pizza

Healthy Pizza or Unhealthy Hummus?

~ joelshaw@sbcglobal.net ~ Leave a comment

I have had an ongoing love affair with pizza as long as I can remember. I have had a disdain for foods like hummus for almost as long. That is quickly changing (my dislike of hummus, not my love of pizza). Strangely enough, this change is partially due to my engineering background.

I’ve always thought pressure cookers were a neat concept. Why not? They use physics to trick mother nature into allowing water to boil at a higher temperature. I never had one to play with, but my sister bought me and my wife an Instant Pot for our wedding. It seemed that beans benefited the most from this process, hummus is mostly beans, so here we are.

Returning to my love of pizza: over the years, I’ve experimented with pizza variants. One of the biggest disasters was my attempt at making pizza sausage. Note that I wrote pizza sausage, not sausage pizza (image to the left). To all of the naysayers that said it would never work, you were correct… at least thus far.

Now to pull my stories of pizza and hummus together. While looking for bean and hummus recipes, I discovered that there were people making pizza hummus. I thought that would be a great way to test out our new pressure cooker, looked at some recipes online, picked one, and started playing around.

The base recipe came from www.wholenewmom.com, but I decided to make some changes. You can see some of the iterations in my notes to the right (no, I am not a doctor). I really liked the last batch, so I am finalizing the recipe.

 

Pizza Hummus

  • 8 oz (half bag) of dry garbanzo beans cooked 45 min under high pressure
  • 1/2 cup olive oil
  • a bunch of peeled garlic (8 -10 cloves)
  • 1 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 3/8 cup  +/- water from the cooked garbanzo beans
  • Small can tomato paste (8 oz)
  • 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
  • 2 tsp red peppers
  • 1 tsp fennel
  • 4 tsp basil
  • 1 1/2 tsp oregano

Put all of the ingredients in a food processor and beat the heck out of them.

Procedurally, I have learned some things that might be helpful:

  • I find it necessary to mix for much longer than I would have thought necessary, 10-15 minutes on high.
  • Some people peel the beans for a smoother consistency, I just pummel them into submission.
  • Since the garbonzo beans seem to take the longest to beat down, put them in the food processor with the oil and start abusing them while you measure everything else out.
  • I minced the garlic when I began playing with this recipe. Now I just peel it and throw it in while the food processor annihilates the garbanzo beans.
  • Once close to the final amount of water, a little bit goes a long way towards adjusting the consistency. Save some of it to slowly add at the end to obtain the desired consistency.
  • The red peppers add much more heat to the hummus after it sits for several days.
  • I started grinding up the last 4 items in a coffee/spice grinder (red peppers, fennel, basil, oregano) to increase the smoothness. These also seems to release the heat of the red peppers immediately.
  • Use the food processor to thrash the garbanzo beans just a little more.
  • The hummus will thicken upon cooling.

If things go well, a post in the near future might be titled “Healthy Wings or Unhealthy Hummus.” Any guesses what it will be about?

Pizza! Propane! Pepperoni! and Science?

~ joelshaw@sbcglobal.net ~ Leave a comment

During my time on this planet, I have picked up a number of things:

  • The Earth is probably not flat
  • It is likely that man once landed on the moon
  • 2+2 is mostly 4
  • Pizza is the best foodKIMG Renamed (81)

While the first few items are debatable, the 4th item is a well established scientific fact.

 

 

I typically prefer the simplicity of getting pizza from a local purveyor, but I also like to tinker with making it at home. Knowing that that dedicated pizza ovens at restaurants go to 700+ degrees Fahrenheit , I’ve toyed with the idea of modifying the controls of my kitchen oven to get to those levels. While I have used a thermocouple to measure the oven temperature during a cleaning cycle at well over 900 degrees F, the insurance companies and sensibility frown at such behavior. I decided to take it outside.

I once got distracted while my propane grill was heating up, and I left it on high for a bit too long. When I got back, I noticed a burning smell and that the temperature gauge was maxed out. This made me curious about two things:

  • How hot did it get
  • How hot could it get

I couldn’t figure out the former, but I could definitely figure out the latter. I made an enclosure with some bricks and got it to about 1050 F. It took a small optimized (open on the bottom) enclosure to get to that temperature, but I figured a pizza sized enclosure could get to an ambient temperature of at least 700 F.

I initially attempted using a piece of granite (a drop from a countertop manufacturer) set on bricks as the top of the oven and another rectangular granite drop as the cooking surface. I really thought that the granite would crack and all would be for naught. It  did not crack, but as a cooking surface it acted too much as an insulator. The heat went around it rather than heating the cooking surface.

For my next attempt I bought a round pizza stone from Wal-Mart for about 8 bucks, cut it to fit with an abrasive masonry blade, and tried it out.  I don’t know if it was the round geometry letting more heat by or if it was the thermal conductivity of the pizza stone, but it worked great.KIMG0117

 

Shown above is the last iteration. It has bricks supporting the granite drop for the top of the oven and the pizza stone as the cooking surface. It maintains about 750 – 850 F and will evenly cook a pizzas in about 4-5 minutes after heating up for about 20 minutes.

I still want to make a wood-fired pizza oven sometime in the future, but I don’t know when that will happen. The design is still being over thought and over engineered.