Pizza by Ken Forkish

This year for Christmas, our daughter in law, Joanna, gave us a very serious bread-making book written by Ken Forkish.  I do not have the patience for serious bread baking but I always have an interest in eating good food, so both of us were thrilled with the gift.  Harry has been serious about baking bread for a good long time since his bread machine died a few years back and he learned that baking bread without the help of the machine was more difficult but the bread was better.

He had watched his English mother baking bread every week when he was a child, which may be the reason he is fascinated when it comes to learning new bread making techniques. I was thrilled that Joanna gave us this book because as every woman knows, a retired husband with a hobby has a happy wife. 


This lovely book begins with the story of a man who gives up his Silicon Valley executive job to pursue his passion for baking bread.  Forkish studied in Paris (and Minneapolis!) and opened a bakery and pizza restaurant in Portland, Oregon.  It was a long difficult road for Ken but his passion for the art of bread making kept him going. 

                 

We found the equipment one needs to make this artisan bread on Amazon.com (where else?). The equipment included two large plastic containers, a scale and an iron pot used for the actual baking of the bread.  We started with making pizza dough instead of bread because it was less intimidating. We were having family and friends for dinner, and we already had some experience making homemade pizza.   





The pizza dough was an all day process because the dough required long periods of time to rise.  The recipe made enough for five pizzas, but it is not the kind of pizza dough you roll with a rolling pin: rather the kind you need to stretch by hand and toss into the air if you can.  By the last pizza, Harry actually began to toss the dough into the air. 


                  


Choosing to be a total dough dead-beat, I made myself useful by preparing the sauce and shopping for toppings.  Ken insists that quality ingredients are important so we went to a neighborhood Italian market for imported tomatoes and flour.  

We used fresh mozerella and a variety of other toppings for the five pizzas, which included sausage, pepperoni, basil leaves, pears and sweet potatoes.  




                                                       

Our first attempt at making Ken's pizza came with many unforeseen challenges and were it not for the dear family and friends who attended our  attempt to be an Italian pizzeria, Harry and I might have killed each other.

As our hungry guests waited patiently, the first pizza in the oven flew off the pizza stone and ended upside down on the oven floor.  My son-in-law, Curtis, came to a fast rescue getting the shelf out so he could scrape the mangled pizza out of the oven.  Next the fire alarm kept going off in our condo because the oven needed to be 550 degrees and smoke from the pizza bits were burning up in the oven.  Curtis used a NYC apartment trick, ingeniously putting a plastic bag over our smoke detector to silence it.  Our long married friends Tom and Ann, two of the best cooks I know, kept gently reminding us that the learning curve for cooking something new is difficult and we should just relax and try not to kill each other. This comforting encouragement came during the well-below-zero moment when we opened the dining room windows to get rid of the smoke that was filling the apartment and making it hard to breathe.   

So next for us will be bread making!  I will be in charge of buying some nice jam.