.

Squash, Leek, Goat Cheese Topping

6 ounces butternut squash, a roughly 3- by 3-inch chunk from the solid top part, peeled
1 small leek, white and light green part, well washed, sliced thin on the diagonal
1 small dried red chili, seeds removed, crushed
salt and black pepper
1 Tbsp oil, sunflower, olive, or grapeseed
3 ounces fresh soft goat cheese, "chevre"

Slice the squash very thin, less than 1/8-inch--use a mandoline if you have one. Cut the slices into 1/2-inch strips. In a large bowl, toss the squash with the leeks, chili, a few grinds of pepper, a couple good pinches salt, and 1 tablespoon oil.

Just before baking spread the vegetable mix over the dough, and dot the goat cheese around evenly. Bake on a stone in a 550 oven (or as hot as your oven will go) for 7 to 9 minutes, until the crust is nicely brown and the vegetables are browned on the edges.


_______________________________________________________

*To make the maple-cider vinegar reduction, combine ½ cup maple syrup and ½ cup apple cider vinegar in a saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat—watch the pot constantly as it comes to a boil, to avoid boil-overs. Cook over medium-low heat—vigilance, again, is necessary to avoid a sticky mess—until reduced by half. Once cool, store in a small glass jar in the fridge. Use to glaze grilled meat or vegetables, or to add to salad dressings for a sweet-sour jolt. Or spoon it over vanilla ice cream, or into a baked apple.

Pootzy's Progress

Or, "What We Did on our Summer Vacation". Since the last Pootzy post, the oven has acquired three more layers. First, I built out the door a bit, so it wasn't just a hole in the side of the oven, and I added another layer of mud around the whole oven when I did so. Then we put on the crucial insulation layer. That's the rough-looking stuff under the wet mud in the photos above and below. It's sawdust mixed with a liquid clay-sand-water blend called "slip" in potters' lingo.


Then we put a finish layer of clay-sand mix over that. And that cracked quite badly in drying, but we patched it up, and it looked pretty good after the final drying. It took days and days of passive drying, then hours and hours of firing before the oven finally looked dry. Without further ado, here's what Pootzy can now do:

That's a Bide-A-Wee version of tarte flambée--bacon lardons, onions, thyme, reduced cream with a little dry vermouth. And here's a chorizo-kale-garlic-gruyère 'za:

We also made a cassoulet à la Bide-A-Wee, beans baked with maple syrup, onions, bacon rind, etc. The oven works great for things cooked long and low.

The whole process of making this first earth oven has been for the fun of it, the hell of it, and to learn how it's done. We've learned a lot about the qualities of our soil for oven building, and we've learned the number one lesson of creating any kind of wood-fired oven: Don't scrimp on the insulation. Because: A well insulated oven is...an oven. And a poorly insulated oven is...a great big wood-fired radiator, heating the great outdoors.

We could have put a thicker layer of insulation on the outside, and should have build a better-insulated base. We sort of took an attitude of, It's just a little oven, it doesn't need all that stuff.... When, in fact, because it is small, it needs that stuff all the more, lacking the sheer heat-holding mass of a larger oven.

But we are very pleased with our Pootzy, overall, and looking forward to our next Bide-A-Wee visit to fire it up again. I'm going to smoke-roast, Pootzy-bake, and grill-finish a slab of pork belly.

Yes, we're willing to go to a lot of trouble for a really good meal.


The other major project of the vacation was the creation of the Bide-A-Wee Zen Gravel Garden and Art Park (ZiGGAP). It took a long, grueling day to construct this little patio, but it was worth it, for we now have a level spot to place our lawn chairs, something the land conspicuously lacked.

To make sawdust for the insulation I went at a couple of box elder logs with the chainsaw. This left the accidental sculptural pieces that adorn the gravel garden (and double as end tables...).

















Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

First Pootzy Pizza

We're off the grid out at Bide-A-Wee, the radio our only form of modern entertainment. Sometimes even that is not so modern, as when Wisconsin Public Radio runs "Old-Time Radio Drama." The weekend we built the earth oven, we listened to one about a young boy, Runyon Jones, who goes traveling across the universe looking for his dog that was killed while chasing a car. The dog's name was Pootzy. Pootzy was a good dog, but mischievous, so he has wound up in "Curgatory." We named the oven in his honor.

But on to the important stuff: How did it work? Well, okay. Small as it is, it didn't hold the heat very well. We need to add an insulating layer of material on the outside, and insulate underneath, as well. That's not to say we didn't enjoy a marvelous dinner as a result of our first baking in the earth oven:


First we had to dry the oven out. Though it had been sitting for a week, it had dried hardly at all. In the top picture you can see the color difference between the dry clay just around the door, and the rest. We kept a fire in it for several hours Sunday morning and afternoon. As it dried, it cracked a bit, probably because our clay mix was too wet; I think we can patch that.

When I got tired of tending the fire, I let it die down, then swept out the ashes and roasted baby beets and new potatoes from the market, wrapped in aluminum foil. That worked great.

Early in the evening we fired it up again. I made a simple, no-recipe dough--water, yeast, salt, olive oil, all-purpose and whole wheat flour. We topped the first pizza with lardons of our home-smoked maple-cured bacon, sliced spring onions from the market, and a bit of aged Marieke gouda .


Into the oven, close the door, hope for the best.




The big question: Is it hot enough?



The answer:



We baked it for twelve minutes, turned it around once. It was wonderful. We made a salad of the roasted beets, tossing them with red wine vinegar, a bit of cream, dill, spring onion, salt and pepper. Mala, thanks for sharing your beet stash with us!

The second pizza, topped with Wisconsin baby swiss and mixed herbs from our garden, got cooked but not very brown. It had a sort of a breadstick quality to it, like those soft breadsticks you get with your soup at a lunch buffet; tasty enough, but it wouldn't win any pizza contests. As I said, more insulation is the key. We'll work on it. For now, we consider our first Pootzy firing and baking a solid success, and a base to build on.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Bienvenue en Alsace

Keeping the northern table interesting through the winter can be a matter of looking at familiar ingredients in different ways, or of looking at different places on the globe. Looking between the 45th and 50th parallels and traveling east across the Atlantic, we find ourselves in...France! Lucky us. Of the regional cuisines we can choose from, we've got Bretonne , Normande, Auvergnate, Tourangelle, Savoyarde, and today's stop, where we'll remain for the next couple of posts, Alsace, in the northeast corner of La Belle France.

The beauty of this approach is not only that we get to try delicious Alsatian "pizza" topped with crème fraîche , onions, and bacon, and succulent simmered sauerkraut served with savory charcuterie; it also gives us a chance to learn about working in imaginative ways with the limited winter larder. The cuisines of these regions are a great deal older and more sophisticated (for all that they might now be labeled "peasant food") than Jell-O salad and hot dish. There's a wealth of knowledge here about making the most of what we've preserved or cellared from last year's harvest.
With its blend of German heartiness and French refinement, Alsatian cooking provides a great template for cooks in the upper midwest, or other northern climes.

We were in Strasbourg a couple of years ago, and picked up a cookbook called La Cuisine Alsacienne Traditionelle. It didn't seem like such a find at the time, a bit "Better-Homes-and-Gardenish," but the more I look into it, the more I like it. This recipe for tarte flambée is a fairly literal translation of the recipe from that book.

Tarte Flambée (Flammekuche)serves 3 to 4

1 cup warm water
1 tsp active dry yeast
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups (approx.) unbleached all-purpose flour
optional-- 1/4 cup whole wheat flour as part of the 3 cups
1 ounce (2Tbsp) softened unsalted butter

Pour the warm water into a large mixing bowl, and sprinkle in the yeast. Let stand five minutes. Add the salt and half the flour, mix. Add the butter in small pieces, mix. Continue adding flour a bit at a time until the dough is too stiff to mix with a spoon. Turn the dough out onto a floured counter and knead, adding flour as required to keep the dough from sticking, for one minute. Even if the dough isn't perfectly smooth, set it aside, dusted with flour, for 10 or 15 minutes.

Knead the dough again for just a couple of minutes. After the dough has rested it shouldn't take much kneading to achieve a smooth, elastic dough. Return the dough to the bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise at room temperature one to two hours; or, place it in the fridge for a longer, slower rise, taking it out an hour or two before you want to bake the tarte.

For the topping:

3 medium onions, chopped
2 tsp butter
2 tsp grapeseed or canola oil
freshly grated nutmeg
4 ounces best quality slab bacon1 cup crème fraîche, or 3/4 cream mixed with 1/4 cup sour cream
1 egg
salt and pepper

Sauté the chopped onions in the butter and oil for a few minutes, until they are soft but not browned.

Slice the bacon into 1/4-inch slices, and then cut the slices into 1/4-inch little sticks, or "lardons."

Mix the crème fraîche with the egg and a good pinch of salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and a few scrapings of nutmeg.

Preheat your oven to 500 F. Prepare the dough: This amount of dough will make three or four tartes--I originally made two larger tartes, but smaller ones would be better. Keep in mind the size of your oven and/or baking stone--you may only be able to bake one or two tartes at a time. For four tarts, divide the dough in four, then stretch and/or roll the dough into roughly 8-by-10-inch rectangles. If you're using a baking stone, place the dough on cornmeal-dusted peels. If you don't have a stone, place the dough on cornmeal-dusted baking sheets.

Spread the cream mixture on the rectangles of dough. Spread the sautéed onions on top of that, and sprinkle the bacon lardons evenly over the top.

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until the crust is well browned and the cream bubbling. Serve with a salad, like carrotes rapées , and plenty of cold Alsatian wine, such as riesling or pinot blanc, or the Alsatian blend known as "gentil."


Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

The Last Pizza Post

I never would have thought that in the first six months of Trout Caviar I'd do three pizza posts, but there you go. In the previous post I mentioned an idea for a grilled dessert pizza topped with rhubarb compote, and that idea came to fruition so successfully, I have to share the results.

So: You make the pizza dough from this entry (you need to scroll down a bit). Three-quarters of it you use for the main-course pizza, the rest becomes dessert. (You can make the dough, any of the three options, the morning or even the night before you plan to use it; refrigerate, punch down a couple times till it stops overflowing the bowl, take it out a couple hours before dinner to let it warm up.)

As topping I made this simple, delicious rhubarb compote:

Rhubarb-Honey-Thyme Compote

1/2 pound rhubarb (about six stalks)--cut into 1/2" pieces
1/4 cup honey
1/2 cup water

Combine in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Turn down and simmer 10 minutes. Remove from heat and add:

A few sprigs fresh thyme
Pinch salt
A couple grinds black pepper (this was a nice touch of spice)

A few drops lemon juice, if you like

Cover and let the thyme steep for at least an hour.

This can then be used on the pizza, on a buttermilk shortcake, over ice cream.

Continuing with the pizza: Shape the remaining dough into a 10-inch round. Brush the top with a neutral oil like canola or grapeseed.

Prepare a glaze: Mix two teaspoons honey with one teaspoon of rum (or brandy, or water in a pinch).

Have your coals ready, as in the previous post. You can, and should, grill the dessert crust right after you're done the main-course pizza, while your coals are still good. Then it can just sit until you're ready to top it.

Brush the grill grate with oil, and slide the dough on. Grill for three minutes, watching to be sure it doesn't burn. Flip the dough over, and bake for two minutes. Then flip again, brush the top (you once again have the original top facing up) with the honey-rum glaze, flip it once more, and cook for another minute-and-a-half or so--BE VERY CAREFUL not to let it burn. With the honey it will burn very quickly.

But a little focused attention will produce something like what you see above, which would be good enough to eat as is, or with a dusting of powdered sugar, like a county fair funnel cake. Topped with the rhubarb compote and some whipped cream, it becomes an elegantly rustic dessert.

You could also top it with strawberries--a strawberry shortcake-type variation--fresh peaches in season, grilled apples tossed with a little more of the honey-rum glaze and a few leaves of fresh thyme or mint. Knock yourselves out.

This really is worth doing. The glaze baked to a lacquered, glossy finish, keeping the dough nice and crisp and light. The compote had the right tart-sweet balance, the thyme and pepper adding complexity, and the Cedar Summit whipped cream--I could eat a bowl of that straight up.

And thus concludes the pizza posts.

Text & photos copyright 2008 by Brett Laidlaw

Another Springtime Pizza

Because spring just keeps going here this year, and there's still great asparagus at the market, and this was my first experiment with pizza on the grill, and it turned out really well.

When I wrote the recipe for the fiddleheads and ramps pizza I said asparagus could stand in for the fiddleheads if you couldn't get them. That sounded so good, I had to try it once asparagus made it to the market (ours is the Midtown Farmers' Market , of course). We've been really lucky this year to have lots of great asparagus in the market, first from new vendor Honey Creek Farm, then from our old friend Alvin Schlangen .

I've always thought the idea of pizza on the grill was kind of dumb, to be honest. Pizza should be cooked at 800 degrees Fahrenheit in a brick, wood-fired oven, or at 550 on a stone in your home oven. Cooking bread dough over the direct heat of a charcoal fire seemed a dubious proposition at best. But I kept seeing references to this peculiarly American dish, and with my various interests in bread and in grilling, I guess it was only a matter of time before I gave it a try.

It made a different sort of pizza, but a very nice one. There's no cheese but the cream cheese in the topping you dollop on to melt slightly at the end. The smoked fish really is purely optional--this was really good with or without. Made ahead and then brought to room temperature, this would make an unusual and delicous brunch dish.

Grilled Pizza with Asparagus and Herbed Cream Cheese

serves three or four
Dough for one 14" pizza--use the recipe from the fiddleheads and ramps pizza , or another that you like. (My dough made a fairly thick-crusted pizza; use less of the dough if you like a thinner crust. For instance, take away a quarter or a little more of the dough, and make a mini-pizza with that after you've cooked the big one. How about a dessert pizza, topped with a little rhubarb compote and some good whipped cream? I like the way you think!)

Shape the dough into a roughly 14-inch circle. Place on a wooden peel dusted with cornmeal or on cornmeal-dusted parchment paper on a baking sheet. Brush the top of the crust with olive oil. Let rise while you prepare the vegetables.

Prepare your coals. (I can't emphasize enough the importance of using natural chunk charcoal, or if you can't find that, natural wood briquettes. The smell of lighter fluid and those name-brand briquettes used to be the smell of summer on suburban Saturday evenings; now when that chemical aroma wafts into our yard I think, You would eat something cooked over something that smells like that?)

8 spears asparagus, about 6 ounces

Toss the asparagus in olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Grill, turning frequently, until just tender and lightly browned, four to five minutes.

10-12 medium sized ramps--or an equivalent amount of spring onions or young leeks, about 3/4 cup, chopped (We still had ramps, the wild leeks, when we made this the first time--the second time, with spring onions, it was even better)

Slice the ramps or onions--use only the whites and a little bit of the greens. Sauté in one tablespoon olive oil over medium low heat until soft and slightly brown. Leave them in the pan but set aside.

The cream cheese topping:

2 ounces cream cheese, at room temp.

¼ cup plus 2 Tbsp cream
Juice of ¼ lemon
Some zest, if you like.
1 Tbsp each chopped dill, chives and/or tarragon.
freshly ground black pepper

Blend the cream a little bit at a time into the cream cheese until smooth. Add the lemon juice, herbs and freshly ground pepper. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Once the asparagus is grilled cut it into 1 ½ inch pieces and toss with the sautéed ramps or onions.

Back to the grill: You don't want the coals too hot. You should be able to hold your hand over the fire and say One-Mississippi, Two-Mississippi, Three-Mississippi, Ouch. Make sure the coals are spread out over the whole area the dough will cover!

Brush the grill grate with oil. Slide the dough off the peel or parchment directly onto the grill and cook for three minutes, standing close by to make sure it doesn't burn (a little charring is fine, and to be expected). Flip it over and cook for three minutes more.

Note: If the pizza is getting too brown (i.e., burnt to a crisp), you can place a sheet of aluminum foil between the dough and the grill.

Take it off the grill--put it back on the peel or baking sheet. Add the toppings: Scatter the asparagus/onion mixture evenly over the surface. Dollop teaspoons-fulls of the cream cheese topping around. Return to the grill. Cook with the lid down for about 5 minutes until the dough is done and the toppings are warm.

(Oh, and I mentioned smoked fish above: We had some smoked salmon in the fridge, the odds and ends of smoked sockeye from Whole Foods. We brought that to the table as additional garnish--good but not required.)

With the pizza we had a salad of Honey Creek spinach from the market:
Wash and drain well the spinach.

Render some lardons of good bacon reserving the fat.

Put 1 Tbsp of the fat in a bowl, add 1 tsp buckwheat honey (or other well flavored honey of your choice), 1 tsp grain mustard, 2 tsp red wine vinegar.

Toss the spinach in the dressing, top with the lardons. You can make this a warm salad by using the fat right away, or you can let it cool to make a regular vinaigrette.

The pizza turned out better than I expected. I was quite prepared for the dough to fall right through the grate, or for the pizza to come out half burned and half raw. Mine did get a little charred, but once it rested, even those parts were tasty, and very crisp! The wood coals imparted a pleasant smokiness. The asparagus pieces bathed in that slightly melty, creamy, herby topping were absolutely delicious.

I would actually classify this as more of a tart than a pizza. Or maybe a flatbread with toppings...which pretty much defines a pizza, come to think of it.... Call it what you like, it's worth adding to the summertime rotation. Other vegetables could take the place of the asparagus as their season arrives: summer squash, eggplant, even green beans, and later maybe winter squash roasted in the coals before being diced to top the pizza? Grilled apples and honey on a dessert version? We'll certainly try it with heirloom tomatoes from our garden.

That will depend on summer arriving, as it is currently reluctant to do. That's okay. For the time being we'll say, Vive le printemps!

Text and photos copyright Brett Laidlaw 2008

Spring Green

Mother Nature is a pretty good gardener. While I'm still sorting through seed-starting supplies and flipping through seed catalogs, setting up lights in the basement, looking for lost tools, trying to remember what was planted where last year and what doesn't like to be where the other what was before, the Mother of Us All has her plan all laid out, and with the first breath of spring warmth is off and running.

So to find the first local vegetables of the spring I don't look to the garden or the farmers' market; I head for the woods.

Wild asparagus is an early crop, and an entirely mythical one to me. I only think of it in the autumn when I see the blown seed stalks and think I ought to make a note of the spot, to check back in the spring. But I don't. It was my friend Lynn Ann who told me what those tall, spidery stalks were, poking up from the sandy roadside ditches. She pointed them out as we drove home from a day of fishing, and she reminisced about asparagus-hunting outings with her parents when she was a kid, how jealously people guarded the locations of their prized asparagus patches. Now I always think of her when I see those very un-asparagus-like plants, those tall spindly weeds. If I never find fresh wild asparagus, that's okay with me.

Much easier to locate, though equally short of season, are fiddlehead ferns, which are simply fern fronds that have yet to unfurl. Many kinds of ferns are edible in this young form, though some should be avoided. The safest and most abundant--and by many accounts most delicious--is the ostrich fern. You may have them in your yard. I do. That's where I picked the fiddleheads pictured here. Ostrich ferns grow in clumps, have smooth stalks (not furry), with a distinct groove on one side of the stalk.

As long as the leafy part is well-coiled, fiddleheads are edible and delicious, even if the stalk is several inches tall. They resemble asparagus somewhat both in texture and flavor. Asparagus would stand in admirably for fiddleheads in recipe offered below. Like most wild edibles, fiddleheads take a lot of washing. There's a papery brown husk over the fiddlehead as it emerges, and that needs to be removed. You can rustle the fiddleheads around in a colander or salad spinner to chafe off some of it, then washing in several changes of clean water will take care of the rest.

While some sources say fiddleheads can be eaten raw, others report digestive problems from undercooked ferns. I play it safe and blanch them in boiling water for a couple of minutes, regardless of how I intend to finish them. Go on over to the Google and search up "fiddlehead ferns ostrich wild edibles" and you'll find more info than you'll ever manage to read on the topic.

A natural companion to fiddleheads, both gastronomically and geographically, is ramps. These are the wild leeks or wild onions (allium tricoccum) that seem to be more and more common in our northern woods. They're a springtime staple in Appalachia, where some towns hold ramp and trout fests. They've become common on fancy restaurant menus, too, as the local-seasonal eating ethic moves up the food chain.

I associate ramps, fiddleheads, and watercress with trout fishing, because I find them all along trout streams. The cress lives in clear cold springs, the others like the damp, shady woods along the stream banks. A plate of grilled or fried trout over a simple cress salad, accompanied by sautéed ramps and fiddleheads, is a ritual meal in our house. It means that spring is really here. It means, as Mary remarked recently, that we can turn away from the sauerkraut, the last of last year's carrots at the bottom of the crisper, the winter squash, the frozen tomatoes, and look to spring green.

Thanks, Ma.

This tart, or pizza, highlights the spring flavors of ramps and fiddleheads in a fun and tasty package. It gets some richness from cream and a sprinkling of cheese--of course use your best local products. We made this tart (which is somewhat inspired by the Alsatian classic tarte flambée, or flammekueche in Alsatian dialect) with Cedar Summit Cream and Roth Kase Wisconsin "gruyere."

Because I think a great pizza depends on great bread, I've gone to some lengths in describing crust options. There are two long-fermented versions, and a shorter one. All will be great. If you're a bread fanatic, of course you'll want to try the long-proofed versions, which you'll find at the bottom of this post. You'll get the very best results baking this on a baking stone ("pizza stone," if you like) at high temperatures, but the lower-temp baking sheet method will make a delicious tart, too. If you have a favorite pizza dough of your own, go ahead and use that.

Ramps & Fiddleheads Tart
serves four as a main course

The dough:

The short version:

1 cup warm water
1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast

Stir the yeast into the water and let stand for about five minutes.

1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 Tbsp olive oil
3 Tbsp whole wheat flour (we like Whole Grain Milling's whole wheat bread flour)
Unbleached all-purpose flour, around 2 cups

Stir in the salt, olive oil, whole wheat flour, and one cup all-purpose flour. Then add all-purpose flour to make a soft but workable dough. Knead for a couple of minutes. Leave it alone for 10 or 15 minutes. Then knead again for a couple of minutes, adding flour as needed, till the dough is nice and smooth. Place the dough in a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise till doubled, 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

The topping:

6 ounces ramps--10 to 20 depending on the size; once chopped, the white bulbs and red stems will measure about 3/4 cup
3 ounces fiddlehead ferns, a generous cup (or like amount of asparagus blanched and sliced into 1 1/2-inch pieces)
2 Tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup cream

2 ounces gruyère, parmesan, or other grating cheese (aged gouda, perhaps?), grated medium-coarse

Wash the ramps well, then slice the white bulbs and red stems on the diagonal into 1/4-inch pieces. Slice the greens into 1/2-inch strips. Melt the butter in a sauté pan, add the white and red parts of the ramps and a good pinch of salt. Sauté over medium heat for a couple of minutes, till wilted. Add the ramp greens and cook one minute more. Add the cream. Remove from the heat, let cool.

Wash the fiddleheads well in several changes of water. Bring a pot of water to the boil and blanch the fiddleheads for three minutes, then drain and refresh them under cold running water. Drain and set aside.

If using a baking stone, preheat your oven to 525 or 510 convection.

If you don't have a stone, preheat your oven to 450 or 425 convection.

Shape the dough into a roughly 12 by 14-inch rectangle. If you'll be baking the tart on a stone, place the dough on a cornmeal-dusted wooden peel. If you don't have a stone, place the dough on a cornmeal-dusted baking sheet. Spread the ramps and cream mixture over the dough, to within 1/2-inch of the edge. Distribute the fiddleheads over the top, just like pepperoni!

Let the dough rise for 20 minutes, then bake:

Stone users: Slide the tart onto the stone (make sure it's sliding freely on the peel before you stick your head in the oven!). Bake for three minutes, then sprinkle the cheese over the tart and bake for another three to four minutes, till the cheese is melted and the crust is brown.

Non-stoners: Bake your tart for five minutes, then sprinkle the cheese over the tart and bake for another four to five minutes, till the cheese is melted and the crust is brown.

Everyone, all together now: Remove the tart from the oven when it's nice and brown, let cool on a rack for a few minutes. Grind some fresh pepper over the top if you like. Slice and serve with a salad on the side, and a glass of chilled white wine, an Alsatian riesling or pinot blanc, or a dry vouvray from the Loire. Equally fitting, a light and lightly cooled red, a beaujolais or chinon.



Mixed-leaven dough (if you have a liquid sourdough starter around):

2/3 cup warm water
1 tsp active dry yeast

Mix the yeast into the warm water and let sit five minutes. Add:

1/2 cup liquid sourdough starter
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 Tbsp olive oil
3 Tbsp whole wheat flour (we like Whole Grain Milling's whole wheat bread flour)
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

Mix well, then add additional unbleached flour--up to one cup more--to make a soft but workable dough. Knead for a couple of minutes. Leave it alone for 10 or 15 minutes. Then knead again for a couple of minutes, adding flour as needed, till the dough is nice and smooth. Place the dough in a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for several hours, or overnight. Remove the dough from the fridge an hour before you plan to shape it.

"Poolish" Method (a poolish is a yeast sponge which somewhat approximates a sourdough):
1 cup warm water
1 tsp active dry yeast

Stir the yeast into the water and let stand for about five minutes. Add:

3 Tbsp whole wheat flour (we like Whole Grain Milling's whole wheat bread flour)
3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

Mix well, then cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let stand for several hours or overnight.

1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 Tbsp olive oil
Additional unbleached all-purpose flour, around a cup

Stir the salt and olive oil into the poolish. Add unbleached flour a bit at a time to make a soft but workable dough. Knead for a couple of minutes. Leave it alone for 10 or 15 minutes. Then knead again for a couple of minutes, adding flour as needed, till the dough is nice and smooth. Let rise for 1 1/2 to 2 hours at room temperature, or refrigerate, then remove from the fridge an hour before you plan to shape it.

Text and photos copyright Brett Laidlaw 2008