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Everybody loves PIZZA!
Ok smart aleck, I want the name and address of the pizza hater? Uh huh, I thought so… I’ll be keeping an eye on you…

Now, it’s no secret that I am the large size that I am today, because my love for home made “Artisan” breads, and in particular home made PIZZA! So, I bought a food scale, so I could do the numbers on my favorite home made pie, to get a real estimation of the caloric intake per slice.

Sit down (softly), because the total was a shocking 368 calories per slice. Yet by removing one ingredient, that could be reduced to 275 calories per slice. And I’m sure a huge amount of fat (which was uncalculated). Want to guess what it is that has almost half the calories in your common pizza? It’s the pepperoni! 93 calories per slice, and almost all the fat! Right behind that is Italian Sausage, which comes in at 49 calories per slice, if you use as much as I do (which is about double what come from most Pizza Palaces and Pizzerias). So without the MEAT(?), my pizza is now 226 calories per slice. On a 1200 calorie diet that’s; 3, 4, or 5 slices of pizza you could eat per day, if you eat nothing else. But these are THICK slices of pizza, you could remove another 89 calories per slice, by cutting dough in half and making THIN crust pizza. Mind you, this is still a Cheese, Olive, Mushroom, Onion, Bell Pepper, large Pizza, which is quite a load of toppings.

Ok dieters, I hear you; Home made, thin crust, cheese pizza, please! Ok, that’s 125 Calories per slice. Who says Pizza not healthy? Clearly, you can live on it! And you can get fat like me on it, if you take it to the excess that I do! Moderation, you say? Moderation is for skinny people!

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I’ve got that summer fever for sure!
There is no time of year, including Christmas, that I look more forward to more than the first week of June. And why? Summer fruit suddenly hits the supermarket shelves, at a price I can afford. That’s why!
Mangoes, Peaches, and the OMG BING CHERRY, STRAWBERRY, I can’t sleep, for the taste of all that great nectar in my mouth. As a middle age fat slob, let me warn you now, your CPAP will not be happy with all that drooling going on under your mask all night.

It’s not just the FRUIT. It’s time to live on the patio again! Fire up the smoker and the grill, and plug in the fountain. And dig down to the bottom of the drawers and find my shorts, and pull the blankets from the bed, short sheet the corners, my feet are free-styling in the cool evening air.

Why I love it so; It’s the best temperature, the best food, and the best change of seasons of all year. Here in California Mountains, it’s also a heck of a lot of work doing fire abatement too. But Spring weeds are running out of pollen, so your head starting to clear, just before the Pines really start dumping their yellow powder, to mess your head all up again, as well as your windshield.

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The birds start squawking and complaining outside the open windows at 5:30 AM just before first light. Yet, I can find a way to sleep through it all, into the late morning. That’s why I love the first week of June, it’s paradise, in every way it can be.

There are a lot of people who believe that GOD designed fruit look pretty, so you would eat it. In that case did he make poison dart frogs look bright and pretty so you would want to eat them too? You can always find a counter point to these goofy ideas. But flowers attract bees, which cross pollinate plants, which cause fruit to form,… As an omnivore you are lucking enough to join in the cycle of life and proliferation, even in consumption by ironically having a poor designed inefficient digestive system. But, at the same time, keep in mind that you share half your genes with a carrot!

French Bread and Peasant Bread aren’t really all that different, other than the touch of rye flour, and a butter soaked crust. It is  basic of basic bread (flour, water, yeast, and salt).

My favorite recipe comes from Rustic European Breads From Your Bread Machine. Called Pain A L’Ancienne in the book, they explain that butter and baguette the loaf is the only difference between Ancient Bread, and Peasant Bread. This recipe in the book, almost seems like an afterthought, thrown in, so I’m going to try and improve on their instructions here.

This bread starts with Sourdough Sponge, like many artisan breads.

• 6 oz Water
• 1/2 C Rye flour
• 1 C Bread flour
• 2 1/2 t Yeast

If you have a bread machine that makes artisan and sourdough breads, set it for sourdough and for 12 hours. For regular bread machines just select dough setting, and just let it rest in the machine overnight. You may want run it twice, to help develop the gluten, in the regular machine or by handwork.

Once we have a 12 to 24 hour old Sponge made, we can finish up this bread.
Add:

• 5 oz warm water
• 2 C Bread flour
• 2 t Salt

That’s it! That’s all there is to it (flour, water, yeast, and salt). Complete the dough process. For those using a regular bread machine, run Dough Only, a third time with these additions.

Preheat Oven and Bread Stone to 420 F degrees. Shape a baguette, cutting the top as fancy as you might like, letting it rise as the oven heats. Bake 20 minutes on the stone. Brush crust with butter, the second you remove it from the oven.

My recipe calls for a little more water than theirs, because I live in California where it’s dry (humidity is only about 6% most of the time, so a lot is lost in steam here). You may want the 5 and 5 or even 5 and 4, depending on where you live.

This is slow recipe to make, no doubt.  But well worth it, for such a simple and awesome bread!

Focaccia is a German bread, pronounced FuknFieldRation.  Ok, I’ll admit that did that to tease Atalian Mothers everywhere!  Atalia, which is right next to Sydney.  And if your thinking linguistically, you will get that joke, when nobody else does (x3 nerd humor).

What is ‘Foc-a-chi-a’?  Quite simply, it’s flat olive oil bread.  And therefore a lot of people think pizza, but no, this is a totally different product than a simple pizza crust.  Pizza crust is actually made with a CHEAP bread.  Olive Oil is hardly cheap.  It is frequently used to serve herbs, like with a Pesto Sauce with olives, nuts, and dry cheeses.  See, totally different than pizza. 

My Focaccia is not exactly pure, either.  I realized a long time ago, that oregano makes the bread better, not the suace.  So, I make mine with the oregano in the bread.  A pure Focaccia would be a big white cracker!

• 1 C water
• 3 C flour
• 1 1/2 t salt
• 2 Tbl extra virgin olive oil (this can be as much as 1/4 C, but with more oil, increase yeast)
• 1 t dried oregano (optional)
• 1 1/2 t Yeast

Set bread machine for dough only.

A basic Focaccia sauce:

• 1 oz exta virgin
• 1 tbl basil
• 2 tbl parsely
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 t kosher salt
• 2 t black pepper
• 1/4 C Parmesan Cheese
• olives

Divide dough in 2.  Roll out to 12 inch rounds.  Finger poke over and over to make moon like creators.  Cover with a towel and let rise a while.  Brush with olive oil, and topping.  Bake 400 degrees for 30 minutes, is the expert instructions. Personally, I prefer it a little shorter, so it’s not a giant hardened cracker, and still a little bread like.

Once you cook that Turkey carcass down to soup, you’ll want some focaccia to go with it, after a cold winter’s shopping run.

I have joked in the past about having to prove yourself to the bread gods before you are allowed to make good Artisan Breads, that don’t fail to rise or fall flat. The truth is that if cookies and cakes are your thing, most likely you will want to use too much moisture in your bread dough, or not provide enough heat. There is balance between water, salt, and yeast that is critical, and until you get the feel for it, things will go wrong, no matter how close you follow the recipe. So if your first loafs of bread are a failure, start tweaking, you’ll figure it out. And even faster if you make notes.

Because of my heart disease, I had to watch the amount of moisture I got, so I became educated in all the hidden sources around me. That’s why I bring it up as an issue. Bread is all about controlling moisture. Fruits, including raisins have to be viewed as moisture. Nuts are very oil rich. These are the thing that you have to develop a sense (almost an instinct) with. It comes with time, and experience. Making good artisan bread is worth all the time and investment in failure, that you more than likely will have when you first start.

Why I learned to cook. I grew up in a restaurant, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was cook. But once I got out on my own in the world, and starting missing my family’s cooking. Not that that was a problem, just a run home for the weekend, and I could get my fix. But while making the drive one day, I realized that if anything ever happened (God forbid), but if it did, I would loose my favorite foods- FOREVER! On that trip, I started reading all my mother’s favorite cook books, and became a cook, for all of those very selfish reasons.

I never cared much about bread. Making bread was my mother’s thing, that she never did in a cold mountain home. Until she got her hands on a bread machine. Then she did some toying around, but once bread machines are so much smaller than most antiquated old recipes, she quit using it. Which is where number cruncher son comes in, to figure out how to make 6-8 cups into 4 cups tops. But I have to admit that the bread machine is just the greatest robot invented so far, and today, you can get plenty of bread recipes scaled down to fit them, unlike a decade ago. So far I’ve worn out 3 machines. They really work very hard, and will even shake a table to pieces, kneading the dough with a mixer paddle.

lol! Something that just came to mind; We call them flashlights here. So why isn’t the expression; I’m passing the flashlight on to my son?

We call that secret special family recipe, Betty Crocker’s, at my house.